Textkit Greek and Latin Forums

I don't remember where I heard this, but can anyone confirm if it is true that biblical Greek had no spaces between words or sentences.

EXAMPLE:

inenglishitwouldlooklikethis

I don't now when this practice changed but yes, there were no spaces, and all capital letters.
INENGLISHTHISWOULDLOOKLIKETHIS.

I could read English like that but there is not a chance that I could decipher Greek written in this way.

Yes! In the 1st-5th century there were the Uncial manuscripts that were continuous script. I have edited some of them such as the Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Bezae.

Here is an actual photocopy of the Gospel of John from the Sinaiticus from the 4th century. http://alpha.reltech.org:8083/cgi-bin/E ... nv4?seq=99

I could read English like that but there is not a chance that I could decipher Greek written in this way.

You'd probably just have to get used to it, that's all.

John L wrote: Here is an actual photocopy of the Gospel of John from the Sinaiticus from the 4th century. http://alpha.reltech.org:8083/cgi-bin/E ... nv4?seq=99

That is interesting.
Do you know why not all the letters are capitals, and why some letters are written much smaller than others?
Why are θεος and θεον written with a line above where the vowels 'should have been'?[face=Arial][/face]

Bert wrote:

John L wrote: Here is an actual photocopy of the Gospel of John from the Sinaiticus from the 4th century. http://alpha.reltech.org:8083/cgi-bin/E ... nv4?seq=99

That is interesting.
Do you know why not all the letters are capitals, and why some letters are written much smaller than others?
Why are θεος and θεον written with a line above where the vowels 'should have been'?[face=Arial][/face]

shorthand. very common. :)

Bert

That is interesting.
Do you know why not all the letters are capitals, and why some letters are written much smaller than others?
Why are QEOS and QEON written with a line above where the vowels 'should have been'?

The reason why you see the tiny letters on those Uncial manuscripts is because that is from a later scribe who tried to "correct" mispellings, they used very tiny letters since they did not have white-out. Often those corrections are done centuries later. That is why you see in the Greek NT Nestle Aland and other Greek texts have variants of a manuscript with a little c beside the manuscript, which means "corrected." For example, the Vaticanus is manuscript B, and if you have a variant that has B with a tiny c beside it that means that the variant given is the "Vaticanus corrected" reading. All the letters used are capitol letters.

The reason why you see the lines above some letters is because that means that it is an abbreviation. That was a common practice with names of people and also references to THEOS or PNEUMA.

klewlis wrote:shorthand. very common.

When I saw the smiley emoticon I thought: "Now is she kidding or not".
After reading John L's reply I gathered that you were not smiling because you were kidding, just smiling.

John, you wrote that all letters are capitals.
After re-checking, I realized that I mistook an upercase Upsilon for a lowercase Gamma.
What about the Omega. It looks like a lowercase.
Thanks for the other explanations.

Bert

What about the Omega. It looks like a lowercase.

Keep in mind this was done by a scribe about 350AD, so the uncial writing was a modification of the even more ancient "Capital Letters that were done most often on stone. The Capital Letters were more rigid while the Uncial writing was more rounded. During a given period more than one style of book-hand was in use, and the transition from one style to a new one always lasted one generation. So the Capital Letters you see in your grammar books today are somewhat different then of the 4th century.