Utilisateur:Flyax/β

This is a personal research still going on. My purpose is to find out what forms of the Greek letter beta have been used in various centuries and countries. What motivated me into this task is the double β in Bailly's dictionary.

Currently we could say that there are two variants of this letter: the one (β) is used in typography and computers and the other is used in handwriting and is more or less similar to ϐ. However there is no other distinction between these two, nothing like the σ / ς distinction. Greeks (and I dare say Anglo-Saxons) think of them as one letter, just as French see "a" in their books and computer screens but may actually write something like "ɑ" in their own handwritten scripts.

Documents with only one type of β

• Manuscript (895 AD) File:Codex Clarkianus Phaedrus.gif : at this time β was written like "u". βέλτιστε = uέλτιστε, ἐβουλόμην = ἐuουλόμην.
• Manuscript (1550): File:Greek doc01.jpg See the word βεβαίως.
• The first Greek newspaper (1790) File:Ephemeris 1790.png See the word βέβαιοι. Just one type of β.
• Divers traités de Lucien, Xénophon, Platon et Plutarque, Paris, 1788, p.202, see συμβάληται and βούλει.
• Gottfried Heinrich Schäfer, Xenophontis Historia graeca, Lipsiae 1811, p.2, see βασιλέα - Αλκιβιάδης
• Xenophontis Memorabilia Socrates, Ludwig August Dindorf, Oxford, 1862 p.3, see συμβόλοις, βούλεσθαι
• Jacques Schamp, Photios, historien des lettres: la Bibliothèque et ses notices biographiques, Paris 1987, p. 225, βιβλίοις