Greek ligatures

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 writing. There were many dozens [ [http://www.ctan.org/get/fonts/philokalia/philokalia.pdf The Philokalia Package] , for LaTeX] [Carl Faulmann, "Das Buch der Schrift: Schriftzeichen und Alphabete aller Zeiten und Völker", Vienna 1880, p.172-176.] of conventional ligatures. Some of them stood for frequent letter combinations, some for inflectional endings of words, and some were abbreviations of entire words.

In early printed Greek after c.1500, some ligatures continued to be used, although their use 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 ligature polytonic|Ȣ for ου (resembling an "o" with an "u" on top), and the abbreviation polytonic|ϗ for polytonic|καὶ 'and' (resembling a κ with a downward stroke on the right). In addition, the ligature polytonic|ϛ for στ, now called stigma, survived in a special role besides its original use. It took on the function of a number sign for "6", having been conflated with the ancient letter digamma. In the modern computer encoding standard Unicode, these three combinations have been given separate codepoints, since they are still occasionally used. Another ligature that is relatively frequent in early modern printing is a ligature of Ο with ς (a small sigma "inside" a capital omicron) for a terminal ος.

=Example

References

External links

* [http://schmidhauser.us/tools/rgl/ Renaissance Greek with Ligatures] — a Greek font with hundreds of ligatures (by Vernon Kooy)

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Greek ligatures

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