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San (letter)
Encyclopedia
San was an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet
. Its shape was similar to modern M, or to a modern Greek Sigma
(Σ) turned sideways, and it was used as an alternative to Sigma to denote the sound /s/. Unlike Sigma, whose position in the alphabet is between Rho
and Tau, San appeared between Pi
and Qoppa in alphabetic order. In addition to denoting this separate archaic character, the name "San" was also used as an alternative name to denote the standard letter Sigma.
script, because Phoenician had more sibilant (s-like) sounds than Greek had. According to one theory, the distribution of the sibilant letters in Greek is due to pair-wise confusion between the sounds and alphabet positions of the four Phoenician sibilant signs: Greek Sigma got its shape and alphabetic position from Phoenician Šin
(
), but its name and sound value from Phoenician Samekh
. Conversely, Greek Xi (Ξ) got its shape and position from Samekh (
), but its name and sound value from Šin. The same kind of pair-wise exchange happened between Phoenician Zayin
and Tsade
: Greek Zeta
has the shape and position of Zayin (
) but the name and sound value of Tsade, and conversely Greek San has the approximate shape and position of Tsade (
) but may originally have had the sound value of Zayin, i.e. voiced [z]. However, since voiced [z] and voiceless [s] were not distinct phoneme
s in Greek, Sigma and San came to be used in essentially the same function.
According to a different theory, "San" was indeed the original name of what is now known as Sigma, and as such presents a direct representation of the corresponding name "Shin" in that position. This name was only later also associated with the alternative local letter now known as "San", whose original name remains unknown. The modern name "Sigma", in turn, was a transparent Greek innovation that simply meant "hissing", based on a nominalization of a verb (sízō, from an earlier stem *sigj-, meaning 'to hiss').
Whereas in early abecedaria
, Sigma and San are typically listed as two separate letters in their separate alphabetic positions, each Greek dialect tended to use either San or Sigma exclusively in practical writing. The use of San became a characteristic of the Doric
dialects of Corinth
and neighboring Sikyon, as well as Crete
. San became largely obsolete by the second half of the fifth century BC, when it was generally replaced by Sigma, although in Crete it continued in use for about a century longer. In Sikyon, it was retained as a symbolic mark of the city used on coin inscriptions (just as the likewise archaic Qoppa was used by Corinth, and a special local form of Beta
by Byzantium
).
San could be written with the outer stems either straight or slanted outwards , and either longer or of equal length with the inner strokes . It was typically distinguished from the similar-looking Mu
(Μ) by the fact that San tended to be symmetrical, whereas Mu had a longer left stem in its archaic forms .
Outside Greece, San was borrowed into the Old Italic alphabet
s . It initially retained its M-shape in the archaic Etruscan alphabet, but from the 6th century BC changing its aspect to a shape similar to that of the d-rune
.
The name of "San" lived on as an alternative (dialectal or archaic) name for "Sigma" even at a time when the letter itself had everywhere been replaced with standard Sigma. Thus, Herodotus
in the late 5th century reports that the same letter was called "San" by the Dorians
but "Sigma" by the Ionians
. Athenaeus
in his Deipnosophistae
(c.200 AD) quotes an epigram which contained the spelled-out name of a philosopher, still using "San" as the name for Sigma:
, Arcadia
, a 5th century BC inscription dedicated to Athena Alea
(Inscriptiones Graecae
V.ii.262) It is widely assumed to be a local innovation based on San, although Jeffery (1961) classes it as a variant of Sigma. It appears to have denoted a /ts/ sound and has been labelled "Tsan" by some modern writers. In the local Arcadian dialect, this sound occurred in words that reflect Proto-Greek */kʷ/. In such words, other Greek dialects usually have /t/, while the related Cypriot dialect has /s/. Examples are:
From these correspondences, it can be concluded that the letter most likely denoted an affricate sound, possibly [ts] or [tʃ], which would have been a natural intermediate step in the sound change from */kʷ/ to /s/. The letter has been represented in modern scholarly transcriptions of the Mantinea inscription by <ś> (s with an acute accent) or by <σ̱> (sigma with a macron underneath).
