Kai (conjunction)

Kai (και, "and", IPA: [cɛ]) is a conjunction in Greek (sometimes abbreviated k), Coptic (ⲕⲁⲓ) and, under the form kaj, Esperanto.

Kai is the most frequent word in any Greek text and thus used by statisticians to assess authorship of ancient manuscripts (see below).

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Kai ligature

Because of its frequent occurrence, kai is sometimes abbreviated in Greek manuscripts, by a ligature (comparable to Latin &, written as ϗ (uppercase variant Ϗ; Coptic variant ⳤ), formed from kappa (κ) with an extra lower stroke. It may occur with the varia above it: ϗ̀.

Authorship of ancient texts

The number of common words which express a general relation ("and", "in", "but", "I", "to be") is random with the same distribution at least among the same genre. By contrast, the occurrence of the definite article "the" cannot be modeled by simple probabilistic laws because the number of nouns with definite article depends on the subject matter.

Table 1 has data about the epistles of St. Paul. Abbreviations: Rom Romans; Co1 1st Corinthians; Co2 2nd Corinthians; Gal Galatians; Phi Philippians; Col Colossians; Th1 1st Thessalonians; Ti1 1st Timothy; Ti2 2nd Timothy; Heb Hebrews. 2nd Thessalonians, Titus, and Philemon were excluded because they were too short to give reliable samples. From an analysis of these and other data [Mor65, p. 224] the first 4 epistles (Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, and Galatians) form a consistent group, and all the other epistles lie more than 2 standard deviations from the mean of this group (using \chi^2 statistics). If Paul is defined as being the author of Galatians, then he also wrote Romans and 1st and 2nd Corinthians. The remaining epistles come from at least six hands.

Table 1

Number of Sentences in Paul's Epistles with 0, 1, 2, and >= 3 occurrences of kai

          Rom Co1 Co2 Gal Phi Col Th1 Ti1 Ti2 Heb 
no kai    386 424 192 128  42  23  34  49  45 155 
one       141 152  86  48  29  32  23  38  28  94 
two        34  35  28   5  19  17   8   9  11  37 
3 or more  17  16  13   6  12   9  16  10   4  24

References

[Mor65] A. Q. Morton. The authorship of Greek prose (with discussion). Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, 128:169-233, 1965

This article incorporates material from Econ 7800 class notes by Hans G. Ehbar, which is licensed under GFDL

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