Sampi (modern: ϡ; ancient shapes: Ͳ, x16px|Ͳ|class=skin-invert-image) is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It was used as an addition to the classical 24-letter alphabet in some eastern Ionic dialects of ancient Greek in the 6th and 5th centuries BC, to denote some type of a sibilant sound, probably or , and was abandoned when the sound disappeared from Greek.
It later remained in use as a numeral symbol for 900 in the alphabetic ("Milesian") system of Greek numerals. Its modern shape, which resembles a π inclining to the right with a longish curved cross-stroke, developed during its use as a numeric symbol in minuscule handwriting of the Byzantine era.
Its current name, sampi, originally probably meant "san pi", i.e. "like a pi", and is also of medieval origin. The letter's original name in antiquity is not known. It has been proposed that sampi was a continuation of the archaic letter san, which was originally shaped like an M and denoted the sound in some other dialects. Besides san, names that have been proposed for sampi include parakyisma and angma, while other historically attested terms for it are enacosis, sincope, and o charaktir.
Alphabetic sampi
As an alphabetic letter denoting a sibilant sound, sampi (shaped ) was mostly used between the middle of the 6th and the middle of the 5th centuries BC,
Among the earliest known uses of sampi in this function is an abecedarium from Samos dated to the mid-7th century BC. This early attestation already bears witness to its alphabetic position behind omega (i.e. not the position of san), and it shows that its invention cannot have been much later than that of omega itself. An inscription from Halicarnassus has the names "Ἁλικαρναͳέ[ω]ν" ("of the Halicarnassians") and the personal names "Ὀαͳαͳιος" and "Π[α]νυάͳιος". All of these names appear to be of non-Greek, local origin, i.e. Carian. The same title "Queen of Perge", the local title for the goddess Artemis, is found on coin legends: <span style="background-color: white !important; color: black !important;"></span>. As <span style="background-color: white !important; color: black !important;"></span> is known to be the local feminine form of the archaic Greek noun , i.e. (w)anax ("king"), it is believed that the letter stood for some type of sibilant reflecting Proto-Greek .
Numeric sampi
In the alphabetic numeral system, which was probably invented in Miletus and is therefore sometimes called the "Milesian" system, there are 27 numeral signs: the first nine letters of the alphabet, from alpha (A) to theta (Θ) stand for the digits 1–9; the next nine, beginning with iota (Ι), stand for the multiples of ten (10, 20, etc. up to 90); and the last nine, beginning with rho (Ρ), stand for the hundreds (100 – 900). For this purpose, the 24 letters of the standard classical Greek alphabet were used with the addition of three archaic or local letters: digamma/wau (Ϝ, , originally denoting the sound ) for "6", koppa (Ϙ, originally denoting the sound ) for "90", and sampi for "900". While digamma and koppa were retained in their original alphabetic positions inherited from Phoenician, the third archaic Phoenician character, san/tsade (Ϻ, denoting an sound), was not used in this way. Instead, sampi was chosen, and added at the end of the system, after omega (800).
From this, it has been concluded that the system must have been invented at a time and place when digamma and koppa were still either in use or at least still remembered as parts of the alphabetic sequence, whereas san had either already been forgotten, or at least was no longer remembered with its original alphabetic position. In the latter case, according to a much debated view, sampi itself may in fact have been regarded as being san, but with a new position in the alphabet.
The dating of the emergence of this system, and with it of numeric sampi, has been the object of much discussion. At the end of the 19th century, authors such as Thompson placed its full development only in the 3rd century BC. Jeffery but the exact numeric meaning of this example is disputed.
Origins
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, many authors have assumed that sampi was essentially a historical continuation of the archaic letter san (), the M-shaped alternative of sigma (Σ) that formed part of the Greek alphabet when it was originally adopted from Phoenician. Archaic san stood in an alphabetic position between pi (Π) and koppa (Ϙ). It dropped out of use in favour of sigma in most dialects by the 7th century BC, but was retained in place of the latter in a number of local alphabets until the 5th century BC. It is generally agreed to be derived from Phoenician tsade.