(A distinct epichoric letter that shared the same И shape with Arcadian Tsan but had the unrelated sound value of /w/ existed in yet another dialect, in Pamphylia
. It is conventionally known as "Pamphylian digamma", i.e. a variant of Digamma
or Waw.)
letter , which later gave rise to the numeral symbol Sampi
( = 900) may also be a continuation of San, although it did not have the same alphabetic position.
, there existed a letter resembling a "þ", which apparently stood for the sound /ʃ/ (transliterated as š) and has been named "Sho" in recent times. According to one hypothesis, this letter too may go back to San.
In modern editions and transcriptions of ancient Greek writing, San has rarely been used as a separate letter. Since it never contrasts systematically with Sigma except in abecedaria, it is usually silently regularized to Sigma in modern editorial practice. In the electronic encoding standard Unicode
, a pair of uppercase and lowercase forms of the letter was introduced in version 4.0 (2003). For this purpose, new lowercase forms for modern typography, for which no prior typographic tradition existed, had to be designed. Most fonts have adopted the convention of distinguishing uppercase San from Mu by having its central V-like section descend only halfway down above the baseline, and lowercase San by giving it a left stem descending below the baseline. (Note that in historical epigraphic practice it was the other way round, with San being symmetrical and Mu having a longer left stem.)
San is encoded in Unicode at codepoints U+03FA (uppercase, Ϻ) and U+03FB (lowercase, ϻ). The Arcadian "Tsan" variant, unified with the identical-looking Pamphylian
Digamma
, has been included at U+0376 (uppercase, Ͷ) and U+0377 (lowercase, ͷ) since version 5.1.
Greek alphabet
The Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
. Its shape was similar to modern M, or to a modern Greek Sigma
Sigma
Sigma is the eighteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, and carries the 'S' sound. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 200. When used at the end of a word, and the word is not all upper case, the final form is used, e.g...
(Σ) turned sideways, and it was used as an alternative to Sigma to denote the sound /s/. Unlike Sigma, whose position in the alphabet is between Rho
Rho (letter)
Rho is the 17th letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 100. It is derived from Semitic resh "head"...
and Tau, San appeared between Pi
Pi (letter)
Pi is the sixteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, representing . In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 80. Letters that arose from pi include Cyrillic Pe , Coptic pi , and Gothic pairthra .The upper-case letter Π is used as a symbol for:...
and Qoppa in alphabetic order. In addition to denoting this separate archaic character, the name "San" was also used as an alternative name to denote the standard letter Sigma.
Sigma and San
The existence of the two competing letters Sigma and San is believed to have been due to confusion during the adoption of the Greek alphabet from the PhoenicianPhoenician alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, was a non-pictographic consonantal alphabet, or abjad. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia...
script, because Phoenician had more sibilant (s-like) sounds than Greek had. According to one theory, the distribution of the sibilant letters in Greek is due to pair-wise confusion between the sounds and alphabet positions of the four Phoenician sibilant signs: Greek Sigma got its shape and alphabetic position from Phoenician Šin
Shin (letter)
Shin literally means "Sharp" ; It is the twenty-first letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician , Aramaic/Hebrew , and Arabic ....
(
), but its name and sound value from Phoenician SamekhSamekh
Samekh or Simketh is the fifteenth letter in many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic, representing . The Arabic alphabet, however, uses a letter based on Phoenician šin to represent ; however, that glyph takes Samekh's place in the traditional Abjadi order of the Arabic...
. Conversely, Greek Xi (Ξ) got its shape and position from Samekh (
), but its name and sound value from Šin. The same kind of pair-wise exchange happened between Phoenician ZayinZayin
Zayin is the seventh letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician , Aramaic , Hebrew , Syriac and Perso-Arabic alphabet...
and Tsade
Tsade
' is the eighteenth letter in many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew ' and Arabic ' . Its oldest sound value is probably , although there is a variety of pronunciation in different modern Semitic languages and their dialects...
