Greek Numerals
Posted: April 23rd, 2012, 9:26 am
My 1904 Patriarchal Edition uses Greek letters for chapter numbers. I hadn't really used these before, and was confused when three consecutive chapters were numbered εʹ, στʹ, ζʹ. Why does στʹ come between εʹ and ζʹ?
A sticker in English gives the equivalent Arabic numbers, and says that στ stands for the obsolete stigma.
I was able to find an explanation of the system here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_numerals
Which references this paper:
http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/numerals.html
Not too confusing once you understand the system, except for remembering where obsolete letters are inserted in the alphabetical sequence. Fortunately, the digamma comes right between the two mnemonic sentences "all bigots get diarrhea eventually" and "zorro ate the ice cap". They used up all the letters for single digits, then took the next one for 10 (ι), the one after that for 20 (κ), etc.
The Wikipedia article explains why obsolete letters were used:
A sticker in English gives the equivalent Arabic numbers, and says that στ stands for the obsolete stigma.
I was able to find an explanation of the system here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_numerals
Which references this paper:
http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/numerals.html
Not too confusing once you understand the system, except for remembering where obsolete letters are inserted in the alphabetical sequence. Fortunately, the digamma comes right between the two mnemonic sentences "all bigots get diarrhea eventually" and "zorro ate the ice cap". They used up all the letters for single digits, then took the next one for 10 (ι), the one after that for 20 (κ), etc.
The Wikipedia article explains why obsolete letters were used:
If a modern set of letters ΣΤ is used for ϝ, is there no modern letter equivalent for ϟ and ϡ?This requires 27 letters, so the 24-letter Greek alphabet was extended by using three obsolete letters: digamma ϝ for 6, qoppa ϟ for 90, and sampi ϡ for 900. Digamma is today most often written in its modern form ϛ, which is also called stigma; in Greece it is often replaced by the letter combination στ/ΣΤ.