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Sigma
Sigma ( ; uppercase Σ, lowercase σ, lowercase in word-final position ς; ) 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 (mathematics), operator for summation. When used at the end of a Letter case, 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 alphabet, Latin letter S derives from sigma while the Cyrillic script, Cyrillic letter Es (Cyrillic), Es derives from a #Lunate sigma, lunate form of this letter. History The shape (Σς) and alphabetic position of sigma is derived from the Phoenician alphabet, Phoenician letter (Shin (letter), ''shin''). Sigma's original name may have been ''san'', but due to the complicated early history of the Greek Archaic Greek alphabets, epich ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
San (letter)
San () is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. Its shape is similar to Latin and Greek Mu (Greek letter), mu (), and can be described as a sigma () turned sideways. It was used as an alternative to sigma to denote the sound . Unlike sigma, whose position in the alphabet is between Rho (letter), rho and Tau (letter), tau, san appeared between Pi (letter), pi and Qoppa (letter), koppa in alphabetic order. In addition to denoting the archaic character, the name "san" also came to be used for sigma itself. Historical use Sigma and san The existence of the two competing letters sigma and san is traditionally believed to have been due to confusion during the adoption of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician alphabet, Phoenician script, because Phoenician had more sibilant sounds than Greek had. According to one theory, the distribution of the sibilant letters in Greek is due to pair-wise confusion between the sounds and alphabet positions of the four Phoenician sibilant sign ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Summation
In mathematics, summation is the addition of a sequence of numbers, called ''addends'' or ''summands''; the result is their ''sum'' or ''total''. Beside numbers, other types of values can be summed as well: functions, vectors, matrices, polynomials and, in general, elements of any type of mathematical objects on which an operation denoted "+" is defined. Summations of infinite sequences are called series. They involve the concept of limit, and are not considered in this article. The summation of an explicit sequence is denoted as a succession of additions. For example, summation of is denoted , and results in 9, that is, . Because addition is associative and commutative, there is no need for parentheses, and the result is the same irrespective of the order of the summands. Summation of a sequence of only one summand results in the summand itself. Summation of an empty sequence (a sequence with no elements), by convention, results in 0. Very often, the elements of a ... [...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 BC. It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and is the earliest known alphabetic script to systematically write vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic Greece, Archaic and early Classical Greece, Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in Archaic Greek alphabets, many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BC, the Ionia, Ionic-based Euclidean alphabet, with 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard throughout the Greek-speaking world and is the version that is still used for Greek writing today. The letter case, uppercase and lowercase forms of the 24 letters are: : , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of several scripts, such as the Latin script, Latin, Gothic alphabet, Gothic, Coptic script, Coptic, and Cyrillic scripts. Throughout antiquity, Greek had only a single uppercas ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Greek Numerals
Greek numerals, also known as Ionic, Ionian, Milesian, or Alexandrian numerals, is a numeral system, system of writing numbers using the letters of the Greek alphabet. In modern Greece, they are still used for ordinal number (linguistics), ordinal numbers and in contexts similar to those in which Roman numerals are still used in the Western world. For ordinary cardinal number (linguistics), cardinal numbers, however, modern Greece uses Arabic numerals. History The Minoans, Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations' 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 composed another system that came into use perhaps in the 7th century BC. They were acrophonic, derived (after the initial one) from the first letters of the names of the numbers represented. They ran = 1, = ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Es (Cyrillic)
Es (С с; italics: ''С с'') is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the voiceless alveolar fricative , like the pronunciation of in "sand". History The Cyrillic letter Es is derived from a variant of the Greek letter Sigma known as ''lunate sigma'' (Ϲ ϲ), in use in the Greek-speaking world in early medieval times. “Es” (Cyrillic: С) is related to the Latin letter “C” (C c), visuo- phono- semantically due to being a homoglyph and having similar roots, which C is a descendant of the Greek letter Gamma (Γ γ), and therefore С is related to the Latin C and Latin G. While the Cyrillic “С” represents the /s/ sound, many languages apply the value of to the Latin letter “C,” especially before front vowels like ‘‘e’’ and ‘‘i’’ (examples include English, French, Portuguese, and Latin American Spanish). This distinction between “hard” and “soft” C reflects historical phonetic shifts. As its name sugg ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Archaic Greek Alphabets
