Greek ligatures

File:Greek print 1566 Aristotle.png

Early Greek print, from a 1566 edition of Aristotle.
The sample shows the -os ligature in the middle of the second line (in the word μέθοδος), the kai ligature below it in the third line, and the -ou- ligature right below that in the fourth line, along many others.

File:Caslon Greek type sample.jpeg

18th-century typeface sample by William Caslon, showing a greatly reduced set of ligatures (-ου- in , end of first line; -στ- in , middle of second line; and the abbreviation).

Greek ligatures are graphic combinations of the letters of the Greek alphabet that were used in medieval handwritten Greek and in early printing. Ligatures were used in the cursive writing style and very extensively in later minuscule writing. There were dozens of conventional ligatures. Some of them stood for frequent letter combinations, some for inflectional endings of words, and some were abbreviations of entire words.

History

In early printed Greek from around 1500, many ligatures fashioned after contemporary manuscript hands continued to be used. Important models for this early typesetting practice were the designs of Aldus Manutius in Venice, and those of Claude Garamond in Paris, who created the influential Grecs du roi typeface in 1541. However, the use of ligatures gradually declined during the 17th and 18th centuries and became mostly obsolete in modern typesetting. Among the ligatures that remained in use the longest are the Omicron-Upsilon ligature Ȣ for ου, which resembles an o with an u on top, and the abbreviation ϗ for ('and'), which resembles a κ with a downward stroke on the right. The ου ligature is still occasionally used in decorative writing, while the abbreviation has some limited usage in functions similar to the Latin ampersand (&). Another ligature that was relatively frequent in early modern printing is a ligature of Ο with ς (a small sigma inside an omicron) for a terminal ος.

The ligature for , now called stigma, survived in a special role besides its use as a ligature proper. It took on the function of a number sign for "6", having been visually conflated with the cursive form of the ancient letter digamma, which had this numeral function.

Unicode

The abbreviation has been encoded since Unicode version 3.0 (1999). An uppercase version was added in version 5.1 (2008). A lower and upper case "stigma", designed for its numeric use, is also encoded in Unicode. Letters derived from the ου ligature exist for use in Latin, and for Cyrillic, though not for Greek itself. Some attempts have been made at recreating typesetting with ligatures in modern computer fonts, either through Unicode-compliant OpenType glyph replacement, or with simpler but non-standardized methods of glyph-by-glyph encoding.

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Example images

Other examples

File:Greek minuscule Alpha with ligatures.svg		File:Greek minuscule Kappa with ligatures.svg		File:Greek minuscule Rho with ligatures.svg
File:Greek minuscule Gamma with ligatures.svg		File:Greek minuscule Lambda with ligatures.svg		File:Greek minuscule Sigma with ligatures.svg
File:Greek minuscule Delta with ligatures.svg		File:Greek minuscule Mu with ligatures.svg		File:Greek minuscule Tau with ligatures.svg
File:Greek minuscule Epsilon with ligatures.svg		File:Greek minuscule Nu with ligatures.svg		File:Greek minuscule Upsilon with ligatures.svg
File:Greek minuscule Eta with ligatures.svg		File:Greek minuscule Omikron with ligatures.svg		File:Greek minuscule Phi with ligatures.svg
File:Greek minuscule Theta with ligatures.svg		File:Greek minuscule Pi with ligatures.svg		File:Greek minuscule Omega with ligatures.svg

See also

• iota adscript, which is written with a ligatured iota:
• iota subscript, also written with a ligatured iota:
• Tau-Rho
• Chi-Rho
• IX Monogram
• Orthographic ligature
• Ancient Greek Numbers, a Unicode block with numerous Greek ligatures

External links

• Template:Sister-inline