Talk:The Poems of Sappho

Greek transcription

In transcribing the Greek text from this book, I have chosen to adhere to modern standards for three reasons:

1) The original volume uses the lunate sigma (Ϲ, ϲ) in place of the standard initial, medial, and final sigma variants (Σ, σ, ς). Although the lunate sigma is common in medieval and scholarly texts, it did not appear in Greek until two centuries after Sappho, and is generally not used in modern transcriptions.

2) The font used is idiosyncratic, unlike most contemporary texts. The alpha resembles a Roman lowercase double-storey a rather than the more usual α or Α. The delta is triangular like upper case Δ but has a short ascender like lowercase δ. The first xi I came across puzzled me until I recognized the word.

3) The font face is {{small-caps}} (with the aforementioned idiosyncracies), and certain combinations of vowels and diacritical marks cannot be replicated using capital letters in standard Unicode.

For these reasons, the Greek text has been transcribed using modern conventions. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:18, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Error in Poem 2 translation

If this is actually Cox's translation of Sappho's poem 2, there is a mistake in translation.

Φάινεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν means "He appears to me a peer of the gods", not "Peer of the gods, the happiest man I seem"

The entire poem is about jealousy, but through this mistranslation (or typo? changing seem into see solves the issue) the meaning is completely upset.

Paolodm (talk) 02:31, 22 January 2013 (UTC)