Digamma

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Digamma

Digamma (uppercase , lowercase ) is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet

Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
, used primarily as a Greek numeral.

The letter had the phonetic value of a voiced labial-velar approximant

Voiced labial-velar approximant

The voiced labiovelar approximant is a type of consonantal sound, used in certain Speech communication languages, including English. It is the sound denoted by the letter "w" in the English alphabet; likewise, the symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is w....
. It was originally called wau. It was later called (digamma — "double gamma") because of its shape. It is attested in archaic and dialectal ancient Greek

Ancient greek language

#REDIRECT Ancient Greek...
inscriptions, and is occasionally used as a symbol in later Greek mathematical texts.

Digamma, like Upsilon

Upsilon

Upsilon is the 20th letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 400. It is derived from the phoenecian alphabet Waw ....
, derives from the Phoenician

Phoenician alphabet

The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to originate around 1050 BC. It was used for the writing of Phoenician language, a Northern Semitic languages language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia....
letter Waw

Waw (letter)

Waw is the sixth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician alphabet, Aramaic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet, and Arabic alphabet ....
, and in its turn gave rise to the Roman letter F.

s also used as the Greek numeral 6.

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Encyclopedia

Digamma (uppercase , lowercase ) is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet

Greek alphabet

Voiced labial-velar approximant

Ancient greek language

#REDIRECT Ancient Greek...
inscriptions, and is occasionally used as a symbol in later Greek mathematical texts.

Digamma, like Upsilon

Upsilon

Upsilon is the 20th letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 400. It is derived from the phoenecian alphabet Waw ....
, derives from the Phoenician

Phoenician alphabet

Waw (letter)

Numeral

It is also used as the Greek numeral 6. In ancient usage, the numeral had the same form as the letter digamma. However, in medieval and modern usage, the numeral has normally been written in the graphic form of a stigma

Stigma (letter)

Stigma is a ligature of the Greek alphabet letters sigma and tau , sometimes used in modern times to represent the Greek numeral 6. However, today the letters st are more widely used to represent the number 6 or the ordinal 6th....
(), which historically is completely distinct from digamma; it is a medieval ligature

Ligature (typography)

In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components, and are part of a more general class of glyphs called "contextual forms" where the specific shape of a letter depends on context such as surrounding letters or prox...
of sigma and tau. To complete the confusion, in modern times, the sequence st or S? is sometimes used instead of the stigma symbol.

The sound in Greek

Mycenaean Greek

The sound was existed in Mycenean Greek, as attested in Linear B

Linear B

Linear B is a script that was used for writing Mycenaean language, an early form of Greek language. It predated the Greek alphabet by several centuries and seems to have died out with the fall of Mycenaean Greece civilization....
and archaic Greek inscriptions using digamma. It is also confirmed by the Hittite

Hittite language

Hittite or Nesili is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centered on ancient Hattusas in north-central Anatolia ....
name of Troy

Troy

Troy is a legendary city and center of the Trojan War, as described in the Epic Cycle, and especially in the Iliad, one of the two epic poems attributed to Homer....
, Wilusa, corresponding to the Greek name *Wilion.

Classical Greek

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

In Ionic

Ionic Greek

Ionic Greek was a sub-dialect of the Attic-Ionic dialectal group of Ancient Greek .Ionic dialect appears to have spread originally from the Greek mainland across the Aegean at the time of the Dorian invasions, around the 11th Century B.C....
, had probably disappeared before Homer

Homer

Homer is traditionally held to be the author of the ancient Greek language epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as of the Homeric Hymns....
's epics were written down (7th century BC), but its former presence can be detected in many cases because its omission left the meter

Meter (poetry)

In poetry, the meter is the basic rhythm of a verse . Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse meter, or a certain set of meters alternating in a particular order....
defective. For example, the words (king), found in the Iliad