Many local variants of the Greek alphabet were employed in ancient Greece during the Archaic Greece, archaic and Classical Greece, early classical periods, until around 400 BC, when they were replaced by the classical 24-letter alphabet that is the standard today. All forms of the Greek alphabet were originally based on the shared inventory of the 22 symbols of the Phoenician alphabet, with the exception of the letter Samekh, whose Greek counterpart Xi (letter), Xi () was used only in a subgroup of Greek alphabets, and with the common addition of Upsilon () for the vowel . The local, so-called ''epichoric'', alphabets differed in many ways: in the use of the consonant symbols , and ; in the use of the innovative long vowel letters ( and ), in the absence or presence of Η in its original consonant function (); in the use or non-use of certain archaic letters ( = , = , = ); and in many details of the individual shapes of each letter. The system now familiar as the standa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Samekh
Samekh or samech is the fifteenth Letter (alphabet), letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician alphabet, Phoenician ''sāmek'' 𐤎, Hebrew alphabet, Hebrew ''sāmeḵ'' , Aramaic alphabet, Aramaic ''samek'' 𐡎, and Syriac alphabet, Syriac ''semkaṯ'' ܣ. Arabic script, Arabic sīn س represents samekh, but there is no surviving descendant of samekh in the arabic alphabet. However, it was present in the Nabataean alphabet, the Arabic alphabet's immediate predecessor, as the letter ''simkath'' , which was related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪏 and Ancient South Arabian script, South Arabian . The gematria, numerical value of samekh is 60. Samekh represents a voiceless alveolar fricative . In the Hebrew language, the samekh has the same pronunciation as the left-dotted Shin (letter)#Hebrew shin/sin, shin . Origin The Phoenician letter may continue a glyph from the Middle Bronze Age alphabets, possibly based on a Egyptian hieroglyphs, hieroglyph for a tent ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michael Everson
Michael Everson (born January 1963) is an American and Irish linguistics, linguist, Character encoding, script encoder, typesetting, typesetter, type designer and Publishing, publisher. He runs a publishing company called Evertype, through which he has published over one hundred books since 2006. His central area of expertise is with writing systems of the world, specifically in the representation of these systems in formats for computer and digital media. In 2003 Rick McGowan said he was "probably the world's leading expert in the computer encoding of scripts" for his work to add a wide variety of Writing systems, scripts and Character (computing), characters to the Universal Character Set. Since 1993, he has written over two hundred proposals which have added thousands of characters to ISO/IEC 10646 and the Unicode standard; as of 2003, he was credited as the leading contributor of Unicode proposals. Life Everson was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and moved to Tucson, Ariz ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nicholas Sims-Williams
Nicholas Sims-Williams, FBA (born 11 April 1949, Chatham, Kent) is a British professor of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, where he is the Research Professor of Iranian Iranian () may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Iran ** Iranian diaspora, Iranians living outside Iran ** Iranian architecture, architecture of Iran and parts of the rest of West Asia ** Iranian cuisine, cooking traditions and practic ... and Central Asian Studies at the Department of the Languages and Cultures of Near and Middle East. Sims-Williams is a scholar who specializes in Central Asian history, particularly the study of Sogdian and Bactrian languages. He is also a member of the advisory council of the ''Iranian Studies'' journal. Sims-Williams was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, at the same time as his twin brother, the Celtic Studies scholar Patrick Sims-Williams; he graduated with BA, MA (Cantab.) and PhD degrees. Sims-Williams has rece ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-Greek Language
The Proto-Greek language (also known as Proto-Hellenic) is the Indo-European language which was the last common ancestor of all varieties of Greek, including Mycenaean Greek, the subsequent ancient Greek dialects (i.e., Attic, Ionic, Aeolic, Doric, Arcadocypriot, and ancient Macedonian—either a dialect or a closely related Hellenic language) and, ultimately, Koine, Byzantine and Modern Greek (along with its variants). Proto-Greek speakers entered Greece sometime between 2200 and 1900BC, with the diversification into a southern and a northern group beginning by approximately 1700BC. Origins Proto-Greek emerged from the diversification of the late Proto-Indo-European language (PIE); a process whose last phase gave rise to the later language families and occurred .. Pre-Proto-Greek, the Indo-European dialect from which Proto-Greek originated, emerged , in an area which bordered pre- Proto-Indo-Iranian to the east and pre- Proto-Armenian and pre-Proto- Phrygian to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Xi (letter)
Xi ( or ; uppercase Ξ, lowercase ξ; ) is the fourteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the voiceless consonant cluster . Its name is pronounced in Modern Greek. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 60. Xi was derived from the Phoenician letter samekh . Xi is distinct from the letter chi, which gave its form to the Latin letter X. Greek Both in classical Ancient Greek and in Modern Greek, the letter Ξ represents the consonant cluster /ks/. In some archaic local variants of the Greek alphabet, this letter was missing. Instead, especially in the dialects of most of the Greek mainland and Euboea, the cluster /ks/ was represented by Χ (which in classical Greek is chi, used for ). Because this variant of the Greek alphabet was used in Magna Graecia (the Greek colonies in Sicily and the southern part of the Italian peninsula), the Latin alphabet borrowed Χ rather than Ξ as the Latin letter that represented the /ks/ cluster that was also ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
