Stigma and Final Sigma

Stephen C. Carlson scarlson at mindspring.com
Tue Nov 5 14:20:56 EST 2002


On Tue, 05 Nov 2002 17:55:44 -0000 Mark Goodacre <M.S.Goodacre at bham.ac.uk>
wrote:
> The other thing that concerns me in what Daniel writes above is that 
> this came in "when the Greeks began to write in cursive".  Looking at 
> P115 (late 3rd, early 4th C.), there is clearly a stigma used (C 
> shape but with elongated upper line) for 6 in 616 (Chi, Iota, 
> Stigma).  There's a good image on-line at 
http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/POxy/beast616.htm . 
> So stigma for 6 surely didn't come in with the advent of cursive
> writing, did it?

The letter in P115 is a digamma, in one of the various ways that it was
written then.  The digamma is also presented in other forms.  For example, one
form looks like a backwards question mark on some coins, as shown on this
page:

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/dougsmit/philip.html

Later in cursive writing, the digamma came to resemble the stigma ligature and
was replaced it.
 
> Finally, I wonder if I might ask for some additional clarification on 
> stigma being an abbreviation for sigma + tau?  
> Does this mean that stigma was used in texts as an abbreviation for
> sigma + tau?  Was  that the origin of the letter before it was
> used for the numeral 6?  

Among other places, the stigma was used as a sigma+tau ligature in the
original edition of the NT by Erasmus.  You can see the stigma being used in
the word EXESTIN on the end of the first line in the sample picture found on
this web page:

http://www.skypoint.com/~waltzmn/TR.html

Stephen Carlson

--
Stephen C. Carlson, 
mailto:scarlson at mindspring.com 
"Poetry speaks of aspirations, and songs chant the words."  Shujing 2.35



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