Digamma
Channel: 宇宙のすべての知識 プリンシピア
Date: 2019-02-02

Digamma, by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8125 / CC BY SA 3.0

#Greek_letters
Digamma

Digamma, waw, or wau (uppercase: Ϝ, lowercase: ϝ, numeral: ϛ) is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It originally stood for the sound but it has principally remained in use as a Greek numeral for 6. Whereas it was originally called "waw" or "wau", its most common appellation in classical Greek is "digamma"; as a numeral, it was called "episēmon" during the Byzantine era and is now known as "stigma" after the Byzantine ligature combining σ-τ as ϛ.

Digamma or wau was part of the original archaic Greek alphabet as initially adopted from Phoenician. Like its model, Phoenician waw, it represented the voiced labial-velar approximant and stood in the 6th position in the alphabet between epsilon and zeta. It is the consonantal doublet of the vowel letter upsilon (), which was also derived from waw but was placed at the end of the Greek alphabet. Digamma or wau is in turn the ancestor of the Latin letter F. As an alphabetic letter, it is attested in archaic and dialectal ancient Greek inscriptions until the classical period.

The shape of the letter went through a development from through , , , to or , which at that point was conflated with the σ-τ ligature . In modern print, a distinction is made between the letter in its original alphabetic role as a consonant sign, which is rendered as "Ϝ" or its modern lowercase variant "ϝ", and the numeric symbol, which is represented by "ϛ". In modern Greek, this is often replaced by the digraph .

The sound existed in Mycenean Greek, as attested in Linear B and archaic Greek inscriptions using digamma. It is also confirmed by the Hittite name of Troy, "Wilusa", corresponding to the Greek name *"Wilion".

The sound was lost at various times in various dialects, mostly before the classical period.

In Ionic, had probably disappeared before Homer's epics were written down (7th century BC), but its former presence can be detected ...