Quidam hanc imaginem in pagina ipsa misit cum adnotatione "complete sequence of letters to show alphabetical position of obsolete letters within Greek alphabetic sequence". Sed id impossibile est, quia
Haec litterae nullo tempore, unam aliam sequentes, omnes in alphabeto fuerunt;
Series harum litterarum rite ordinatarum minime exstat.
It seems highly unlikely that the ʃ sound is transliterated as sch in latin. How do you go from ʃ to sch? Even just plain s would be closer sounding. Is there a source for this or is it made up?--Rafaelgarcia18:20, 23 Iunii 2008 (UTC)[reply]
According to en:wiki, the letter was used only in Bactrian (a long-extinct Iranian language, deciphered in 1957, which few mortals currently know). I quote: "The name "sho" is modern; its Bactrian name is unknown, as is its order in the Bactrian alphabet." I quote further from the paper by Michael Everson and Nicholas Sims-Williams, which is linked on that English page: "No traditional name is attested for this letter, but because of its similarity to RHO, the name SHO has been suggested here." This means, I would say, that sho is a fantasy-name, created by those two multitypographers purely for the reason that the Unicode people demand a name as well as a shape before they will consider new proposals for inclusion of characters in Unicode. It has nothing to do with God, Ms Emmerich, Adamic or Bactrian, and certainly nothing to do with Greek. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 20:01, 23 Iunii 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Exactly. If anyone wanted to write an article about the Bactrian alphabet, that's where it would find its obvious place. The Greek alphabet has other extended variants too (notably Coptic). Why the Bactrian variant has become so important in the scheme of things, God knows.
The following reference [1] was given by our anonymous editor and is really useful on variant Greek letters. I don't see a mention of "sho" there, but maybe I just failed to find it as yet.
I don't think there is a strong reason for excluding the variants from this page unless and until we have a better page for them. But it's dishonest to imply that letters were used for Greek when they weren't: our editors must try to guard against this. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 20:33, 23 Iunii 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Where I was unable to confirm the name of one of the odd letters in early or classical Greek, I've asked for a citation; where I'm sure that there was no name, I've deleted it. In either case, a real citation (of an ancient Greek text) is what's needed. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 21:17, 23 Iunii 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I replaced analogical dead external link set with analogical life external link set in main article to provide broadest ever centralized reference set available known to me. 83.30.143.13114:27, 14 Februarii 2010 (UTC)[reply]
References
Here is useful bare reference link set, use it, because links in article are linking to defunct sites.
Thanks. Anyone who finds these links useful could label them in Latin and add them to the page, but they would (I think) be appropriate rather on the pages about the individual characters. On this page links about the whole alphabet are more suitable. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 15:16, 14 Februarii 2010 (UTC)[reply]
She's an obsessive who has been a minor nuisance on many Wikipedias for many years. Her aim is to get sho and san adopted as part of the Greek alphabet for religious reasons (see also Lingua Adamica on this subject). In my view the best solution, for her own good, is to persuade her to use other sites, not wikipedia, for her propaganda. I can point you to earlier discussions if you're really interested.
