''Kai'' is a word that is a
conjunction meaning "and" in
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek (, ; ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the classical antiquity, ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Greek ...
(, ),
Modern Greek
Modern Greek (, or , ), generally referred to by speakers simply as Greek (, ), refers collectively to the dialects of the Greek language spoken in the modern era, including the official standardized form of the language sometimes referred to ...
(, ),
Coptic (, ) and
Esperanto
Esperanto (, ) is the world's most widely spoken Constructed language, constructed international auxiliary language. Created by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887 to be 'the International Language' (), it is intended to be a universal second language for ...
(, ).
''Kai'' is the most frequent word in any Greek text, and thus used by statisticians to assess authorship of ancient manuscripts based on the number of times it is used.
Ligature
Because of its frequent occurrence, ''kai'' is sometimes abbreviated in Greek manuscripts and in
signage
Signage is the design or use of signs and symbols to communicate a message. Signage also means signs ''collectively'' or being considered as a group. The term ''signage'' is documented to have been popularized in 1975 to 1980.
Signs are any ki ...
, by a ligature (comparable to Latin
&), written as ϗ (uppercase variant Ϗ;
Coptic variant ⳤ), formed from
kappa
Kappa (; uppercase Κ, lowercase κ or cursive ; , ''káppa'') is the tenth letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the voiceless velar plosive sound in Ancient and Modern Greek. In the system of Greek numerals, has a value of 20. It was d ...
(κ) with an extra lower stroke.
It may occur with the
varia above it: ϗ̀.
Image:Greek Kai.png, Two possible renderings of the ''kai'' abbreviation.
Image:Greek ligature kai.svg, One form of ''kai'' in medieval minuscule handwriting.
For representation in electronic texts the kai symbol has its own
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
positions: GREEK KAI SYMBOL (U+03D7) and GREEK CAPITAL KAI SYMBOL (U+03CF).
Authorship of ancient texts
The number of common words which express a general relation ('and', 'in', 'but', 'I', 'to be') is random with the same distribution at least among the same genre. By contrast, the occurrence of the
definite article
In grammar, an article is any member of a class of dedicated words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. The category of articles constitutes a part of speech.
In English, both "the" ...
"the" cannot be modeled by simple probabilistic laws because the number of nouns with definite article depends on the subject matter.
Table 1 has data about the epistles of Saint
Paul
Paul may refer to:
People
* Paul (given name), a given name, including a list of people
* Paul (surname), a list of people
* Paul the Apostle, an apostle who wrote many of the books of the New Testament
* Ray Hildebrand, half of the singing duo ...
. 2nd Thessalonians, Titus, and Philemon were excluded because they were too short to give reliable samples. From an analysis of these and other data
[Mor65, p. 224] the first 4 epistles (Romans,
1 Corinthians
The First Epistle to the Corinthians () is one of the Pauline epistles, part of the New Testament of the Christian Bible. The epistle is attributed to Paul the Apostle and a co-author, Sosthenes, and is addressed to the Christian church in Anc ...
,
2 Corinthians
The Second Epistle to the Corinthians is a Pauline epistle of the New Testament of the Christian Bible. The epistle is attributed to Paul the Apostle and a co-author named Timothy, and is addressed to the church in Corinth and Christians in ...
, and
Galatians Galatians may refer to:
* Galatians (people)
* Epistle to the Galatians, a book of the New Testament
* English translation of the Greek ''Galatai'' or Latin ''Galatae'', ''Galli,'' or ''Gallograeci'' to refer to either the Galatians or the Gauls in ...
) form a consistent group, and all the other epistles lie more than 2
standard deviation
In statistics, the standard deviation is a measure of the amount of variation of the values of a variable about its Expected value, mean. A low standard Deviation (statistics), deviation indicates that the values tend to be close to the mean ( ...
s from the mean of this group (using
statistics).
Esperanto
Esperanto comes from Greek.
[.]
It may be abbreviated as or
(among other places, in the
PIV dictionary),
or, sometimes, as
&.
See also
*
Kaige revision
The ''kaige'' revision, or simply ''kaige'', is the group of revisions to the Septuagint made in order to more closely align its translation with the proto-Masoretic Hebrew. The name ''kaige'' derives from the revision's pervasive use of ("and ...
, group of Greek-language
Septuagint
The Septuagint ( ), sometimes referred to as the Greek Old Testament or The Translation of the Seventy (), and abbreviated as LXX, is the earliest extant Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible from the original Biblical Hebrew. The full Greek ...
Bible versions that frequently use ('and indeed').
*
&
References
*
or65A. Q. Morton. ''The authorship of Greek prose (with discussion).''
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society
The ''Journal of the Royal Statistical Society'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal of statistics. It comprises three series and is published by Oxford University Press for the Royal Statistical Society.
History
The Statistical Society of ...
, Series A, 128:169–233, 1965.
''This article incorporates material from Econ 7800 class notes by Hans G. Ehrbar, which is licensed under
GFDL
The GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL or GFDL) is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the rights ...
.
External links
Proposal to encode the uppercase letter in Unicode
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kai (conjunction)
Kai
Greek language
Punctuation
Typography
Greek letters