A coronis or koronis (Ancient Greek: , plural , korōnides) is a textual symbol found in ancient Greek

Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...

 papyri that was used to mark the ends of entire works or major sections in poetic and prose texts. Coronides were placed most often in the left-hand margin of the text and were generally accompanied by a paragraphos

Paragraphos

Paragraphos literally meant in ancient Greek papyri anything that was written beside the main text, e.g. marginal note or sign to mark the close or beginning of a sentence. There are many variants of this symbol...

 or forked paragraphos.

Etymology

Liddell and Scott's Greek–English Lexicon gives the basic meaning of korōnis as "crook-beaked" from which a general meaning of "curved" is supposed to have derived. Pierre Chantraine

Pierre Chantraine

Pierre Chantraine was a French linguist.A student of, among others, Antoine Meillet, Joseph Vendryes and Paul Mazon, Chantraine became one of the most renowned authorities on Ancient Greek philology of his generation...

concurs and derives the word from (korōnē), "crow", assigning the meaning of the epithet's use in reference to the textual symbol to the same semantic range of "curve". But, given the fact that the earliest coronides actually take the form of birds, there has been debate about whether the name of the textual symbol initially referred to use of a decorative bird to mark a major division in a text or if these pictures were a secondary development that played upon the etymological relation between korōnē, "crow", and korōnis, as in "curved".

Works Cited

• Chantraine, P. Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1968).
• Liddell, H. G. et al. A Greek–English Lexicon, 9th ed. (Oxford: OUP, 1996).
• Schironi, F. Τὸ Μέγα Βίβλιον: Book-Ends, End-Titles, and Coronides in Papyri with Hexametric Poetry (Durham, NC: The American Societ of Papyrologists, 2010).
• Turner, E. G. Greek Manuscripts of the Ancient World, 2nd rev. ed. P.J. Parsons (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 1987).