Sampi

Its modern shape, which resembles a π inclining to the right with a longish curved cross-stroke, developed during its use as a numeric symbol in minuscule handwriting of the Byzantine era.

Besides san, names that have been proposed for sampi include parakyisma and angma, while other historically attested terms for it are enacosis, sincope, and o charaktir.

[1] Sampi occurs in positions where other dialects, including written Ionic, normally have double sigma (σσ), i.e. a long /ss/ sound.

Traces of corrections that are still visible underneath the painted "Τ" have led to the conjecture that the painter originally wrote Νέͳος, with sampi for the σσ/ττ sound.

[11][12] A letter similar to Ionian sampi, but of unknown historical relation with it, existed in the highly deviant local dialect of Pamphylia in southern Asia Minor.

[15] As Ͷανάα is known to be the local feminine form of the archaic Greek noun ἄναξ/ϝάναξ, i.e. (w)anax ("king"), it is believed that the letter stood for some type of sibilant reflecting Proto-Greek */ktj/.

For instance, there is a set of 25 metal tokens, each stamped with one of the letters from alpha to sampi, which are dated to the 4th century BC and were probably used as identification marks for judges in the courts of the Athenian democracy.

This form fits the earliest attested verbal description of the shape of sampi as a numeral sign in the ancient literature, which occurs in a remark in the works of the 2nd-century AD physician Galen.

Commenting on the use of certain obscure abbreviations found in earlier manuscripts of Hippocrates, Galen says that one of them "looks like the way some people write the sign for 900", and describes this as "the shape of the letter Π with a vertical line in the middle" ("ὁ τοῦ π γραμμάτος χαρακτὴρ ἔχων ὀρθίαν μέσην γραμμὴν, ὡς ἔνιοι γράφουσι τῶν ἐννεακοσίων χαρακτῆρα").

[24] From the time of the earliest papyri, the square-topped forms of handwritten sampi alternate with variants where the top is rounded (, ) or pointed (, ).

[27] Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, many authors have assumed that sampi was essentially a historical continuation of the archaic letter san (Ϻ), the M-shaped alternative of sigma (Σ) that formed part of the Greek alphabet when it was originally adopted from Phoenician.

A part of the discussion about the identity of san and sampi has revolved around a difficult and probably corrupted piece of philological commentary by an anonymous scholiast, which has been debated ever since Joseph Justus Scaliger drew attention to it in the mid-17th century.

The following is the passage in the reading provided by a modern edition, with problematic words marked: κοππατίας ἵππους ἐκάλουν οἷς ἐγκεχάρακτο τὸ κ[?]

αἱ δὲ χαράξεις αὗται καὶ μέχρι τοῦ νῦν σῴζονται ἐπὶ τοῖς ἵπποις.

This hypothesis is mentioned by Jeffery[1] and has been supported more recently by Genzardi[33] Brixhe[34] suggested that sampi could be related to the Carian letter 25 "", transcribed as ś.

This opinion has been rejected as phonologically impossible by Soldati,[26] who points out that the /ss/ sound only ever occurred in the middle of words and therefore could not have been used in the beginning of its own name.

The name is already attested in manuscript copies of an Old Church Slavonic text describing the development of the alphabet, the treatise On Letters ascribed to the 9th-century monk Hrabar, which was written first in Glagolitic and later transmitted in the Cyrillic script.

In one medieval Cyrillic group of manuscripts of this text, probably going back to a marginal note in an earlier Glagolitic version,[38] the letter names "sampi" ("сѧпи") and "koppa" ("копа") are used for the Greek numerals.

[40] The first reference to the name sampi in the western literature occurs in a 17th-century work, Scaliger's discussion of the Aristophanes scholion regarding the word samphoras (see above).

However, this account too is problematic as it implies a very early date of the emergence of the name, since after the archaic period the original position of san was apparently no longer remembered, and the whole point of the use of sampi in the numeral system is that it stands somewhere else.

Thus, in De loquela per gestum digitorum, a didactic text about arithmetics attributed to the Venerable Bede, the three Greek numerals for 6, 90 and 900 are called "episimon", "cophe" and "enneacosis" respectively.

According to Willi's hypothesis, the name angma would have been derived from the verbal root *ank-, "to bend, curve", and referred to a "crooked object", used because of the hook-like shape of the letter.

[58][59] Its numeric role was subsequently taken over by the native character Ϣ (shei, /ʃ/), which is related to the Semitic tsade (and thus, ultimately, cognate with Greek san as well).

[60] The Gothic alphabet adopted sampi in its Roman era form of an upwards-pointing arrow (, 𐍊)[61] In the Slavic writing system Glagolitic, the letter (tse, /ts/) was used for 900.

However, since the system is typically used only to enumerate items in relatively small sets, such as the chapters of a book or the names of rulers in a dynasty, the signs for the higher tens and hundreds, including sampi, are much less frequently found in practice than the lower letters for 1 to 10.

With the advent of modern printing in the western Renaissance, printers adopted the minuscule version of the numeral sign, ϡ, for their fonts.

The typographic realization of Sampi has varied widely throughout its history in print, and a large range of different shapes can still be found in current electronic typesetting.

[68] Many fonts designed for scholarly use have adopted an upright triangular shape with straight lines and serifs (), as proposed by the typographer Yannis Haralambous.

[65][71] As the existing code point had been technically defined as an uppercase character, the new addition was declared lowercase (U+03E1, "Greek small letter Sampi").

However, lowercase and uppercase sampi were provided for by the ISO 5428:1984 Greek alphabet coded character set for bibliographic information interchange.