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Obelism is the practice of annotating
Image:Coronis.png, The coronis marked subsections.
Image:Paragraphos.png, The paragraphos was used for breaks.
Image:Hypodiastole.svg, The hypodiastole separated words before the use of spaces.
Image:Diple-periestigmene.png, The dotted diple was also used for dubious lines.
''Punctuation''
The two-dot punctuation is used as a word separator in
Obelism is the practice of annotating manuscript
A manuscript (abbreviated MS for singular and MSS for plural) was, traditionally, any document written by hand or typewritten, as opposed to mechanically printed or reproduced in some indirect or automated way. More recently, the term has ...
s with marks set in the margins. Modern obelisms are used by editors when proofreading a manuscript or typescript. Examples are "stet" (which is Latin for "Let it stand", used in this context to mean "disregard the previous mark") and " dele" (for "Delete").
The obelos symbol (see obelus
An obelus (plural: obeluses or obeli) is a term in codicology and latterly in typography that refers to a historical annotation mark which has resolved to three modern meanings:
* Division sign
* Dagger
* Commercial minus sign (limited g ...
) gets its name from the spit, or sharp end of a lance 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 ...
. An obelos was placed by editors on the margins of manuscripts, especially in Homer
Homer (; , ; possibly born ) was an Ancient Greece, Ancient Greek poet who is credited as the author of the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'', two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Despite doubts about his autho ...
, to indicate lines that may not have been written by Homer. The system was developed by Aristarchus and notably used later by Origen
Origen of Alexandria (), also known as Origen Adamantius, was an Early Christianity, early Christian scholar, Asceticism#Christianity, ascetic, and Christian theology, theologian who was born and spent the first half of his career in Early cent ...
in his ''Hexapla
''Hexapla'' (), also called ''Origenis Hexaplorum'', is a Textual criticism, critical edition of the Hebrew Bible in six versions, four of them translated into Ancient Greek, Greek, preserved only in fragments. It was an immense and complex wor ...
''. Origen marked spurious words with an opening obelus and a closing metobelos ("end of obelus").
There were many other such shorthand
Shorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed and brevity of writing as compared to Cursive, longhand, a more common method of writing a language. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Gr ...
symbols, to indicate corrections, emendations, deletions, additions, and so on. Most used are the editorial coronis, the paragraphos, the forked paragraphos, the reversed forked paragraphos, the hypodiastole, the downwards ancora, the upwards ancora, and the dotted right-pointing angle, which is also known as the . Loosely, all these symbols, and the act of annotation by means of them, are obelism.
These nine ancient Greek textual annotation symbols are also included in the supplemental punctuation list of ISO/IEC 10646 standard for character sets.
Modern encoding
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 ...
encodes the following:
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
Some of these were also used in Ancient Greek punctuation as word dividers.The two-dot punctuation is used as a word separator in
Old Turkic script
The Old Turkic script (also known variously as Göktürk script, Orkhon script, Orkhon-Yenisey script, Turkic runes) was the alphabet used by the Göktürks and other early Turkic peoples, Turkic khanates from the 8th to 10th centuries to recor ...
.
See also
* * * . A horizontal form of the dagger mark was used an obelus. * * * List of proofreader's marks * General PunctuationUnicode block containing punctuation, spacing, and formatting charactersReferences