Now, we look at how many vowels and consonants are retained in abbreviations, see Table 2. As one can see, in all contexts the ratio of vowels in the abbreviations is clearly lower than in the extensions. Information theory, see for instance Shannon (1948) provides a stable basis for the interpretation of these results. a) the class of vowels is smaller than the class of consonants and b) vowels are much more frequent not only because of a) but also because they occur in syllable nuclei and consequently a single vowel, yet not a single consonant can constitute a syllable. <ref xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" target="ftn5" n="5" /> <ref xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" target="ftn6" n="6" /> Thus, vowels are less informative and hence more easily guessable than consonants. Finally, we analysed our larger Latin data in more detail. We extract the frequency based rankings of letters and test their correlation with the ranking through probability of being retained in an abbreviation. The Spearman rank correlation suggests, that there is a significant correlation between the frequency of a consonant and its probability to be retained in an abbreviation (p-value = 0.002655, ρ 0.622807). For vowels p is above 0.01, and ρ is negative at -0.2 suggesting that for vowels, which are all quite frequent, there is no clear effect. Carreiras et al. (2009) find that vowels do not yield priming effects for recognition in opposition to consonants, which would nicely align with this finding. Thus, an inf requent consonant grapheme is more probably retained. One may deduct that consonants that are left out - if any - are more frequent than the ones retained. Knowing this and knowing that the first portion of the word root is probably represented in the abbreviation decreases the number of possible interpretations ideally by this token helping to decipher abbreviations.