Open main menu
Home
Random
Recent changes
Special pages
Community portal
Preferences
About Wikipedia
Disclaimers
Incubator escapee wiki
Search
User menu
Talk
Dark mode
Contributions
Create account
Log in
Editing
Digamma
(section)
Warning:
You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you
log in
or
create an account
, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
Anti-spam check. Do
not
fill this in!
=== Typography === In western typesetting during the modern era, the numeral symbol was routinely represented by the same character as the ''stigma'' ligature (Ο). In normal text, this ligature together with numerous others continued to be used widely until the early nineteenth century, following the style of earlier minuscule handwriting, but ligatures then gradually dropped out of use. The ''stigma'' ligature was among those that survived longest, but it too became obsolete in print after the mid-19th century. Today it is used only to represent the numeric digamma, and never to represent the sequence ΟΟ in text. Along with the other special numeric symbols koppa and sampi, numeric digamma/stigma normally has no distinction between uppercase and lowercase forms,<ref name="holton">{{cite book|first1=David|last1=Holton|first2=Peter|last2=Mackridge|first3=Irene|last3=Philippaki-Warburton|title=Greek: a comprehensive grammar of the modern language|place=London|publisher=Routledge|year=1997|page=105|isbn=0-415-10001-1}}</ref> (while other alphabetic letters can be used as numerals in both cases). Distinct uppercase versions were occasionally used in the 19th century. Several different shapes of uppercase stigma can be found, with the lower end either styled as a small curved S-like hook (<span style="background-color: white;">[[File:Greek Stigma uc S-shaped.svg|x16px]]</span>), or as a straight stem, the latter either with a serif (<span style="background-color: white;">[[File:Greek Koppa-Stigma uc.svg|x16px]]</span>) or without one (<span style="background-color: white;">[[File:Greek Koppa-Stigma uc 2.svg|x16px]]</span>). An alternative uppercase stylization in some twentieth-century fonts is <span style="background-color: white;">[[File:Greek Stigma uc ST.svg|x16px]]</span>, visually a ligature of Roman-style uppercase C and T. The characters used for numeric digamma/stigma are distinguished in modern print from the character used to represent the ancient alphabetic digamma, the letter for the [w] sound. This is rendered in print by a Latin "F", or sometimes a variant of it specially designed to fit in typographically with Greek (<span style="font-family:serif">Ο</span>). It has a modern lowercase form (<span style="font-family:serif">Ο</span>) that typically differs from Latin "f" by having two parallel horizontal strokes like the uppercase character, with the vertical stem often being somewhat slanted to the right or curved, and usually descending below the [[baseline (typography)|baseline]]. This character is used in Greek [[epigraphy]] to transcribe the text of ancient inscriptions that contain "Ο", and in linguistics and historical grammar when describing reconstructed proto-forms of Greek words that contained the sound {{IPA|/w/}}.
Edit summary
(Briefly describe your changes)
By publishing changes, you agree to the
Terms of Use
, and you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 License
and the
GFDL
. You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license.
Cancel
Editing help
(opens in new window)