Jelks Cabaniss wrote:

> http://www.jelks.nu/demo/stigma.html

| What's a Stigma?
| I am transcoding into HTML a printed document from the early 1900's c.e.
| containing a mixture of Latin, Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, and (mostly)
English.
|
| Some of the names in this document contain a cryptic mixture of Greek,
Arabic,
| and (mostly) English letters — (don't ask, I didn't write it). For
example:
|
| [graphics]
|
| After the name, note the cryptic explanation of one of the letters
appearing
| in it ...
|
| [graphics]
|
| where the equation to "st" led me to believe that the letter in question
was the
| archaic greek letter Stigma. This letter appears in some of the subsequent
names
| as well.
|
| Yet when I transcode this as Unicode 03DA (that's an uppercase Stigma,
lowercase
| looks pretty much the same, just smaller), this is the rendition I get ...
|
| [graphics: something like a big lowercase final sigma]
|
| which is quite different in appearance. Interestingly, the latter is the
rendition
| given in multiple fonts on multiple platforms, so one might presume this
to be the
| canonical representation (if there is such a thing) of the letter Stigma.

This is what the Unicode charts have to say about this:

| 03C2 ς GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA
| = stigma (the Modern Greek name for this letterform)
| * not to be confused with the actual stigma letter
| -> 03DB ? greek small letter stigma
|
| 03C3 σ GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA
| * used symbolically with a numeric value 200
|
| [...]
|
| 03DA ? GREEK LETTER STIGMA
| * apparently in origin a cursive form of digamma
| * the name "stigma" originally applied to a medieval sigma-tau ligature,
whose
| shape was confusably similar to the cursive digamma
| * used as a symbol with a numeric value of 6
|
| 03DB ? GREEK SMALL LETTER STIGMA
| -> 03C2 ς greek small letter final sigma
|
| 03DC ? GREEK LETTER DIGAMMA
|
| 03DD ? GREEK SMALL LETTER DIGAMMA
| * used as a symbol with a numeric value of 6

So, apparently, there are three totally unrelated letters which have been
called "stigma" in the course of time:

1) an old sigma+tau ligature (encoding: 03C3 followed 03C4);

2) a cursive form of digamma (encoding: 03DA or 03DC), called
"stigma" because it looks like (1) above;

3) the final form of lowercase sigma (encoding: 03C2), called
"stigma" because it looks like (2) above (which, in turns, looks like (1)!).

Considering the bracketed explanation in your document, I would say that the
correct transcription is (1), although that makes the bracketed explanation
quite ridiculous:

Dηnaστartarωθ [στ = st]

You should probably underline or italicize the "στ", and add a note to make
it clearer that it is a legated symbol and not the two ordinary sigma and
tau letters.

Although the Unicode chart does not show it, also the modern final sigma
("ς") is also as a symbol for numeral 6 (in place of the digamma,
which is obviously missing from most fonts intended for modern Greek).

_ Marco