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Stigma (letter)
Stigma (ϛ) is a ligature of the Greek letters sigma (Σ) and tau (Τ), which was used in writing Greek between the Middle Ages and the 19th century. It is also used as a numeral symbol for the number 6. In this unrelated function, it is a continuation of the old letter digamma (originally Ϝ, cursive form ), which had served as a numeral since antiquity and was conflated with the σ-τ ligature in the minuscule handwriting of the Middle Ages. History and use The στ ligature (, ) was one of many ligature forms that came into widespread use as part of the minuscule writing style of Greek from the 9th and 10th centuries onwards. It is based on the lunate form (Ϲ) of the letter sigma. With many other ligatures, it was used to print Greek during the early-modern era. Between the 18th and 19th centuries, the use of ligatures in print gradually diminished. The στ ligature was among the last to go, around the middle of the 19th century. The name, ''stigma'' (), is ori ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Greek Ligatures
Greek ligatures are graphic combinations of the letters of the Greek alphabet that were used in medieval handwritten Greek and in early printing. Ligatures were used in the cursive writing style and very extensively in later minuscule writing. There were dozens of conventional ligatures. Some of them stood for frequent letter combinations, some for inflectional endings of words, and some were abbreviations of entire words. History In early printed Greek from around 1500, many ligatures fashioned after contemporary manuscript hands continued to be used. Important models for this early typesetting practice were the designs of Aldus Manutius in Venice, and those of Claude Garamond in Paris, who created the influential Grecs du roi typeface in 1541. However, the use of ligatures gradually declined during the 17th and 18th centuries and became mostly obsolete in modern typesetting. Among the ligatures that remained in use the longest are the ligature Ȣ for ου, which resembl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Greek Alphabet
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BCE, the Euclidean alphabet, with 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used for Greek writing today. The uppercase and lowercase forms of the 24 letters are: : , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , /ς, , , , , , . The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. Like Latin and Cyrillic, Greek originally had only a single form of each letter; it developed the letter case distinction between uppercase and lowercase in parallel with Latin during the modern era. Sound values and conventional transcriptions for some ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sigma (letter)
Sigma (; uppercase Σ, lowercase σ, lowercase in word-final position ς; grc-gre, σίγμα) is the eighteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 200. In general mathematics, uppercase Σ is used as an operator for summation. When used at the end of a letter-case word (one that does not use all caps), the final form (ς) is used. In ' (Odysseus), for example, the two lowercase sigmas (σ) in the center of the name are distinct from the word-final sigma (ς) at the end. The Latin letter S derives from sigma while the Cyrillic letter Es derives from a lunate form of this letter. History The shape (Σς) and alphabetic position of sigma is derived from the Phoenician letter ( ''shin''). Sigma's original name may have been ''san'', but due to the complicated early history of the Greek epichoric alphabets, ''san'' came to be identified as a separate letter in the Greek alphabet, represented as Ϻ. Herodotus reports that "san" ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tau (letter)
Tau (uppercase Τ, lowercase τ, or \boldsymbol\tau; el, ταυ ) is the 19th letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the voiceless dental or alveolar plosive . In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 300. The name in English is pronounced or , but in Greek it is . This is because the pronunciation of the combination of Greek letters αυ can have the pronounciation of either , or , depending on what follows and if a diaeresis is present on the second vowel (see Greek orthography). Tau was derived from the Phoenician letter taw (𐤕). Letters that arose from tau include Roman T and Cyrillic Te (Т, т). The letter occupies the Unicode slots U+03C4 (lowercase) and U+03A4 (uppercase). In HTML, they can be produced with named entities (τ and Τ), decimal references (τ and Τ), or hexadecimal references (τ and Τ). Modern usage The lower-case letter τ is used as a symbol for: * Specific tax amou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Greek Numerals
Greek numerals, also known as Ionic, Ionian, Milesian, or Alexandrian numerals, are a system of writing numbers using the letters of the Greek alphabet. In modern Greece, they are still used for ordinal numbers and in contexts similar to those in which Roman numerals are still used in the Western world. For ordinary cardinal numbers, however, modern Greece uses Arabic numerals. History The Minoan and Mycenaean civilization Mycenaean Greece (or the Mycenaean civilization) was the last phase of the Bronze Age in Ancient Greece, spanning the period from approximately 1750 to 1050 BC.. It represents the first advanced and distinctively Greek civilization in mainland ...s' Linear A and Linear B alphabets used a different system, called Aegean numerals, which included number-only symbols for powers of ten: = 1, = 10, = 100, = 1000, and = 10000. Attic numerals comprised another system that came into use perhaps in th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Digamma
Digamma or wau (uppercase: Ϝ, lowercase: ϝ, numeral: ϛ) is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It originally stood for the sound but it has remained in use principally as a Greek numeral for 6. Whereas it was originally called ''waw'' or ''wau'', its most common appellation in classical Greek is ''digamma''; as a numeral, it was called ''episēmon'' during the Byzantine era and is now known as '' stigma'' after the Byzantine ligature combining σ-τ as ϛ. Digamma or wau was part of the original archaic Greek alphabet as initially adopted from Phoenician. Like its model, Phoenician waw, it represented the voiced labial-velar approximant and stood in the 6th position in the alphabet between epsilon and zeta. It is the consonantal doublet of the vowel letter upsilon (), which was also derived from waw but was placed near the end of the Greek alphabet. Digamma or wau is in turn the ancestor of the Latin letter F. As an alphabetic letter, it is attested in archa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Typographic Ligature
