Modern Greek
Modern Greek is the form of the Greek language spoken in the modern era. The end of the Medieval Greek period and the beginning of Modern Greek is symbolically assigned to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 though that date marks no clear linguistic boundary and many characteristic modern features of the language arose centuries earlier, between the fourth and the fifteenth centuries AD. During most of the period, the language existed in a situation of diglossia, with regional spoken dialects existing side by side with learned, more archaic written forms, as with the demotic and learned varieties that co-existed throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Varieties of Modern Greek include several varieties, including Demotic, Pontic, Mariupolitan, Southern Italian and Tsakonian. Speaking, Demotic refers to all popular varieties of Modern Greek that followed a common evolutionary path from Koine and have retained a high degree of mutual intelligibility to the present; as shown in Ptochoprodromic and Acritic poems, Demotic Greek was the vernacular before the 11th century and called the "Roman" language of the Byzantine Greeks, notably in peninsular Greece, the Greek islands, coastal Asia Minor and Cyprus.
Today, a standardised variety of Demotic Greek is the official language of the Hellenic Republic and Cyprus, is referred to as "Standard Modern Greek", or less simply as "Modern Greek" or "Demotic". Demotic Greek comprises various regional varieties with minor linguistic differences in phonology and vocabulary. Due to the high degree of mutual intelligibility of these varieties, Greek linguists refer to them as "idioms" of a wider "Demotic dialect", known as "Koine Modern Greek". Most English-speaking linguists however refer to them as "dialects", emphasising degrees of variation only when necessary. Demotic Greek varieties are divided into two main groups and Southern; the main distinguishing feature common to Northern variants is a set of standard phonological shifts in unaccented vowel phonemes: becomes and and are dropped. The dropped vowels' existence is implicit, may affect surrounding phonemes: for example, a dropped palatalizes preceding consonants, just like an, pronounced. Southern variants do not exhibit these phonological shifts.
Examples of Northern dialects are Rumelian, Macedonian, Thracian, Northern Euboean, Samos and Sarakatsanika. The Southern category is divided into groups that include: Old Athenian-Maniot: Megara, Athens and Mani Peninsula Ionian-Peloponnesian: Peloponnese, Ionian Islands, Attica and Southern Euboea Cretan-Cycladian: Cyclades and several enclaves in Syria and Lebanon Southeastern: Chios, Ikaria and Cyprus. Demotic Greek has been taught in monotonic Greek script since 1982. Polytonic script remains popular in intellectual circles. Katharevousa is a semi-artificial sociolect promoted in the 19th century at the foundation of the modern Greek state, as a compromise between Classical Greek and modern Demotic, it was the official language of modern Greece until 1976. Katharevousa is written in polytonic Greek script. While Demotic Greek contains loanwords from Turkish, Italian and other languages, these have for the most part been purged from Katharevousa. See the Greek language question. Pontic was spoken along the mountainous Black Sea coast of Turkey, the so-called Pontus region, until most of its speakers were killed or displaced to modern Greece during the Pontic genocide, followed by the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923.
It hails from Hellenistic and Medieval Koine and preserves characteristics of Ionic due to ancient colonizations of the region. Pontic evolved as a separate dialect from Demotic Greek as a result of the region's isolation from the Greek mainstream after the Fourth Crusade fragmented the Byzantine Empire into separate kingdoms. Cappadocian is a Greek dialect of central Turkey of the same fate as Pontic. Cappadocian Greek diverged from the other Byzantine Greek dialects earlier, beginning with the Turkish conquests of central Asia Minor in the 11th and 12th centuries, so developed several radical features, such as the loss of the gender for nouns. Having been isolated from the crusader conquests and the Venetian influence of the Greek coast, it retained the Ancient Greek terms for many words that were replaced with Romance ones in Demotic Greek; the poet Rumi, whose name means "Roman", referring to his residence amongst the "Roman" Greek speakers of Cappadocia, wrote a few poems in Cappadocian Greek, one of the earliest attestations of the dialect.
