Re: re aleph beit

Marco Cimarosti wrote:

>Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
>
>
>>Etymologically, the Hebrew "vav" (originally "waw," like it is in
>>Arabic) is indeed cognate to digamma. However, since digamma dropped
>>out of Greek, the sound it represents, /w/, is now written as
>>"ou",
>>
>>
>
>And, AFAIK, as a numeric symbol it has been replaced by initial lowecase
>sigma.
>
>

Not ezzactly. It's more like a lowercase *final* sigma, and it isn't
that either: it's really more of a sigma-tau ligature ("stigma"), which
it became after the original numeral letter, digamma, became similar in
shape to stigma (much as English has things like "Ye Olde Shoppe"
spelled with a Y which is really a glyph-variant of thorn).

See http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/numerals.html#stigma

~mark