Kai (conjunction)
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Και ("and") is a conjunction in Greek (sometimes abbreviated k), Coptic 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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[edit] Kai ligature
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Because of its frequent occurrence, και 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.
 Two possible renderings of the kai abbreviation. |
 One form of kai in medieval minuscule handwriting |
[edit] Authorship of ancient texts
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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 X2 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
[edit] 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
