>Has anyone assigned mappings to these characters (on any device)?
> alternate lowercase sigma (terminal sigma)
One of my troff manuals at least has a \(ts for it
>....[lots deleted]
> iota subscript
sure would be nice!
> coppa (a Byzantine character? not Greek, but on these fonts)
Actually, it is Greek, but archaic. The letter is vaguely q-shaped,
and sounds about like the Arabic Q in Iraq or Qaddafi.
There's also a digamma, which is F-shaped (stack two capital Gammas),
and has a v or w sound - it shows up in oinos (wine), and a few other
words, or rather fails to show up (Homer may have used them ~800BC,
but by Plato's time ~500BC it was unused - still affects declension/
conjugation of a few words. I think I saw more of this in Xenophon
(Ionic dialect) than Plato's Attic, but I barely survived that
semester.)
Rough & Smooth Breathing marks?
--
# Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs 2G-202, Holmdel NJ 1-201-949-0705 ihnp4!ho95c!wcs
>Has anyone assigned mappings to these characters (on any device)?
> alternate lowercase sigma (terminal sigma)
One of my troff manuals at least has a \(ts for it
>....[lots deleted]
> iota subscript
sure would be nice!
> coppa (a Byzantine character? not Greek, but on these fonts)
Actually, it is Greek, but archaic. The letter (sp qoppa?) is vaguely
q-shaped, and sounds about like the Arabic Q in Iraq or Qaddafi.
There's also a digamma, which is F-shaped (stack two capital Gammas),
and has a v or w sound - it shows up in oinos (wine), and a few other
words, or rather fails to show up (Homer may have used them ~800BC,
but by Plato's time ~500BC it was unused - still affects declension/
conjugation of a few words. I think I saw more of this in Xenophon
(Ionic dialect) than Plato's Attic, but I barely survived that
semester.)
Perhaps these characters are provided so that one of the old Greek
numeral systems can be typeset. That system was one of the ones
that assigned every letter of the alphabet a numeric value. The
values assigned were 1,2,3,...9, 10,20,30,...90, 100,200,300,...900.
Unfortunately the Greek alphabet is only 24 letters long. To make
it up to the required 27, 3 obsolete characters were inserted:
van between eta and zeta (thus = 6)
koppa between pi and rho (thus = 90)
sampi after omega (thus = 900).
Van looks rather like an s with the top stretched up; if it's not on the
font, I suppose the alternate lower case sigma is close. Koppa is a Q
with the tail pointing straight down, and sampi is like a backwards C
overstruck with an upward-slanted = sign.
Reference: "A History of Mathematical Notations" by Florian Cajori, vol. 1,
1928, reprinted 1974.
Mark Brader
P.S. [1] Please direct any followups to the appropriate single newsgroup.
[2] With all the remarks flying around lately about inaccurate values
attempted to be assigned to pi, I'm surprised that nobody else
has pointed out that the ancient Greeks made it 80... :-)