Rumeíka or Mariupolitan Greek is a dialect spoken in about 17 villages around the northern coast of the Sea of Azov in southern Ukraine and Russia. Mariupolitan Greek is related to Pontic Greek and evolved from the dialect of Greek spoken in Crimea, a part of the Byzantine Empire and the Pontic Empire of Trebizond, until that latter state fell to the Ottomans in 1461. Thereafter, the Crimean Greek state continued to exist as the independent Greek Principali
Koppa (letter)
Koppa or qoppa is a letter, used in early forms of the Greek alphabet, derived from Phoenician qoph. It was used to denote the /k/ sound, but dropped out of use as an alphabetic character in favor of Kappa, it has remained in use as a numeral symbol in the system of Greek numerals, although with a modified shape. Koppa is the source of Latin Q, as well as the Cyrillic numeral sign of the same name. In Phoenician, qoph was pronounced. In this function, it was borrowed into the Italic alphabets and into Latin. However, as the sound /k/ had two redundant spellings, koppa was replaced by kappa in Greek, it remained in use as a letter in some Doric regions into the 5th century BC. The koppa was used as a symbol for the city of Corinth, which had the early spelling of Ϙόρινθος. Koppa remained in use in the system of Milesian Greek numerals, where it had the value of 90, it has continued to be used in this function into modern times, though its shape has changed over time. In the Greek cursive script, the Q-like shape with a closed circle on top was broken up at the side or at the top.
These are the shapes in which it was borrowed into the early Cyrillic alphabet, as well as into Gothic, in both cases with the same numeric function. In the Coptic script, the identical-looking sign ϥ is used as a numeral for 90, although as an alphabetic letter it has an unrelated sound value, /f/, derived from Egyptian demotic. In minuscule handwriting, the shape changed further into a simple zigzag line. Modern typography of the numeral Koppa has most employed some version of the Z-shaped character, it may appear in several variants: as a simple geometrical lightning-bolt shape. Other variants common in older print include shapes based on the open uncial form; some of these shapes may be indistinguishable from realizations of the other Greek numeral, Stigma, in other fonts. Koppa has sometimes been replaced by a lowercase Latin "q", a mirrored uppercase "P", or a "5" turned upside down; as with the numeral usage of stigma and Sampi, modern typographical practice does not observe a contrast between uppercase and lowercase forms for numeric koppa.
The Unicode character encoding standard had only a single code point for Koppa, marked as uppercase and could be used either for an epigraphic or a numeral glyph, depending on font design. A lowercase form was encoded in version 3.0. A second pair of code points for the original closed epigraphical shape was introduced in version 3.2. This left the older two code points to cover the numeral glyphs; as of 2010, coverage of these code points in common computer fonts is therefore still inconsistent: while the most used version of the numeral glyph will be located at the lowercase code point U+03DF in recent fonts, older fonts may either have no character at all or a version of the closed epigraphic form at that position. Conversely, older fonts may have the numeral glyph at the uppercase code point, while this position may be filled with any of several less common glyphs in newer ones. Since there had never been a consistent typographic tradition for a uppercase numeral koppa, the typographer Yannis Haralambous proposed two new variants for it, noting that he himself found them not "entirely satisfactory".