ILiad

The iLiad is an electronic handheld device, or e-book device, which can be used for document reading and editing. Like the Sony Reader or Amazon Kindle, the iLiad makes use of an electronic paper display....
, which would originally have been [wanaks], and (wine) are sometimes used in the meter where a word starting with a consonant would be expected. Further evidence coupled with cognate-analysis shows that was earlier [woinos] (cf.Cretan Doric

Doric Greek

Doric or Dorian was a ancient Greek dialects of ancient Greek Greek language. Its variants were spoken in the southern and eastern Peloponnese, Crete, Rhodes, some islands in the southern Aegean Sea, some cities on the coasts of Asia Minor, Southern Italy, Sicily, Epirus and Macedon....
ibêna, Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Military history of the Roman Empire, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe....
vinum and English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
"wine"). For some time, word-initial /w-/ remained foreign to Greek phonology, and was dropped in loanwords, compare the name of Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia....
(Italia from Oscan Viteliu *??te???) or of the Veneti

Adriatic Veneti

The Veneti were an ancient people who inhabited north-eastern Italy, in an area corresponding to the modern-day region of the Veneto. They spoke Venetic language, an independent Indo-European language, which is attested in approximately 300 short inscriptions dating from 6th to 1st centuries BC....
(Greek Enetoi). By the 2nd century BC, the phoneme was once again registered, compare for example the spelling of for vates
Vates

The earliest Latin writers used vates to denote "prophets" and soothsayers in general; the word fell into disuse in Latin until it was revived by Virgil ....
.

In some local (epichoric) alphabets, a variant glyph of the letter digamma existed that resembled modern Cyrillic ?

or is a letter derived from the Latin alphabet. Both glyphs of the majuscule and Lower case forms of this letter are based on the rotated form of a minuscule e; a similar letter with identical minuscule is used in the Pan-Nigerian Alphabet, but has the capital form majuscule , based on a horizontally flipped majuscule E....
. In one local alphabet, that of Pamphylia

Pamphylia

In ancient geography, Pamphylia was the region in the south of Asia Minor, between Lycia and Cilicia, extending from the Mediterranean Sea to Mount Taurus ....
, this variant form existed side by side with standard digamma as two distinct letters. It has been surmised that in this dialect the sound /w/ may have changed to labiodental in some environments. The F-shaped letter may have stood for the new [v] sound, while the special ?-shaped form signified those positions where the old [w] sound was preserved.

Modern Greek

The digamma survives even today as /v/ in the Modern Greek Tsakonian dialect

Tsakonian language

Tsakonian, Tzakonian or Tsakonic is a Varieties of Modern Greek spoken in the Tsakonia of the Peloponnese, Greece. It is named after its speakers, the 'Tsakonian people', which is held to be an alteration of 'Laconians' - although Tsakonians themselves did not traditionally use this ethnonym....
, the only dialect not descended from ancient Koine Greek

Koine Greek

Koine Greek is the popular form of Greek which emerged in post-Classical antiquity . Other names are Alexandrian, Hellenistic, Common, or New Testament Greek....
, the famous, and only, example being ß???e /'vanne/ "lamb" for standard Greek ) (cf. Cretan ).

The city of Oitylo

Oitylo

Oitylo is one of the oldest towns in Mani Peninsula. It was mentioned in the Iliad by Homer. In the Middle Ages, Oitylo grew to become the most important town in Messenian Mani....
used to be called Vitulo earlier, until the Classical Attic-Ionic form, /'itilo/, was introduced. The diphthong - which is attested in the Iliad

ILiad

Unicode representation

In Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character expressed in most of the world's writing systems....
digamma has code uppercase U+03DC ?, lowercase U+03DD ? .

In July 2006, another pair of the uppercase and lowercase digamma with bold typeface, were added to the Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character expressed in most of the world's writing systems....
standard version 5.0 and have codes U+1D7CA and U+1D7CB. Their intended use is as mathematical symbols, not regular text.

The ?-shaped "Pamphylian digamma" was additionally encoded as U+0376 (uppercase) and U+0377 (lowercase) in Unicode version 5.1.

External links

List of words that once started with digamma: