Obelism
Encyclopedia
Manuscript
A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...
s with marks set in the margins. Modern obelisms are used by editors when blue-penciling a manuscript or typescript. Examples are "stet" (which is Latin for "Let it stand," used in this context to mean "disregard the previous mark") and "dele" (for "Delete").
The obelos symbol gets its name from the spit, or sharp end of a lance
Lance
A Lance is a pole weapon or spear designed to be used by a mounted warrior. The lance is longer, stout and heavier than an infantry spear, and unsuited for throwing, or for rapid thrusting. Lances did not have tips designed to intentionally break off or bend, unlike many throwing weapons of the...
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...
. An obelos was placed by editors on the margins of manuscripts, especially in Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
, to indicate lines that were doubtfully Homer's. The system was developed by Aristarchus
Aristarchus of Samothrace
Aristarchus of Samothrace was a grammarian noted as the most influential of all scholars of Homeric poetry. He was the librarian of the library of Alexandria and seems to have succeeded his teacher Aristophanes of Byzantium in that role.He established the most historically important critical...
and notably used later by Origen
Origen
Origen , or Origen Adamantius, 184/5–253/4, was an early Christian Alexandrian scholar and theologian, and one of the most distinguished writers of the early Church. As early as the fourth century, his orthodoxy was suspect, in part because he believed in the pre-existence of souls...
in his Hexapla
Hexapla
Hexapla is the term for an edition of the Bible in six versions. Especially it applies to the edition of the Old Testament compiled by Origen of Alexandria, which placed side by side:#Hebrew...
. Origen marked spurious words between obelos and metobelos.
There were many other such shorthand symbols, to indicate corrections, emendations, deletions, additions, and so on. Most used are the editorial coronis
Coronis (textual symbol)
A coronis or koronis is a textual symbol found in ancient Greek papyri that was used to mark the ends of entire works or major sections in poetic and prose texts...
, the 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...
, the forked paragraphos, the reversed forked paragraphos, the hypodiastole
Hypodiastole
Hypodiastole is a textual mark developed in ancient Greek texts before the separation of words by spaces was commonplace. It was used together with the hyphen to mark how the words should be read correctly. A hyphen was placed between words that should be read as one, while a hypodiastole was put...
, the downwards ancora, the upwards ancora, and the dotted right-pointing angle
Diple (textual symbol)
Diple was used in margins to draw attention to something in text. It is sometimes also called antilambda because the sign resembles a Greek capital letter lambda turned upon its side...
, which is also known as the diple periestigmene. Loosely, all these symbols, and the act of annotation by means of them, are obelism.
These nine ancient Greek textual annotation symbols are also included in the supplemental punctuation list of ISO IEC standard 10646
Universal Character Set
The Universal Character Set , defined by the International Standard ISO/IEC 10646, Information technology — Universal multiple-octet coded character set , is a standard set of characters upon which many character encodings are based...
for character sets.
Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
encodes the following:
- U+2058 ⁘ FOUR DOT PUNCTUATION
- U+2059 ⁙ FIVE DOT PUNCTUATION = Greek pentonkion
- U+205A ⁚ TWO DOT PUNCTUATION
- U+205B ⁛ FOUR DOT MARK
- U+205C ⁜ DOTTED CROSS
- U+2E0E ⸎ EDITORIAL CORONIS
- U+2E0F ⸏ PARAGRAPHOS
- U+2E10 ⸐ FORKED PARAGRAPHOS
- U+2E11 ⸑ REVERSED FORKED PARAGRAPHOS
- U+2E12 ⸒ HYPODIASTOLE
- U+2E13 ⸓ DOTTED OBELOS
- U+2E14 ⸔ DOWNWARDS ANCORA
- U+2E15 ⸕ UPWARDS ANCORA
- U+2E16 ⸖ DOTTED RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE = diple periestigmene