[B-Greek] Getting to know you, Sigma
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at ioa.com
Thu Feb 16 06:39:28 EST 2006
On Feb 16, 2006, at 6:26 AM, James Tauber wrote:
> 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
Isn't this pretty clearly (or am I just guessing?) a matter of
writing in cursive fashion? Certainly the distinction does not
antedate cursive writing; I think it's a matter of a form that
readily moves to the next character vs. a form ending a word so that
you must lift the pen off the writing page.
As James noted, this was characteristic of cursive Latin script also;
I remember first being aware of this as a child reading facsimiles of
the Declaration of Independence and of 18th-century letters. German
Gothic or "Fraktur" characters are similar, with the lower-case
initial/medial "s" distinguishable from the "f" primarily by virtue
of absence of the cross-stroke.
> 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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Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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