Re: identifying greek characters in an old book

From: suzanne mccarthy (suzmccarth@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Oct 18 2005 - 14:01:35 CST

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    Lehmann also indentifies the 'kai' logograph with the zigzag that Raymond shows here and represents the same history. He says that the zigzag was an original kappa shorthand but also mentions the kappa epsilon as Thompson does. Lehmann doesn't ever say exactly and ends the page with "jedensfalls ist das Zeichen alt," Since Lehmann spreads his discussion over several pages of text and two pages of tables, I can't easily reproduce them here.
     
    The original historic 'kai' shorthand logograph denifinitely 'looks like' 03DF more than anything.
     
    However, I can't tell origin of these symbol glyphs in Unicode. I am somewhat surprised to see the kai ligature 03D7 since it is a fairly transparent kappa plus alpha-iota ligature. Somehow there seems to be too much choice already :-)
     
    Suzanne
     
     
    Raymond wrote:
     
    "Christopher Fynn" <cfynn@gmx.net> writes
    > So could this other Kai abbreviation be considered as an alternate glyph
    > form of U+03D7?

    Probably not, even though it is best not to multiply needlessly the various
    glyphs. As you see from the first line here the tachygraphical form does not
    really derive from kappa+ ioto subscript, but from another line of
    development that started with a sort of zigzag, and ended up with a form
    like the one in Morgan's text.

    At most I would argue for the encoding of those forms that were used by the
    earliest printers, but ignoring the huge number of others that are found in
    the long manuscript tradition. Unicode is meant for the printed text, is it
    not ?
    This image is from E.M. Thomson's A handbook of Greek and Latin
    Palaeography.

    Raymond Mercier

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