: Greek Zeta
Zeta (letter)
Zeta is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 7. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Zayin...
has the shape and position of Zayin (
) but the name and sound value of Tsade, and conversely Greek San has the approximate shape and position of Tsade () but may originally have had the sound value of Zayin, i.e. voiced [z]. However, since voiced [z] and voiceless [s] were not distinct phonemePhoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s in Greek, Sigma and San came to be used in essentially the same function.
According to a different theory, "San" was indeed the original name of what is now known as Sigma, and as such presents a direct representation of the corresponding name "Shin" in that position. This name was only later also associated with the alternative local letter now known as "San", whose original name remains unknown. The modern name "Sigma", in turn, was a transparent Greek innovation that simply meant "hissing", based on a nominalization of a verb (sízō, from an earlier stem *sigj-, meaning 'to hiss').
| Phoenician | Greek | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| shape | position | name | sound | shape | position | name | sound | |
|
after R | Shin Shin (letter) Shin literally means "Sharp" ; It is the twenty-first letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician , Aramaic/Hebrew , and Arabic .... |
/ʃ/ | Σ | after R | Sigma | /s/ | |
|
after N | Samekh Samekh Samekh or Simketh is the fifteenth letter in many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic, representing . The Arabic alphabet, however, uses a letter based on Phoenician šin to represent ; however, that glyph takes Samekh's place in the traditional Abjadi order of the Arabic... |
/s/ | Ξ | after N | Xi | /ks/ | |
| |
after W | Zayin Zayin Zayin is the seventh letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician , Aramaic , Hebrew , Syriac and Perso-Arabic alphabet... |
/z/ | Ζ | after W | Zeta Zeta (letter) Zeta is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 7. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Zayin... |
/dz/,/zd/ | |
|
after P | Tsade Tsade ' is the eighteenth letter in many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew ' and Arabic ' . Its oldest sound value is probably , although there is a variety of pronunciation in different modern Semitic languages and their dialects... |
/ts/ | after P | San | */z/? > /s/ | ||
Whereas in early abecedaria
Abecedarium
An abecedarium is an inscription consisting of the letters of an alphabet, almost always listed in order. Typically, abecedaria are practice exercises....
, Sigma and San are typically listed as two separate letters in their separate alphabetic positions, each Greek dialect tended to use either San or Sigma exclusively in practical writing. The use of San became a characteristic of the Doric
Doric Greek
Doric or Dorian was a dialect of ancient Greek. Its variants were spoken in the southern and eastern Peloponnese, Crete, Rhodes, some islands in the southern Aegean Sea, some cities on the coasts of Asia Minor, Southern Italy, Sicily, Epirus and Macedon. Together with Northwest Greek, it forms the...
dialects of Corinth
Ancient Corinth
Corinth, or Korinth was a city-state on the Isthmus of Corinth, the narrow stretch of land that joins the Peloponnesus to the mainland of Greece, roughly halfway between Athens and Sparta. The modern town of Corinth is located approximately northeast of the ancient ruins...
and neighboring Sikyon, as well as Crete
Crete
Crete is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, and one of the thirteen administrative regions of Greece. It forms a significant part of the economy and cultural heritage of Greece while retaining its own local cultural traits...
. San became largely obsolete by the second half of the fifth century BC, when it was generally replaced by Sigma, although in Crete it continued in use for about a century longer. In Sikyon, it was retained as a symbolic mark of the city used on coin inscriptions (just as the likewise archaic Qoppa was used by Corinth, and a special local form of Beta
Beta (letter)
Beta is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In Ancient Greek, beta represented the voiced bilabial plosive . In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced labiodental fricative ....
by Byzantium
Byzantium
Byzantium was an ancient Greek city, founded by Greek colonists from Megara in 667 BC and named after their king Byzas . The name Byzantium is a Latinization of the original name Byzantion...
).
San could be written with the outer stems either straight or slanted outwards , and either longer or of equal length with the inner strokes . It was typically distinguished from the similar-looking Mu
Mu (letter)
Carlos Alberto Vives Restrepo is a Grammy Award and three-time Latin Grammy Award winning-Colombian singer, composer and actor.-Biography:...
