The Narrow Path Ministries

In Greek, the letter "sigma" corresponds to "s" in English. When the letter occurs at the beginning or somewhere in the middle of a word, it looks like this "σ" but when it occurs as the last letter in a word, it looks like this "ς". For example here are the last five words of John 1:19 in Greek:

ερωτησωσιν αυτον συ τις ει

Can you find the four sigmas? Two of them occur in the middle of the first word. One occurs at the beginning of the third word. And one occurs at the end of the fourth word.

The interesting thing is that there was a similar practice in middle English with the letter "s." Here is an example:

Would you like ʃome molaʃʃes?

I once thought that there was no way to write "Homer" in Greek because there was no Greek letter corresponding to "H" but then discovered the h sound comes from an accent mark over another letter.

Hi Homer, you wrote:I once thought that there was no way to write "Homer" in Greek because there was no Greek letter corresponding to "H" but then discovered the h sound comes from an accent mark over another letter.

That "accent mark" is called a "rough breathing." However, in the Hellenistic Greek of John's gospel, in Papyrus 66, which was copied in the middle of the second century, all letters were in capitals, and there was no spaces between the words. Nor were periods or question marks used. AND THERE WAS NO ROUGH BREATHING USED. So the "h" sound was simply ignored. If there wasn't room to write a whole word at the right-hand part of the papyrus, the rest of the word was simply written on the next line.

Here's a page from Papyrus 66 that contains John2:10-15.
(I am shocked to find that after I uploaded the image to ibb.com to find that when I downloaded the same image, the right-hand part of the page is missing!)

They must have read very slowly and carefully!