Re: identifying greek characters in an old book

From: suzanne mccarthy (suzmccarth@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Oct 27 2005 - 19:02:19 CST

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     Wed Oct 19 2005 David Starner wrote:

    On 10/19/05, Asmus Freytag <asmusf@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
    > Limiting this support to forms attested in print is pragmatic: the
    > number of variants are much smaller, and their use and appearance is
    > much more settled than for manuscripts.

     

    But all the examples on this thread have been attested in print, have
    they not? The number of variants for old-style Greek text is
    relatively large and unsupported.

     

    A few people have contacted me with further information on U+03D7 : GREEK KAI SYMBOL and the 'variant' kai (shorthand kappa with varia).

     

    The variant 'kai' symbol appears along with Greek Kai Symbol in the Erasmus and Stephanus editions of the NT. (somehow having two makes the name of U+03D7 a bit problematic)

     

    http://www.supakoo.com/rick/ricoblog/content/binary/Erasmus1516-001.png
    http://www.supakoo.com/rick/ricoblog/content/binary/Stephanus1550-002.png

     

    In Erasmus' edition they both appear as ampersand in the Latin.

     

    However, I don't think the variant 'kai' is really a glyph variation on U+03D7 : GREEK KAI SYMBOL but a separate symbol with a distinct history. Bergekios did use both in his handwritten manuscripts.

     

    More recent printed editions of the Textus Receptus (Erasmus) do not use any ligatures at all including U+03D7 : GREEK KAI SYMBOL. Would it not be more authentic not to use this codepoint in the Lord's Prayer as it could obscure the fact that many other unencoded ligatures are also present?

     

    Suzanne McCarthy

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

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