[B-Greek] strange looking pi?

Bert de Haan b_dehaan at sympatico.ca
Tue Sep 26 20:39:09 EDT 2006


I am going to have to watch not to get to interested in this.  It appears to 
be a topic that someone could spend a lot of time on.

Brandon Wason wrote:
>
>It seems that the different PIs are found in prepositions or
>prepositional prefixes. It was common in early printed Greek to write
>these prepositions in a ligature form.

I noticed that with the PIs but then I dismissed it because there is no 
pattern like that for the BETAs GAMMAs and TAUs.
Maybe every letter has its own history as to why two different forms are 
used.
I have a copy of the first four books of the Iliad where two different 
THETAs are used, seemingly at random.

I found Dave Hindley's possible explanation interesting:

>I've also seen this in the older typeset editions.

>In typeset days, the various letters were stored in bins that the 
>typesetter pulled out and set in >the frame one by one. There would
>also be additional bins for the final and medial sigma and accented 
>letters. If fonts get mixed up >accidentally in those bins, this
>could cause differing fonts for the same letter showing up even in the same 
>word.

>The typesetter probably noted the letter forms in the mss or book that was 
>in front of him and >knew which bin these correspond to,
>and may not have even noticed or cared that he pulled the wrong font. They 
>can work incredibly >fast.

Bert de Haan.





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