Greek ligatures

Early Greek print, from a 1566 edition of Aristotle.
The sample shows the -os ligature in the middle of the second line (in the word μέθοδος), the kai ligature below it in the third line, and the -ou- ligature right below that in the fourth line, along many others.
18th-century typeface sample by William Caslon, showing a greatly reduced set of ligatures (-ου- in "τοῦ", end of first line; -στ- in πλείστοις, middle of second line; and the καὶ abbreviation).

Greek ligatures are graphic combinations of the letters of the Greek alphabet that were used in medieval handwritten Greek and in early printing. Ligatures were used in the cursive writing style and very extensively in later minuscule writing. There were dozens[1][2] of conventional ligatures. Some of them stood for frequent letter combinations, some for inflectional endings of words, and some were abbreviations of entire words.

  1. ^ The Philokalia Package Archived 2012-05-25 at the Wayback Machine, for LaTeX
  2. ^ Carl Faulmann, Das Buch der Schrift: Schriftzeichen und Alphabete aller Zeiten und Völker, Vienna 1880, p.172-176.

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