(Μ) by the fact that San tended to be symmetrical, whereas Mu had a longer left stem in its archaic forms .
Outside Greece, San was borrowed into the Old Italic alphabet
Old Italic alphabet
Old Italic refers to several now extinct alphabet systems used on the Italian Peninsula in ancient times for various Indo-European languages and non-Indo-European languages...
s . It initially retained its M-shape in the archaic Etruscan alphabet, but from the 6th century BC changing its aspect to a shape similar to that of the d-rune
Dagaz
The d rune is called Daeg "day" in the Anglo-Saxon rune poem. The corresponding letter of the Gothic alphabet d is called dags. This rune stave is also part of the Elder Futhark, with a reconstructed Proto-Germanic name *dagaz....
The name of "San" lived on as an alternative (dialectal or archaic) name for "Sigma" even at a time when the letter itself had everywhere been replaced with standard Sigma. Thus, Herodotus
Herodotus
Herodotus was an ancient Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus, Caria and lived in the 5th century BC . He has been called the "Father of History", and was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a...
in the late 5th century reports that the same letter was called "San" by the Dorians
Doric Greek
Doric or Dorian was a dialect of ancient Greek. Its variants were spoken in the southern and eastern Peloponnese, Crete, Rhodes, some islands in the southern Aegean Sea, some cities on the coasts of Asia Minor, Southern Italy, Sicily, Epirus and Macedon. Together with Northwest Greek, it forms the...
but "Sigma" by the Ionians
Ionic Greek
Ionic Greek was a subdialect of the Attic–Ionic dialect group of Ancient Greek .-History:Ionic dialect appears to have spread originally from the Greek mainland across the Aegean at the time of the Dorian invasions, around the 11th Century B.C.By the end of the Greek Dark Ages in the 5th Century...
. Athenaeus
Athenaeus
Athenaeus , of Naucratis in Egypt, Greek rhetorician and grammarian, flourished about the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 3rd century AD...
in his Deipnosophistae
Deipnosophistae
The Deipnosophistae may be translated as The Banquet of the Learned or Philosophers at Dinner or The Gastronomers...
(c.200 AD) quotes an epigram which contained the spelled-out name of a philosopher, still using "San" as the name for Sigma:
- "Name: Θ-Ρ-Α-Σ-Υ-Μ-Α-Χ-Ο-Σ,
- Birthplace: Chalkydon; profession: wisdom"
Arcadian "Tsan"
A unique letter variant, shaped (similar to modern Cyrillic И, but with a slight leftward bend) has been found in a single inscription in the Arcado-Cypriot dialect of MantineiaMantineia
Mantineia was a city in ancient Greece that was the site of two significant battles in Classical Greek history. It is also a former municipality in Arcadia, Peloponnese, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality Tripoli, of which it is a municipal unit. Its seat...
, Arcadia
Arcadia
Arcadia is one of the regional units of Greece. It is part of the administrative region of Peloponnese. It is situated in the central and eastern part of the Peloponnese peninsula. It takes its name from the mythological character Arcas. In Greek mythology, it was the home of the god Pan...
, a 5th century BC inscription dedicated to Athena Alea
Athena Alea
Alea was an epithet of the Greek goddess Athena, prominent in Arcadian mythology, under which she was worshiped at Alea, Mantineia and Tegea...
(Inscriptiones Graecae
Inscriptiones Graecae
The Inscriptiones Graecae , is an academic project originally begun by the Prussian Academy of Science, and today continued by its successor organisation, the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften...
V.ii.262) It is widely assumed to be a local innovation based on San, although Jeffery (1961) classes it as a variant of Sigma. It appears to have denoted a /ts/ sound and has been labelled "Tsan" by some modern writers. In the local Arcadian dialect, this sound occurred in words that reflect Proto-Greek */kʷ/. In such words, other Greek dialects usually have /t/, while the related Cypriot dialect has /s/. Examples are:
- иις (cf. AtticAttic GreekAttic Greek is the prestige dialect of Ancient Greek that was spoken in Attica, which includes Athens. Of the ancient dialects, it is the most similar to later Greek, and is the standard form of the language studied in courses of "Ancient Greek". It is sometimes included in Ionic.- Origin and range...