A serifed version similar to his koppa was adopted as the reference glyph for the Unicode code charts, along with a lowercase form with heavy curved arms and pointed angles:. Some current Unicode fonts have adopted these new shapes, while many font designers have opted for some combination of the more traditional glyphs, including the uncial and the lamedh-shaped ones. Powell, Barry B.. Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-37157-0. Threatte, Leslie; the Grammar of Attic Inscriptions. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-007344-7. Woodard, Roger D.. Greek Writing from Knossos to Homer. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-510520-6. Koppa Koppa
Digamma
Digamma, waw, or wau is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It stood for the sound /w/ but it has principally remained in use as a Greek numeral for 6. Whereas it was called waw or wau, its most common appellation in classical Greek is digamma. Digamma or wau was part of the original archaic Greek alphabet as adopted from Phoenician. Like its model, Phoenician waw, it represented the voiced labial-velar approximant /w/ and stood in the 6th position in the alphabet between epsilon and zeta, it is the consonantal doublet of the vowel letter upsilon, derived from waw but was placed near the end of the Greek alphabet. Digamma or wau is in turn the ancestor of the Latin letter F; as an alphabetic letter, it is attested in archaic and dialectal ancient Greek inscriptions until the classical period. The shape of the letter went through a development from through, to or, which at that point was conflated with the σ-τ ligature. In modern print, a distinction is made between the letter in its original alphabetic role as a consonant sign, rendered as "Ϝ" or its modern lowercase variant "ϝ", the numeric symbol, represented by "ϛ".
In modern Greek, this is replaced by the digraph στ. The sound /w/ existed in Mycenean Greek, as attested in Linear B and archaic Greek inscriptions using digamma, it is confirmed by the Hittite name of Troy, corresponding to the Greek name *Wilion. The /w/ sound was lost at various times in various dialects before the classical period. In Ionic, /w/ had disappeared before Homer's epics were written down, but its former presence can be detected in many cases because its omission left the meter defective. For example, the words ἄναξ " king, leader". Found in the Iliad, would have been ϝάναξ /wánaks/, οἶνος "wine" are sometimes used in the meter where a word starting with a consonant would be expected. Further evidence coupled with cognate-analysis shows that οἶνος was earlier ϝοῖνος /wóînos/. There have been editions of the Homeric epics where the wau was re-added in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but these have fallen out of favour. Aeolian was the dialect / w / longest. In discussions by ancient Greek grammarians of the Hellenistic era, the letter is therefore described as a characteristic Aeolian feature.
Loanwords that entered Greek before the loss of / w - / lost. For instance, Oscan Viteliu gave rise to the Greek word Italia; the Adriatic tribe of the Veneti was called in Ancient Greek: translit. Enetoi. In loanwords that entered the Greek language after the drop of /w/, the phoneme was once again registered, compare for example the spelling of Οὐάτεις for vates. In some local alphabets, a variant glyph of the letter digamma existed that resembled modern Cyrillic И. In one local alphabet, that of Pamphylia, this variant form existed side by side with standard digamma as two distinct letters, it has been surmised that in this dialect the sound /w/ may have changed to labiodental /v/ in some environments. The F-shaped letter may have stood for the new /v/ sound, while the special И-shaped form signified those positions where the old /w/ sound was preserved. Digamma/wau remained in use in the system of Greek numerals attributed to Miletus, where it stood for the number 6, reflecting its original place in the sequence of the alphabet.
It was one of three letters that were kept in this way in addition to the 24 letters of the classical alphabet, the other two being koppa for 90, sampi for 900. During their history in handwriting in late antiquity and the Byzantine era, all three of these symbols underwent several changes in shape, with digamma taking the form of "ϛ", it has remained in use as a numeral in Greek to the present day, in contexts such as enumerating chapters in a book or other items in a set. Digamma was derived from Phoenician waw, shaped like an Y. Of the two Greek reflexes of waw, digamma retained the alphabetic position, but had its shape modified to, while the upsilon retained the original shape but was placed in a new alphabetic position. Early Crete had an archaic form of digamma somewhat closer to the original Phoenician, or a variant with the stem bent sidewards; the shape, during the archaic period, underwent a development parallel to that of epsilon. For digamma, this led to the two main variants of square.
