A letter occurring in certain early forms of Greek and transliterated in English as w.
[Latin, from Greek : di-, two; see
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A letter occurring in certain early forms of Greek and transliterated in English as w.
[Latin, from Greek : di-, two; see
digamma, or vau, name given to a Greek consonant equivalent to the English w, in written form resembling F (hence its name ‘double-gamma’), a sound originally in use in all the Greek dialects but which gradually disappeared from most of them. It started to disappear from Attic-Ionic before 1000 BC, from the other dialects later. The earliest Greek literature we possess, the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, was composed in perhaps the eighth century BC but our text of these poems is based on that established by the Alexandrian scholars in the third century BC. It thus has no written indication of the digamma, but metrical effects indicate that the sound must originally have been present in many words; the most obvious example is hiatus (where a word ending with a vowel precedes one beginning with a vowel): hiatus is normally very rare in Greek poetry, but appears with unusual frequency in Homer. It was observed (by the English scholar Richard Bentley, 1662–1742) that if in these cases the lost initial digamma was restored to the second word, hiatus was removed. The digamma must still have been used in the spoken language when these words were incorporated into Homer's epic poetry, but as it dropped out of the spoken language it disappeared from epic also, with consequences for the metre. Although the sound was lost in Greek, it was preserved in languages cognate to Greek, e.g. English wine, Latin vinum: Greek (w)oinos. See also ALPHABET.
Digamma (uppercase Ϝ, lowercase ϝ) is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet, used primarily as a Greek numeral.
The letter had the phonetic value of a voiced labial-velar approximant /w/. It was originally called Ϝαῦ wau.[1] It was later called διγαμμα (digamma — double gamma) because of its shape. It is attested in archaic and dialectal ancient Greek inscriptions, and is occasionally used as a symbol in later Greek mathematical texts.
Digamma, like Upsilon, derives from the Phoenician letter Waw, and in its turn gave rise to the Roman letter F.
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 (Ϛ, ϛ), which historically is completely distinct from digamma; it is a medieval ligature of sigma and tau. To complete the confusion, in modern times, the sequence στ or ΣΤ is sometimes used instead of the stigma symbol.
The sound /w/ 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, [w] had probably disappeared before Homer's epics were written down (7th century BC), but its former presence can be detected in many cases because its omission left the meter defective. An example is the word ἄναξ (king) found in the Iliad, which would originally have been [wanaks]. Also οἶνος (wine) was used in the meter where a word starting with a consonant would be expected. Further evidence coupled with cognate-analysis shows that οἶνος was earlier [woinos] (cf. Latin vinum and English "wine"). For some time, word-initial /w-/ remained foreign to Greek phonology, and was dropped in loanwords, compare the name of Italy (Italia from Oscan Viteliu *Ϝιτελιυ) or of the Veneti (Greek Enetoi).
By the 2nd century BC, the phoneme was once again registered, compare for example the spelling of ουατεις for vates. The digamma survives even today as /v/ in the Doric (or Doric-derived) Tsakonian, the only dialect not descended from ancient Alexandrian (the famous example being βάννε /vánnε/ "lamb" for standard Greek αρνί).
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