In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph. Examples are the characters æ and œ used in English and French, in which the letters 'a' and 'e' are joined for the first ligature and the letters 'o' and 'e' are joined for the second ligature. For stylistic and legibility reasons, 'f' and 'i' are often merged to create 'fi' (where the tittle on the 'i' merges with the hood of the 'f'); the same is true of 's' and 't' to create 'st'. The common ampersand (&) developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters 'E' and 't' (spelling , Latin for 'and') were combined. History The earliest known script Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieratic both include many cases of character combinations that gradually evolve from ligatures into separately recognizable characters. Other notable ligatures, such as the Brahmic abugidas and the Germanic bind rune, figure prominently throughout ancient ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Greek Minuscule
Greek minuscule was a Greek writing style which was developed as a book hand in Byzantine manuscripts during the 9th and 10th centuries. It replaced the earlier style of uncial writing, from which it differed in using smaller, more rounded and more connected letter forms, and in using many ligatures. Many of these forms had previously developed as parts of more informal cursive writing. The basic letter shapes used in the minuscule script are the ancestors of modern lower case Greek letters. From the 10th century onwards, most Byzantine manuscripts of classical and early Christian Greek works were gradually rewritten in the new minuscule style, and few of the older uncial manuscripts were preserved. For this reason, uncial manuscripts are today extremely rare, while early minuscule manuscripts are often the oldest preserved sources attesting an ancient work and may therefore be of central importance for its philological study. Manuscripts from the oldest phase of minuscule writin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Greek Language
Greek ( el, label= Modern Greek, Ελληνικά, Elliniká, ; grc, Ἑλληνική, Hellēnikḗ) is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus, southern Italy ( Calabria and Salento), southern Albania, and other regions of the Balkans, the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor, and the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system is the Greek alphabet, which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic, and many other writing systems. The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world. Beginning with the epics of Homer, ancient Greek literature includes many works ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Acrophony
Acrophony (; Greek: ἄκρος ''akros'' uppermost + φωνή ''phone'' sound) is the naming of letters of an alphabetic writing system so that a letter's name begins with the letter itself. For example, Greek letter names are acrophonic: the names of the letters α, β, γ, δ, are spelled with the respective letters: (''alpha''), (''beta''), (''gamma''), (''delta''). The paradigm for acrophonic alphabets is the Proto-Sinaitic script and the succeeding Phoenician alphabet, in which the letter A, representing the sound , is thought to have derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph representing an ox, and is called "ox", ''ʾalp'', which starts with the glottal stop sound the letter represents. The Latin alphabet is descended from the Phoenician, and the stylized head of an ox can still be seen if the letter A is turned upside-down: ∀. The second letter of the Phoenician alphabet is ''bet'' (which means "house" and looks a bit like a shelter) representing the sound and fro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sigma
Sigma (; uppercase Σ, lowercase σ, lowercase in word-final position ς; grc-gre, σίγμα) is the eighteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 200. In general mathematics, uppercase Σ is used as an operator for summation. When used at the end of a letter-case word (one that does not use all caps), the final form (ς) is used. In ' (Odysseus), for example, the two lowercase sigmas (σ) in the center of the name are distinct from the word-final sigma (ς) at the end. The Latin letter S derives from sigma while the Cyrillic letter Es derives from a lunate form of this letter. History The shape (Σς) and alphabetic position of sigma is derived from the Phoenician letter ( ''shin''). Sigma's original name may have been ''san'', but due to the complicated early history of the Greek epichoric alphabets, ''san'' came to be identified as a separate letter in the Greek alphabet, represented as Ϻ. Herodotus reports that "san" ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Koppa (letter)
Koppa or qoppa (; as a modern numeral sign: ) is a letter that was used in early forms of the Greek alphabet, derived from Phoenician qoph (). It was originally used to denote the sound, but dropped out of use as an alphabetic character in favor of Kappa (Κ). It has remained in use as a numeral symbol (90) in the system of Greek numerals, although with a modified shape. Koppa is the source of Latin Q, as well as the Cyrillic numeral sign of the same name ( Koppa). Alphabetic In Phoenician, qoph was pronounced ; in Greek, which lacked such a sound, it was instead used for before back vowels Ο, Υ and Ω. In this function, it was borrowed into the Italic alphabets and ultimately into Latin. However, as the sound had two redundant spellings, koppa was eventually replaced by kappa (Κ) in Greek. It remained in use as a letter in some Doric regions into the 5th century BC. The koppa was used as a symbol for the city of Corinth, which had the early spelling of . Numeric ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