τις, 'somebody') - иινα (cf. Attic τινα, 'somebody')
- οиεοι (cf. Attic ὅτῳ 'to whomever')
- ειиε (cf. Attic εἴτε 'either')
From these correspondences, it can be concluded that the letter most likely denoted an affricate sound, possibly [ts] or [tʃ], which would have been a natural intermediate step in the sound change from */kʷ/ to /s/. The letter has been represented in modern scholarly transcriptions of the Mantinea inscription by <ś> (s with an acute accent) or by <σ̱> (sigma with a macron underneath).
(A distinct epichoric letter that shared the same И shape with Arcadian Tsan but had the unrelated sound value of /w/ existed in yet another dialect, in Pamphylia
Pamphylia
In ancient geography, Pamphylia was the region in the south of Asia Minor, between Lycia and Cilicia, extending from the Mediterranean to Mount Taurus . It was bounded on the north by Pisidia and was therefore a country of small extent, having a coast-line of only about 75 miles with a breadth of...
. It is conventionally known as "Pamphylian digamma", i.e. a variant of Digamma
Digamma
Digamma is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet which originally stood for the sound /w/ and later remained in use only as a numeral symbol for the number "6"...
or Waw.)
Sampi
The IonianIonic Greek
Ionic Greek was a subdialect of the Attic–Ionic dialect group of Ancient Greek .-History:Ionic dialect appears to have spread originally from the Greek mainland across the Aegean at the time of the Dorian invasions, around the 11th Century B.C.By the end of the Greek Dark Ages in the 5th Century...
letter , which later gave rise to the numeral symbol Sampi
Sampi
Sampi is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It was used in addition to the classical 24 letters of the alphabet to denote some type of a sibilant sound, probably or , in some eastern Ionic dialects of ancient Greek in the 6th and 5th centuries BC...
( = 900) may also be a continuation of San, although it did not have the same alphabetic position.
Bactrian þ
In the Greek script used for writing the Bactrian languageBactrian language
The Bactrian language is an extinct Eastern Iranian language which was spoken in the Central Asian region of Bactria. Linguistically, it is classified as belonging to the middle period of the East Iranian branch...
, there existed a letter resembling a "þ", which apparently stood for the sound /ʃ/ (transliterated as š) and has been named "Sho" in recent times. According to one hypothesis, this letter too may go back to San.
Modern use
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...
, a pair of uppercase and lowercase forms of the letter was introduced in version 4.0 (2003). For this purpose, new lowercase forms for modern typography, for which no prior typographic tradition existed, had to be designed. Most fonts have adopted the convention of distinguishing uppercase San from Mu by having its central V-like section descend only halfway down above the baseline, and lowercase San by giving it a left stem descending below the baseline. (Note that in historical epigraphic practice it was the other way round, with San being symmetrical and Mu having a longer left stem.)
San is encoded in Unicode at codepoints U+03FA (uppercase, Ϻ) and U+03FB (lowercase, ϻ). The Arcadian "Tsan" variant, unified with the identical-looking Pamphylian
Pamphylian Greek
Pamphylian is a little-attested and isolated dialect of Ancient Greek which was spoken in Pamphylia, on the southern coast of Asia Minor. Its origins and relation to other Greek dialects are uncertain. A number of scholars have distinguished in Pamphylian dialect important isoglosses with...
Digamma
Digamma
Digamma is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet which originally stood for the sound /w/ and later remained in use only as a numeral symbol for the number "6"...
, has been included at U+0376 (uppercase, Ͷ) and U+0377 (lowercase, ͷ) since version 5.1.
| Appearance | Code points | Name |
|---|---|---|
| U+03FA | GREEK CAPITAL LETTER SAN | |
| U+03FB | GREEK SMALL LETTER SAN | |
| U+0376 | GREEK CAPITAL LETTER PAMPHYLIAN DIGAMMA | |
| U+0377 | GREEK SMALL LETTER PAMPHYLIAN DIGAMMA |