The latter of these two shapes became dominant when used as a numeral, with "F" only rarely employed in this function. However, in Athens, both of these were avoided in favour of a number of alternative numeral shapes. In cursive handwriting, the square-C form developed further into a rounded form resembling a "C", it developed a downward tail at the end and adopted a shape like a Latin "s" These cursive forms are found in stone inscriptions in late antiquity. In the ninth and tenth centuries, the cursive shape digamma was visually conflated with a ligature of sigma and tau; the στ-ligature had become common in minuscule handwriting from the 9th century onwards. Both closed and open fo
Greek alphabet
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late ninth or early eighth century BC. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, was the first alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many different local variants, but, by the end of the fourth century BC, the Eucleidean alphabet, with twenty-four letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version, still used to write Greek today; these twenty-four letters are: Α α, Β β, Γ γ, Δ δ, Ε ε, Ζ ζ, Η η, Θ θ, Ι ι, Κ κ, Λ λ, Μ μ, Ν ν, Ξ ξ, Ο ο, Π π, Ρ ρ, Σ σ/ς, Τ τ, Υ υ, Φ φ, Χ χ, Ψ ψ, Ω ω. The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of the Cyrillic scripts. Like Latin and Cyrillic, Greek had only a single form of each letter. Sound values and conventional transcriptions for some of the letters differ between Ancient and Modern Greek usage, because the pronunciation of Greek has changed between the fifth century BC and today.
Modern and Ancient Greek use different diacritics. Apart from its use in writing the Greek language, in both its ancient and its modern forms, the Greek alphabet today serves as a source of technical symbols and labels in many domains of mathematics and other fields. In both Ancient and Modern Greek, the letters of the Greek alphabet have stable and consistent symbol-to-sound mappings, making pronunciation of words predictable. Ancient Greek spelling was near-phonemic. For a number of letters, sound values differ between Ancient and Modern Greek, because their pronunciation has followed a set of systematic phonological shifts that affected the language in its post-classical stages. Examples Notes Among consonant letters, all letters that denoted voiced plosive consonants and aspirated plosives in Ancient Greek stand for corresponding fricative sounds in Modern Greek; the correspondences are as follows: Among the vowel symbols, Modern Greek sound values reflect the radical simplification of the vowel system of post-classical Greek, merging multiple distinct vowel phonemes into a much smaller number.
This leads to several groups of vowel letters denoting identical sounds today. Modern Greek orthography remains true to the historical spellings in most of these cases; as a consequence, the spellings of words in Modern Greek are not predictable from the pronunciation alone, while the reverse mapping, from spelling to pronunciation, is regular and predictable. The following vowel letters and digraphs are involved in the mergers: Modern Greek speakers use the same, modern symbol–sound mappings in reading Greek of all historical stages. In other countries, students of Ancient Greek may use a variety of conventional approximations of the historical sound system in pronouncing Ancient Greek. Several letter combinations have special conventional sound values different from those of their single components. Among them are several digraphs of vowel letters that represented diphthongs but are now monophthongized. In addition to the four mentioned above, there is ⟨ηι, ωι⟩, ⟨ου⟩, pronounced /u/; the Ancient Greek diphthongs ⟨αυ⟩, ⟨ευ⟩ and ⟨ηυ⟩ are pronounced, in Modern Greek.
In some environments, they are devoiced to, respectively. The Modern Greek consonant combinations ⟨μπ⟩ and ⟨ντ⟩ stand for and respectively. In addition, both in Ancient and Modern Greek, the letter ⟨γ⟩, before another velar consonant, stands for the velar nasal. In analogy to ⟨μπ⟩ and ⟨ντ⟩, ⟨γκ⟩ is used to stand for. There are the combinations ⟨γχ⟩ and ⟨γξ⟩. In the polytonic orthography traditionally used for ancient Greek, the stressed vowel of each word carries one of three accent marks: either the acute accent, the grave accent, or the circumflex accent; these signs were designed to mark different forms of the phonological pitch accent in Ancient Greek. By the time their use became conventional and obligatory in Greek writing, in late antiquity, pitch accent was evolving into a single stress accent, thus the three signs have not corresponded to a phonological distinction in actual speech since. In addition to the accent marks, every word-initial vowel must carry either of two so-called "breathing marks": the rough breathing, marking an /h/ sound at the beginning of a word, or the smooth breathing, marking its absence.
