[B-Greek] Getting to know you, Sigma

James Tauber jtauber at jtauber.com
Thu Feb 16 06:26:04 EST 2006


It doesn't directly answer your question, but until the last couple  
of centuries, the Latin script also had a distinction between initial/ 
medial s (the so-called 'long s') and final s (the so-called 'short  
s') in the minuscules.

James
--
James Tauber                       http://jtauber.com/
journeyman of some   http://jtauber.com/blog/



On 16/02/2006, at 6:50 PM, Curtis Hinson wrote:

> Greetings, listers,
>
> I have just thought of an obvious and simple question that it never
> occurred to me to ask, for some reason.   Why do  we have two forms of
> sigma in Greek?  Does anyone really even know?  I have been around  
> Greek
> for a while now and I never once recall hearing this question asked or
> addressed, only taken for granted that it is so.
>
> I have been working on Arabic and it caused me to wonder why Greek  
> only
> has this one character that has an initial/medial form plus a final
> lunate form, instead of all or none.  I suspect the question gets into
> linguistic history, but I'm sitting comfortably here so bring it  
> on.  I
> didn't turn up anything on this in the archive so maybe it's time  
> to add
> this to the BGreek megabrain.




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