Sampi

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Sampi (disambiguation).

Greek alphabet

Αα Alpha	Νν Nu
Ββ Beta	Ξξ Xi
Γγ Gamma	Οο Omicron
Δδ Delta	Ππ Pi
Εε Epsilon	Ρρ Rho
Ζζ Zeta	Σσς Sigma
Ηη Eta	Ττ Tau
Θθ Theta	Υυ Upsilon
Ιι Iota	Φφ Phi
Κκ Kappa	Χχ Chi
Λλ Lambda	Ψψ Psi
Μμ Mu	Ωω Omega
Obsolete letters
Digamma	Qoppa
San	Sampi

Greek diacritics

Sampi (Ϡ) is an obsolete letter of the Greek alphabet and has a numeric value of 900 when used as a mathematical character. It may have been derived from the older letter san. The name "sampi" seems to come from [o]sàn pî: "like pi." Another name formerly used for this archaic letter was Disigma because of the phoneme it represented, /ss/ or /ks/.

The archaic letter Sampi

Sampi is mostly represented in modern writing by a glyph resembling a π slanted rightwards, which is the reason for its name in Modern Greek. In ancient epigraphy, there were other shapes, including one resembling an upright T. The Unicode standard of modern computer encoding has introduced two sets of codepoints for these two usages, both with an uppercase and lowercase variant: T-shaped alphabetic U+0372/U+0373 (Ͳ/ͳ, ), and Π-shaped numeric U+03E0/U+03E1 (Ϡ/ϡ).