The letter rho, although not a vowel carries a rough breathing in word-initial position. If a rho was geminated within a word, the first ρ always had the smooth breathing and the second the rough breathing leading to the transliteration rrh; the vowel letters ⟨α, η, ω⟩ carry an additional diacritic in certain words, the so-called iota subscript, which has the shape of a small vertical stroke or a miniature ⟨ι⟩ below the letter. This iota represents the former offglide of what were long diphthongs, ⟨ᾱι, ηι, ωι⟩, which became monophthongized during antiquity. Another diacritic used in Greek is the diaeresis; this system of diacritics was first developed by the scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium, who worked at the Musaeum in Alexandria during the third century BC. Aristophanes of Byzantium was the first to divide poems into lines, rather than writing them like prose, introduced a series of signs for textual criticism. In 1982, a new, simplif
Epsilon
Epsilon is the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet, corresponding phonetically to a mid front unrounded vowel /e/. In the system of Greek numerals it has the value five, it was derived from the Phoenician letter He. Letters that arose from epsilon include the Roman E, Ë and Ɛ, Cyrillic Е, È, Ё, Є and Э; the name of the letter was εἶ, but the name was changed to ἒ ψιλόν in the Middle Ages to distinguish the letter from the digraph αι, a former diphthong that had come to be pronounced the same as epsilon. In essence, the uppercase form of epsilon looks identical to Latin E; the lowercase version has two typographical variants, both inherited from medieval Greek handwriting. One, the most common in modern typography and inherited from medieval minuscule, looks like a reversed "3"; the other known as lunate or uncial epsilon and inherited from earlier uncial writing, looks like a semicircle crossed by a horizontal bar. While in normal typography these are just alternative font variants, they may have different meanings as mathematical symbols.
Computer systems therefore offer distinct encodings for them. In Unicode, the character U+03F5 "Greek lunate epsilon symbol" is provided for the lunate form. In TeX, \ epsilon denotes the lunate form. There is a Latin epsilon or "open e", which looks similar to the Greek lowercase epsilon, it is used as an IPA phonetic symbol. The lunate or uncial epsilon has provided inspiration for the euro sign; the lunate epsilon is not to be confused with the set membership symbol. The symbol ∈, first used in set theory and logic by Giuseppe Peano and now used in mathematics in general for set membership did, evolve from the letter epsilon, since the symbol was used as an abbreviation for the Latin word "est". In addition, mathematicians read the symbol ∈ as "element of", as in "1 is an element of the natural numbers" for 1 ∈ N, for example; as late as 1960, ϵ itself was used for set membership, while its negation "does not belong to" was denoted by ϵ ′. Only did a separate, stylized symbol take the place of epsilon in this role.
In a related context, Peano introduced the use of a backwards epsilon, ∍, for the phrase "such that", although the abbreviation "s.t." is used in place of ∍ in informal cardinals The letter Ε was taken over from the Phoenician letter He when Greeks first adopted alphabetic writing. In archaic Greek writing, its shape is still identical to that of the Phoenician letter. Like other Greek letters, it could face either leftward or rightward, depending on the current writing direction, just as in Phoenician, the horizontal bars always faced in the direction of writing. Archaic writing preserves the Phoenician form with a vertical stem extending below the lowest horizontal bar. In the classical era, through the influence of more cursive writing styles, the shape was simplified to the current E glyph. While the original pronunciation of the Phoenician letter He was, the earliest Greek sound value of Ε was determined by the vowel occurring in the Phoenician letter name, which made it a natural choice for being reinterpreted from a consonant symbol to a vowel symbol denoting an sound.