The false information was not the links (they are repetitive, semi-relevant and lack Latin labels, but not false). The false information was the claim that she is reverting "slashing vandalism". Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 15:29, 14 Februarii 2010 (UTC)[reply]
For the present I've protected the eight pages on odd Greek/Bactrian letters as they are under attack again. While they remain protected, only magistratus can follow my well-meant advice above! Sorry about this. If anyone does want to add these links to any such page, ask here and a magistratus will no doubt help. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 21:15, 14 Februarii 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I request that magistratus will add these links to all eight letters. Additionally I list all alphabetic SVGs for your convenience:
I'm working on your request. For the so-called "stigma" I have preferred to adopt images used in the German Wikipedia, because the one you give here is misleading. It is a cursive ligature and had no uppercase form, so far as I know. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 18:48, 15 Februarii 2010 (UTC)[reply]
There is a reliable source for upper- and lowercase stigma: they are both in Unicode (U+03DB is the small stigma, and U+03DA is the capital). Opoudjis states they were present in earlier encodings as well; but apparently casing stigmas are no longer something common, if they ever were. —Mucius Tever04:32, 16 Februarii 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I am honestly doubtful whether the fact that Evershed or somebody has persuaded Unicode to encode an uppercase form of the st ligature is notable, given that an uppercase form was never used (so far as I know) and can hardly have a use in the future. Still, since you both favour it, I'll add the illustration to the page! Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 12:57, 16 Februarii 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Well, there's nothing to say they were never used; Opoudjis does believe it was a mistake to encode, but not because it was unused; merely because it's a ligature, which should be outside the scope of Unicode. (Clearly the existence in prior encodings must have carried some weight there.) At any rate, there's nothing to say it was never used; it's the number six, for crying out loud! :) so don't just take my word for it. I don't have the best Greek google-fu, but here's at least one example I found with a stigma in a capital-letters context: [2] — Notice the previous chapter is ΚΕΦΑΛΑΙΟΝ Ε. So either that is a capital stigma in the subsequent chapter heading, or it isn't. It does look kind of small, but that might be an issue with the typographer lacking the second case, similar to this example where, although they have a capital and a lower-case stigma, the typographer seems to have lacked the lower-case sampi, and qoppa altogether. (The poorly-outfitted typography hypothesis seems to be borne out by the header on the subsequent page, where not only is the stigma still small in stature, it's the same size as it is in the chapter heading—even though the rest of the letters are considerably larger.) Actually, here is an even better example, with an unambiguously capital stigma. —Mucius Tever23:52, 16 Februarii 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Marvellous. I had never seen one in many years of glancing at old Greek texts, but evidently, at the latest, a true uppercase version of the st ligature was created for the Abbé Migne. What a great man! I happily withdraw the suggestion that it was a Unicode invention :)
[Later:] I've added this to the page. If you ever come across an earlier unambiguously uppercase version of the st ligature, let's note it! But my observations have been in general the same as yours, that printers did not have it. Your interpretation (poorly-outfitted typography) is too Platonic for me. I would say rather that the outfit was perfect, and an uppercase ligature was not invented because it had no reason to exist: in uppercase Greek one did not use ligatures. By Migne's time things looked different, because ligatures even in lowercase text were no longer used, and the numeral system stood on its own. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 10:20, 17 Februarii 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Re: 'in uppercase Greek one did not use ligatures'. How then did they write the Greek numeral 6 in uppercase Greek? Was it dissolved into sigma-tau even in medieval times, or is that a modern invention? For, to be sure, 'stigma' as a numeral did not derive from the ligature of sigma and tau, but from the obsolete letter 'digamma' which later converged with 'stigma', and therefore one might well argue that as a numeral 'stigma' cannot be dissolved into 'sigma' and 'tau'. --Fabullus11:08, 17 Februarii 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not a manuscript person, and I don't know to what extent the numerals were ever written in an identifiable uppercase form. I only knew, and Myces has demonstrated it with some early examples above, that when numerals were printed in uppercase in Greek text, the printer used a lowercase "stigma" for number 6. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 12:28, 17 Februarii 2010 (UTC)[reply]
For the letter J (for which Jot is the German name) I have preferred an image giving both uppercase and lowercase forms.
Late response to the questions about uppercase stigma etc. above: With the numeral signs ϛ,ϟ,ϡ, the general practice in modern print is that you simply use the same glyph both in an uppercase and lowercase context, as Andrew rightly says; that's in fact the practice followed in the Migne example linked to above (his uppercase stigma is simply the same as the lowercase, as even more clearly seen at the top of p.518). Some typesetters did have distinct uppercase forms in the 19th century, but they seem to have been quite rare. A few examples are given at en:Digamma. An interesting question is whether typesetters who had a capital numeric stigma ever also used it for typesetting textual "Στ" in a mixed-case context. This seems to have been even rarer; I have seen one curious example of "Στίχος" abbreviated as "Ϛίχ." though. Future Perfect at Sunrise07:10, 11 Octobris 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Hello there,
I think there are a few inconsistencies in the table under pronuntiatio hodierna. The words sive and vel are both used, I believe to signify the same. In addition to this under Cappa I believe the English word or crept into this article.
I recommend changing all three to the same word.
Iago4096 21:04, 10 Octobris 2010 (UTC)[reply]