Scribal abbreviation by "contraction" and was mostly a Christian usage for sacred words, Nomina Sacra; non-Christian sigla usage usually limited the number of letters the abbreviation comprised and omitted no intermediate letter. One practice was rendering an overused, formulaic phrase only as a siglum: DM for "Dis Manibus" ("Dedicated to the Manes"); IHS from the first three letters of "ΙΗΣΟΥΣ"; and RIP for "requiescat in pace" ("Rest in Peace") because the long-form written usage of the abbreviated phrase, by itself, was rare. According to Trabe, these abbreviations are not really meant to lighten the burden of the scribe but rather to shroud
Noun phrase rules of the language in question; for English, see English articles.) In the original X-bar theory, the two respective types of entity are called noun phrase (NP) and N-bar (N, N′). Thus in the sentence "Here is the big house", both "house" and "big house" are N-bars, while "the big house" is a noun phrase. In the sentence "I like big houses", both "houses" and "big houses" are N-bars, but "big houses" also functions as a noun phrase (in this case without an explicit determiner). In some modern theories of syntax, however, what are called "noun phrases" above are no