 | ||
Kai (και "and"; [ce]; [kai]; sometimes abbreviated k) is a conjunction in Greek, Coptic (ⲕⲁⲓ) and Esperanto (kaj; [kai̯]).
Contents
Kai is the most frequent word in any Greek text and thus used by statisticians to assess authorship of ancient manuscripts (see further).
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 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