Besides its classical Greek sound value, the short /e/ phoneme, it could also be used for other -like sounds. For instance, in early Attic before c.500 B. C. it was used both for the long, open /ɛː/, for the long close /eː/. In the former role, it was replaced in the classic Greek alphabet by Eta, taken over from eastern Ionic alphabets, while in the latter role it was replaced by the digraph spelling ΕΙ; some dialects used yet other ways of distinguishing between various e-like sounds. In Corinth, the normal function of Ε to denote /e/ and /ɛː/ was taken by a glyph resembling a pointed B, while Ε was used only for long close /eː/; the letter Beta, in turn, took the deviant shape. In Sicyon, a variant glyph resembling an X was used in the same function as Corinthian. In Thespiai, a special letter form consisting of a vertical stem with a single rightward-pointing horizontal bar was used for what was a raised variant of /e/ in pre-vocalic environments; this tack glyph was used elsewhere as a form of "Heta", i.e. for the sound /h/.
After the establishment of the canonical classic Greek alphabet, new glyph variants for Ε were introduced through handwriting. In the uncial script, the "lunate" shape became predominant. In cursive handwriting, a large number of shorthand glyphs came to be used, where the cross-bar and the curved stroke were linked in various ways; some of them resembled a modern lowercase Latin "e", some a "6" with a connecting stroke to the next letter starting from the middle, some a combination of two small "c"-like curves. Several of these shapes were taken
Albanian alphabet
The Albanian alphabet is a variant of the Latin alphabet used to write the Albanian language. It consists of 36 letters: Note: The vowels are shown in bold. Listen to the pronunciation of the 36 letters; the earliest known mention of Albanian writings comes from a French Catholic church document from 1332. Written either by archbishop Guillaume Adam or the monk Brocardus Monacus the report notes that Licet Albanenses aliam omnino linguam a latina habeant et diversam, tamen litteram latinam habent in uso et in omnibus suis libris. Scholars warn that this could mean Albanians wrote in the Latin language, not just Albanian with a Latin script; the history of the Albanian alphabet is linked with the influence of religion among Albanians. The writers from the North of Albania used Latin letters under the influence of the Catholic Church, those from the South of Albania under the Greek Orthodox church used Greek letters, while others used Arabic letters under the influence of Islam. There were attempts for an original Albanian alphabet in the period of 1750–1850.
The current alphabet in use among Albanians is one of the two variants approved in the Congress of Monastir held by Albanian intellectuals from November 14 to 22 November 1908, in Monastir. A first reference for Latin letters was in a medieval Latin manuscript of 1332 attributed to a monk called Brocardus Monacus or to one Guillaume Adam. In this manuscript there is a quoted phrase about the existence of books in Albania "licet Albanenses aliam omnino linguam a latina habeant et diversam, tamen litteram latinam habent in usu et in omnibus suis libris"; the earliest document discovered so far, written in Albanian is a manuscript from 1210 by Theodor of Shkodra written in Latin characters. The first certain document in Albanian "Formula e pagëzimit", issued by Pal Engjëlli, was written in Latin characters, it was a simple phrase, supposed to be used by the relatives of a dying person if they couldn't make it to churches during the troubled times of the Ottoman invasion. The five Albanian writers of the 16th and 17th centuries who form the core of early Albanian literature, all used a Latin alphabet for their Albanian books.
The Greek intellectual Anastasios Michael, in his speech to the Berlin Academy mentions an Albanian alphabet produced "recently" by Kosmas from Cyprus, bishop of Dyrrachium. It is assumed that this is the alphabet used for the "Gospel of Elbasan". Anastasios calls Kosmas the "Cadmus of Albania". In 1857 Kostandin Kristoforidhi, an Albanian scholar and translator, drafted in Istanbul, Ottoman Empire, a Memorandum for the Albanian language', he went to Malta, where he stayed until 1860 in a Protestant seminary, finishing the translation of The New Testament in the Tosk and Gheg dialects. He was helped by Nikolla Serreqi from Shkodër with the Gheg version of the Testament. Nikolla Serreqi was the propulsor for the use of the Latin script for the translation of the New Testament, used by the early writers of the Albanian literature and Kristoforidhi enthusiastically embraced the idea of a Latin alphabet. In November 1869, a Commission for the Alphabet of the Albanian Language was gathered in Istanbul.
