Posted: 26 Jul 2007, 17:28
i studied english for 5 years...from 11 to 16....now i'm 33 (as jesus)....and it's the only foreign language i studied....and i never use it before HL
And who writes this bull?Greek majuscule sigma is always written as C and never as Σ, at least, I cannot recall ever having seen it written in the now familiar manner.
Ah, now I understandI will run off to wikipedia and look it up now but I suspect that the sigma that we are used to is a quite modern invention.
As high as I value the Wiki, when you want to make sure about this, Wiki ain't the place.
...so it is not a modern variant, but just a different style of writing based on regions. A different dialect, so to say...Markfiend wrote:Wiki backs this up:In Eastern forms of Greek writing (as opposed to the Western Greek alphabet used in the European Greek colonies) and in the Middle Ages, the lunate sigma (upper case Ϲ, lower case ϲ) — which resembles, but which is not at all related to, the Latin letter C — was often used. Lunate sigma was frequently used for writing Medieval Greek, and it can still sometimes be seen in inscriptions in Greek Orthodox churches, but also in certain printed editions of classical authors. The form of the Cyrillic letter С [s] and Coptic letter sima are derived from lunate sigma.
As Wiki also points out the Western-Greek sigma was originally derived from the Phoenician letter 'shin' which is basically just the letter 'W'. The greek just twiddled it around a bit.
What puzzles me mostly tho, is that the lunate sigma was used in the Western parts of Greece, which are furthest away from Phoenicia.
Also:
Herodotus wrote:The Phoenicians who came with Cadmus—amongst whom were the Gephyraei—introduced into Greece, after their settlement in the country, a number of accomplishments, of which the most important was writing, an art till then, I think, unknown to the Greeks. At first they used the same characters as all the other Phoenicians, but as time went on, and they changed their language, they also changed the shape of their letters. At that period most of the Greeks in the neighbourhood were Ionians; they were taught these letters by the Phoenicians and adopted them, with a few alterations, for their own use, continuing to refer to them as the Phoenician characters—as was only right, as the Phoenicians had introduced them. The Ionians also call paper 'skins'—a survival from antiquity when paper was hard to get, and they did actually use goat and sheep skins to write on. Indeed, even today many foreign peoples use this material. In the temple of Ismenian Apollo at Theba in Boeotia I have myself seen cauldrons with inscriptions cut on them in Cadmean characters—most of them not very different from the Ionian
Diodorus wrote:But there are some who attribute the invention of letters to the Syrians, from whom the Phoenicians learned them and communicated them to the Greeks when they came with Cadmus into Europe; hence the Greeks called them Phoenician letters. To these that hold this opinion, it is answered that the Phoenicians were not the first that found out letters, but only changed the form and shape of them into other characters, which many afterwards using the name of Phoenicians grew to be common.
IZ.
