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Very low hyphens in a monument

mili

This is the text on a monument ("Keisarinnan kivi") commemorating the Russian Empress Alexandra's visit in 1833.
The hyphens in it are in an unusual place, never seen anything like this anywhere else.

PÄÄ-KAUPUNGISSA (nowadays we write it together without hyphen)

I suppose the months were treated like this to avoid repeating the word kuussa
Touko-kuussa
Kesä-kuussa

Was this the way to deal with hyphens in 1830's, or is this an odd one out?

Oisín

I’ve never seen a hyphen quite that low before, either.

Being Danish, I can understand why they wanted to avoid repeating the word kuussa, though.

mili

Does "kuussa" mean something in Danish I don't want to know?

Oisín

Well, not kuussa per se; but kusse (which any Dane will immediately think of when seeing the word) is the Danish equivalent of vittu, except coarser.

So probably yes.

Florian Hardwig

Re to avoid repeating the word kuussa

Maybe the manufacturer charged per character, and they already had back luck with the year. Three triples in Roman numerals, that’s unfortunate. ;-)

Captured from commoncrawl.org on 18 Apr 2015. original URL