One of its members was Kostandin Kristoforidhi and the main purpose of the Commission was the creation of a unique alphabet for all the Albanians. In January 1870 the Commission ended its work of the standardization of the alphabet, in Latin letters. A plan on the creation of textbooks and spread of Albanian schools was drafted; however this plan was not realized, because the Ottoman Government wouldn't finance the expenses for the establishment of such schools. Although this commission had gathered and delivered an alphabet in 1870, the writers from the North still used the Latin-based alphabet, whereas in Southern Albania writers used the Greek letters. In Southern Albania, the main activity of Albanian writers consisted in translating Greek Orthodox religious text and not in forming any kind of literature which could form a strong tradition for the use of Greek letters; as the Albanologist Robert Elsie has written: The predominance of Greek as the language of Christian education and culture in southern Albania and the hostile attitude of the Orthodox church to the spread of writing in Albanian made it impossible for an Albanian literature in Greek script to evolve.
The Orthodox church, as the main vehicle of culture in the southern Balkans, while intent on spreading Christian education and values, was never convinced of the utility of writing in the vernacular as a means of converting the masses, as the Catholic church in northern Albania had been, to a certain extent, during the Counter-Reformation. Nor, with the exception of the ephemeral printing press in Voskopoja, did the southern Albanians have at their disposal publishing facilities like those available to the clerics and scholars of Catholic Albania in Venice and Dalmatia; as such, the Orthodox tradition in Albanian writing, a strong cultural heritage of scholarship and erudition, though one limited to translations of religious texts and to the compilation of dictionaries, was to remain a flower which never blossomed. The turning
Greek ligatures
Greek ligatures are graphic combinations of the letters of the Greek alphabet that were used in medieval handwritten Greek and in early printing. Ligatures were used in the cursive writing style and extensively in minuscule writing. There were dozens of conventional ligatures; some of them stood for frequent letter combinations, some for inflectional endings of words, some were abbreviations of entire words. In early printed Greek from around 1500, many ligatures fashioned after contemporary manuscript hands continued to be used. Important models for this early typesetting practice were the designs of Aldus Manutius in Venice, those of Claude Garamond in Paris, who created the influential Grecs du roi typeface in 1541. However, the use of ligatures declined during the 17th and 18th centuries and became obsolete in modern typesetting. Among the ligatures that remained in use the longest are the ligature Ȣ for ου, which resembles an o with an u on top, the abbreviation ϗ for καὶ, which resembles a κ with a downward stroke on the right.
The ου ligature is still used in decorative writing, while the καὶ abbreviation has some limited usage in functions similar to the Latin ampersand. Another ligature, frequent in early modern printing is a ligature of Ο with ς for a terminal ος; the ligature ϛ for στ, now called stigma, survived in a special role besides its use as a ligature proper. It took on the function of a number sign for "6", having been visually conflated with the cursive form of the ancient letter digamma, which had this numeral function. In the modern computer encoding standard Unicode, the abbreviation ϗ has been encoded since version 3.0 of the standard. An uppercase version Ϗ was added in version 5.1. A lower and upper case "stigma", designed for its numeric use, is encoded in Unicode. Letters derived from the ου ligature exist for use in Latin, for Cyrillic, though not for Greek itself; some attempts have been made at recreating typesetting with ligatures in modern computer fonts, either through Unicode-compliant OpenType glyph replacement, or with simpler but non-standardized methods of glyph-by-glyph encoding.
Greek digraphsLatin and Cyrillic Ou digraphs iota adscript, written with a ligatured iota: ᾼ iota subscript written with a ligatured iota: ᾳ Tau-Rho Chi-Rho
), with the edges subsequently turned outward (
, 
, 
).[2]
The Dorian city of Knidos as well as a few Aegean islands, namely Paros, Thasos and Melos, chose the exact opposite innovation, using a broken-up circle for the short and a closed circle for the long /o/.[2]
, a form that developed during the 3rd century BC in ancient handwriting on papyrus, from a flattened-out form of the letter (
) that had its edges curved even further upward.[4]