The hypothetical identification between san and sampi is based on a number of considerations. One is the similarity of the sounds represented by both. San represented either simple or some other, divergent phonetic realization of the common Greek phoneme. Suggestions for its original sound value have included , and Thompson An isolated position was expressed in the early 20th century by Jannaris, who – without mentioning the alphabetic use of Ionian – proposed that the shape of numeric sampi was derived from a juxtaposition of three "T"s, i.e. 3×300=900. (He also rejected the historical identity of the other two numerals, stigma (6) and koppa (90), with their apparent alphabetic predecessors.) Witnesses of this textual variant exist from c.1200, but its archetype can be dated to before 1000 AD.
The first reference to the name sampi in the western literature occurs in a 17th-century work, Scaliger's discussion of the Aristophanes scholion regarding the word samphoras (see above). Some modern authors, taking Scaliger's reference as the first known use and unaware of earlier attestations, have claimed that the name itself only originated in the 17th century and/or that Scaliger himself invented it. None of these hypotheses has wide support today. The most commonly accepted explanation of the name today is that san pi () simply means "like a pi", where the word san is unrelated to any letter name but simply the modern Greek preposition ("like", from ancient Greek ). has epistmon , kophe, and ennakose. Another medieval manuscript has the same words distorted somewhat more, as psima, coppo and enacos, Other, similar versions of the name include enacosin and niacusin,
The Gothic alphabet adopted sampi in its Roman-era form of an upwards-pointing arrow (, 𐍊) While this form has been adopted in some modern fonts, it has been replaced in more recent versions of Unicode with a simpler glyph, similar to the lowercase forms (). Many fonts designed for scholarly use have adopted an upright triangular shape with straight lines and serifs (), as proposed by the typographer Yannis Haralambous. but was changed after consultation with Greek typesetting experts. The glyph shown in current official code charts stands on the baseline and has an ascender slightly higher than cap height, but its stem has no serifs and is slightly curved leftwards like the descender of an ρ or β. Most type designers who have implemented the character in current fonts have chosen to design a glyph either at x height, or with a descender but no ascender, and with the top either square or curved (corresponding to ancient scribal practice. The Gothic "900" symbol was encoded in version 3.1 (2001), and Coptic sampi in version 4.1 (2005). Codepoints for the related Greek characters san and Bactrian "sho" were added in version 4.0 (2003).
{|class="wikitable"
!Character||Shape||Code||Name||Version||Year
|-
|Ͳ|| ||U+0372||GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ARCHAIC SAMPI||5.1||2008
|-
|ͳ|| ||U+0373||GREEK SMALL LETTER ARCHAIC SAMPI||5.1||2008
|-
|Ϡ|| ||U+03E0||GREEK LETTER SAMPI||1.1||1993
|-
|ϡ|| ||U+03E1||GREEK SMALL LETTER SAMPI||3.0||1999
|-
|Ϸ||Þ ||U+03F7||GREEK CAPITAL LETTER SHO||4.0||2003
|-
|ϸ||þ ||U+03F8||GREEK SMALL LETTER SHO||4.0||2003
|-
|Ϻ||M ||U+03FA||GREEK CAPITAL LETTER SAN||4.0||2003
|-
|ϻ|| ||U+03FB||GREEK SMALL LETTER SAN||4.0||2003
|-
|Ⳁ|| ||U+2CC0||COPTIC CAPITAL LETTER SAMPI||4.1||2005
|-
|ⳁ || ||U+2CC1||COPTIC SMALL LETTER SAMPI||4.1||2005
|-
|𐍊||||U+1034A||GOTHIC LETTER NINE HUNDRED||3.1||2001
|}
Prior to Unicode, support for sampi in electronic encoding was marginal. No common 8-bit codepage for Greek (such as ISO 8859-7) contained sampi. However, lowercase and uppercase sampi were provided for by the ISO 5428:1984 Greek alphabet coded character set for bibliographic information interchange. In the LaTeX typesetting system, the "Babel" package allows accessing lowercase and uppercase sampi through the commands "\sampi" and "\Sampi". Non-Unicode (8-bit) fonts for polytonic Greek sometimes contained sampi mapped to arbitrary positions, but usually not as a casing pair. For instance, the "WP Greek Century" font that came with WordPerfect had sampi encoded as 0xFC, while the popular "Wingreek" fonts had it encoded as 0x22. No encoding system prior to Unicode 5.1 catered for archaic epigraphic sampi separately.