Carl Brown asked:
>"If a mapping is marked by FINAL, use it when the character is not followed
>by a cased character.
>It is final when followed by a hyphen or combining diacritical mark? Can
>you have a final sigma in the middle of a word?
On the latter, yes in some 19th century typographical traditions, where the
final sigma is used to differentiate the prefix pros- from pro-; e.g.
you'll see Lambros in his _Neos Hellenomnemon_ journal write, say,
PRO*S*ABBATON = pro-sabbaton, but PRO*@*AGW = pros-agw. (Sorry about
non-Unicode; I'm on a Mac and have left my lookup-list at the office.) This
tradition has not been maintained, and I don't think it was ever mainstream
in Western Europe. I think I've also seen it done with other such prefixes,
like eis-.
Diacritics following a final sigma would only occur in Modern Greek
dialectology --- e.g. hacek used to denote that the sigma is pronounced as
"sh". (Epigraphists and papyrologists too, I suppose, though they'd tend
more to the lunate sigma anyway.) In that case, yes, the final sigma
remains final. Before a hyphen, on the other hand, it would clearly remain
medial, unless you're pulling the 19th century pros- prefix trick.
Nick Nicholas, Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. nicholas@uci.edu
www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis
"All the nations also under his dominion were filled with joy and
inexpressible gladness at not being even for a moment deprived of the
benefits of a well ordered government."
--- Eusebius of Caesaria on the accession of Constantine I.
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