Kai (conjunction)
Encyclopedia
Kai is a conjunction
Grammatical conjunction
In grammar, a conjunction is a part of speech that connects two words, sentences, phrases or clauses together. A discourse connective is a conjunction joining sentences. This definition may overlap with that of other parts of speech, so what constitutes a "conjunction" must be defined for each...

 in Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

 (sometimes abbreviated k), Coptic () and, under the form kaj, Esperanto
Esperanto
is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto , the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887...

.

Kai is the most frequent word in any Greek text and thus used by statisticians to assess authorship of ancient manuscripts (see below).

Kai ligature

Because of its frequent occurrence, kai is sometimes abbreviated in Greek manuscripts, by a ligature (comparable to Latin &, written as (uppercase variant ; Coptic variant ), formed from kappa
Kappa
Kappa is the 10th letter of the Greek alphabet, used to represent the voiceless velar stop, or "k", sound in Ancient and Modern Greek. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 20. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Kaph...

 (κ) with an extra lower stroke.
It may occur with the varia
Grave accent
The grave accent is a diacritical mark used in written Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Dutch, French, Greek , Italian, Mohawk, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, Romansh, and other languages.-Greek:The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient...

 above it: .

Authorship of ancient texts

The number of common words which express a general relation ("and", "in", "but", "I", "to be") is random with the same distribution at least among the same genre. By contrast, the occurrence of the definite article
Definite Article
Definite Article is the title of British comedian Eddie Izzard's 1996 performance released on VHS. It was recorded on different nights at the Shaftesbury Theatre...

 "the" cannot be modeled by simple probabilistic laws because the number of nouns with definite article depends on the subject matter.

Table 1 has data about the epistles of St.
Saint
A saint is a holy person. In various religions, saints are people who are believed to have exceptional holiness.In Christian usage, "saint" refers to any believer who is "in Christ", and in whom Christ dwells, whether in heaven or in earth...

 Paul
Paul of Tarsus
Paul the Apostle , also known as Saul of Tarsus, is described in the Christian New Testament as one of the most influential early Christian missionaries, with the writings ascribed to him by the church forming a considerable portion of the New Testament...

. Abbreviations: Rom
Epistle to the Romans
The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, often shortened to Romans, is the sixth book in the New Testament. Biblical scholars agree that it was composed by the Apostle Paul to explain that Salvation is offered through the Gospel of Jesus Christ...

 Romans; Co1 1st Corinthians; Co2 2nd Corinthians; Gal
Epistle to the Galatians
The Epistle of Paul to the Galatians, often shortened to Galatians, is the ninth book of the New Testament. It is a letter from Paul of Tarsus to a number of Early Christian communities in the Roman province of Galatia in central Anatolia...

 Galatians; Phi Philippians; Col Colossians; Th1 1st Thessalonians; Ti1 1st Timothy; Ti2 2nd Timothy; Heb
Epistle to the Hebrews
The Epistle to the Hebrews is one of the books in the New Testament. Its author is not known.The primary purpose of the Letter to the Hebrews is to exhort Christians to persevere in the face of persecution. The central thought of the entire Epistle is the doctrine of the Person of Christ and his...

 Hebrews. 2nd Thessalonians, Titus, and Philemon were excluded because they were too short to give reliable samples. From an analysis of these and other data [Mor65, p. 224] the first 4 epistles (Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, and Galatians
Epistle to the Galatians
The Epistle of Paul to the Galatians, often shortened to Galatians, is the ninth book of the New Testament. It is a letter from Paul of Tarsus to a number of Early Christian communities in the Roman province of Galatia in central Anatolia...

) form a consistent group, and all the other epistles lie more than 2 standard deviation
Standard deviation
Standard deviation is a widely used measure of variability or diversity used in statistics and probability theory. It shows how much variation or "dispersion" there is from the average...

s from the mean of this group (using statistics). If Paul
Paul of Tarsus
Paul the Apostle , also known as Saul of Tarsus, is described in the Christian New Testament as one of the most influential early Christian missionaries, with the writings ascribed to him by the church forming a considerable portion of the New Testament...

 is defined as being the author of Galatians
Epistle to the Galatians
The Epistle of Paul to the Galatians, often shortened to Galatians, is the ninth book of the New Testament. It is a letter from Paul of Tarsus to a number of Early Christian communities in the Roman province of Galatia in central Anatolia...

, then he also wrote Romans and 1st and 2nd Corinthians. The remaining epistles come from at least six hands.

Table 1

Number of Sentences in Paul's Epistles with 0, 1, 2, and >= 3 occurrences of kai

Rom Co1 Co2 Gal Phi Col Th1 Ti1 Ti2 Heb
no kai 386 424 192 128 42 23 34 49 45 155
one 141 152 86 48 29 32 23 38 28 94
two 34 35 28 5 19 17 8 9 11 37
3 or more 17 16 13 6 12 9 16 10 4 24

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