Kai (conjunction)

Kai (και "and"; Modern Greek: [ce]; Ancient Greek: [kai]; sometimes abbreviated k) is a conjunction in Greek, Coptic (ⲕⲁⲓ) and Esperanto (kaj; IPA: [kai̯]).

Kai is the most frequent word in any Greek text and thus used by statisticians to assess authorship of ancient manuscripts based on the number of times it is used.

Ligature

Because of its frequent occurrence, kai is sometimes abbreviated in Greek manuscripts and in signage, 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.

Two possible renderings of the kai abbreviation.
One form of kai in medieval minuscule handwriting.

For representation in electronic texts the kai symbol has its own Unicode positions: GREEK KAI SYMBOL (U+03D7) and GREEK CAPITAL KAI SYMBOL (U+03CF).

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 Saint 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).

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
None	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
Three 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. Ehrbar, which is licensed under GFDL.

External links

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