''Kai'' ( "and"; ; ; sometimes abbreviated ''k'') is a letter that is a
conjunction in
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
,
Coptic () and
Esperanto
Esperanto ( or ) is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by the Warsaw-based ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it was intended to be a universal second language for international communi ...
(''kaj''; ).
''Kai'' is the most frequent word in any Greek text and thus used by statisticians to assess authorship of ancient manuscripts based on the number of times it is used.
Ligature
Because of its frequent occurrence, ''kai'' is sometimes abbreviated in Greek manuscripts and in
signage
Signage is the design or use of signs and symbols to communicate a message. A signage also means signs ''collectively'' or being considered as a group. The term ''signage'' is documented to have been popularized in 1975 to 1980.
Signs are any ...
, by a ligature (comparable to Latin
&), written as ϗ (uppercase variant Ϗ;
Coptic variant ⳤ), formed from
kappa
Kappa (uppercase Κ, lowercase κ or cursive ; el, κάππα, ''káppa'') is the 10th letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the voiceless velar plosive sound in Ancient and Modern Greek. In the system of Greek numerals, has a value ...
(κ) with an extra lower stroke.
It may occur with the
varia above it: ϗ̀.
Image:Greek Kai.png, Two possible renderings of the ''kai'' abbreviation.
Image:Greek ligature kai.svg, One form of ''kai'' in medieval minuscule handwriting.
For representation in electronic texts the kai symbol has its own
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...
positions: GREEK KAI SYMBOL (U+03D7) and GREEK CAPITAL KAI SYMBOL (U+03CF).
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
An article is any member of a class of dedicated words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. The category of articles constitutes a part of speech.
In English, both "the" and "a(n)" ...
"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
Saint Paul. 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
The First Epistle to the Corinthians ( grc, Α΄ ᾽Επιστολὴ πρὸς Κορινθίους) is one of the Pauline epistles, part of the New Testament of the Christian Bible. The epistle is attributed to Paul the Apostle and a co-auth ...
,
2 Corinthians
The Second Epistle to the Corinthians is a Pauline epistle of the New Testament of the Christian Bible. The epistle is attributed to Paul the Apostle and a co-author named Timothy, and is addressed to the church in Corinth and Christians in th ...
, and
Galatians Galatians may refer to:
* Galatians (people)
* Epistle to the Galatians, a book of the New Testament
* English translation of the Greek ''Galatai'' or Latin ''Galatae'', ''Galli,'' or ''Gallograeci'' to refer to either the Galatians or the Gaul ...
) form a consistent group, and all the other epistles lie more than 2
standard deviations from the mean of this group (using
statistics).
Esperanto
Esperanto comes from Greek.
[.]
It may be abbreviated as or ,
among other places, in the
PIV dictionary.
See also
*
Kaige revision
The ''kaige'' revision, or simply ''kaige'', is the group of revisions to the Septuagint made in order to more closely align its translation with the proto-Masoretic Hebrew. The name ''kaige'' derives from the revision's pervasive use of ("a ...
, group of Greek-language
Septuagint
The Greek Old Testament, or Septuagint (, ; from the la, septuaginta, lit=seventy; often abbreviated ''70''; in Roman numerals, LXX), is the earliest extant Greek translation of books from the Hebrew Bible. It includes several books beyond t ...
Bible versions that frequently use ("and indeed").
References
*
or65A. Q. Morton. ''The authorship of Greek prose (with discussion).''
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society
The ''Journal of the Royal Statistical Society'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal of statistics. It comprises three series and is published by Wiley for the Royal Statistical Society.
History
The Statistical Society of London was founde ...
, Series A, 128:169–233, 1965.
''This article incorporates material from Econ 7800 class notes by Hans G. Ehrbar, which is licensed under
GFDL.
External links
Proposal to encode the uppercase letter in Unicode
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kai (conjunction)
Kai
Greek language
Punctuation
Typography
Greek letters