Re: End Form Sigma

Jonathan Robie (jwrobie@mindspring.com)
Sun, 17 Aug 1997 07:07:57 -0400

At 03:49 PM 8/17/97 +1000, David Smethurst wrote:
>Dear Gentlemen and Ladies
>I have a question that I havent been able to answer myself so I have joined
>this list to see if any here may be able to answer.
>My question is: what is the numerical value and by what authority and
>reference is it varified for the letter; End Form Sigma.
>All languages that I have seen tend to have the end froms at the end of the
>alphabet giving the value after all the 'normal' alphabet has been valued,
>so that they tend to be in the highest numerical values, such as in Hebrew,
>the last five letters are the end forms to make up the counting to one
>thousand.

If you are referring to the numeric codes used to represent these letters on
a computer, that depends a great deal on the font you are using, and there
are (alas!) almost as many encoding schemes for Greek as there are fonts. If
you are trying to design a computer system, however, you should be aware
that sigma should always sort the same, regardless of where it stands in the
alphabet. So the answer, I'm afraid, depends on what you are trying to do...

Jonathan

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