Are these, in both cases, expected and useful within basic (monotonic) Greek coverage?
What do we know about what these things should look like?
Is the descending piece supposed to be more akin to, say, an italic /g tail, or an ogonek?
The form of the lowercase should always follow suit of /kappa, I presume?
It sometimes appears with a grave-like diacritic--any guidance on when it should or shouldn't, and what that should look like if different from a gravecomb?
Bonus points for good info on the use and shape of Greek numeral signs U+0374 and U+0375
0
Comments
The form you are referring to is the form that was used in early texts and mostly in small sizes. There have been several examples of display uses of it on signs and book covers during the last half of the previous century but most of its variations derive from the letter κ with a small tail (the varia as John Hudson notes is long gone). Let me know if you want me to send you some of these examples.
I think there should be a long discussion about the Greek και abbreviation among designers and relevant scholars working with Greek type design and the Greek language in general so as to answer some questions like:
- why hasn't it been used extensively in Greek texts?
- what made it completely disappear the past years and has been replaced by the latin ampersand?
- do designers need it after all?
- do we need a new Greek και symbol/character (an equivalent of its latin counterpart)?
and investigate:- what does it take to design a new symbol/character nowadays (one that will be accepted and used by the community)?
- how could this symbol/character look like? how abstract or close to the initial abbreviation should it be to work?
Do you think this would be an interesting topic/investigation? Or, do these thoughts have little-to-no value (practically and theoretically)? Are you aware of any similar discussions taking place in the past? (if you do, I would really appreciate any information about them)Thanks for raising this topic.
I have found photographs of Greek typewriters dating back to the early 20th Century that appear to have included the Latin ampersand instead of the καὶ. Even on my polytonic keyboard layout, the Latin ampersand (Shift+7) is given precedence over the καὶ (Option+7)
Also, the lack of presence of a symbol/character on a keyboard is of course a reason why this character is not used, but I think that one has to go back even more and ask, why wasn't there a need to add this symbol to the keyboard? Why did it fail to gain acceptance so that there was no need to add it to a keyboard?
I think the investigation should start a lot earlier.
I’m sure most people who use it are unaware of its Latin-language geneology.
Its complex knottyness does suggest a binding together.
Its “loan” usage, across scripts, is similar to the Numero symbol in Cyrillic.
Perhaps the question to ask of the καὶ sign—dare I try typing it in this forum? will it display correctly? ϗ?—is whether it persisted much at all after the abandonment of Byzantine ligatures in Greek typography? Did it simply get dropped along with the others, and only maintained in some minority usage? Or was there a period when it persisted alone, and only later fell out of use?
So I would add one more question (a bit more difficult to answer objectively I guess): could it be that the actual form of the symbol (somewhat rigid and unnatural) made it less attractive to use by greek typographers? At least, less attractive than the flamboyant, more fluid and ever-evolving form of the latin ampersand?
If I’d thought a little harder, I might have used the same form of κ, but I didn’t, perhaps because the scripty shape just looked nice and proper.
I believe that it is a good thing for a greek typeface to include these characters. Why not? They are nice and it is time we stopped using the ampersand in greek text settings.
I’ve seen this abbreviation in writing up until the late 19th century (see images bellow). It is actually a kappa with a freestyle curl. I feel it was a chance for the writer to release his creativity.
In typography, I believe it was abandoned much earlier. There also used to be another very strange form that served the same purpose, and a kappa-alfa-iota ligature (on the image bellow: Garamond types).
In lettering, the capital form has survived through the past century, mostly on hand made signs (the sign on the photo was probably lettered post WWII).
I used the & in such a way in the past on websites where the list items were read from a database and horizontal space was at a premium.
sub ampersand by ampersand.kai;
ampersand.kai would be the default, with ampersand.Kai in the <case> feature.