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Kai is a word that is aconjunction meaning "and" inAncient Greek (καί,kaí,[kǎi̯]),Modern Greek (και,kai,[ce]),Coptic (ⲕⲁⲓ,kai,[cɛ]) andEsperanto (kaj,[kai̯]).
Kai is the most frequent word in any Greek text, and thus used by statisticians to assess authorship of ancient manuscripts based on the number of times it is used.
Because of its frequent occurrence,kai is sometimes abbreviated in Greek manuscripts and insignage, by a ligature (comparable to Latin&), written asϗ (uppercase variantϏ;Coptic variantⳤ), formed fromkappa (κ) with an extra lower stroke.It may occur with thevaria above it:ϗ̀.
For representation in electronic texts the kai symbol has its ownUnicode positions: GREEK KAI SYMBOL (U+03D7) and GREEK CAPITAL KAI SYMBOL (U+03CF).
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 thedefinite 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 SaintPaul. 2nd Thessalonians, Titus, and Philemon were excluded because they were too short to give reliable samples. From an analysis of these and other data[1] the first 4 epistles (Romans,1 Corinthians,2 Corinthians, andGalatians) form a consistent group, and all the other epistles lie more than 2standard deviations from the mean of this group (using statistics).
| Book | None | One | Two | Three+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Romans | 386 | 141 | 34 | 17 |
| 1 Corinthians | 424 | 152 | 35 | 16 |
| 2 Corinthians | 192 | 86 | 28 | 13 |
| Galatians | 128 | 48 | 5 | 6 |
| Philippians | 42 | 29 | 19 | 12 |
| Colossians | 23 | 32 | 17 | 9 |
| 1 Thessalonians | 34 | 23 | 8 | 16 |
| 1 Timothy | 49 | 38 | 9 | 10 |
| 2 Timothy | 45 | 28 | 11 | 4 |
| Hebrews | 155 | 94 | 37 | 24 |
Esperantokaj comes from Greek.[2]It may be abbreviated ask. ork[3] (among other places, in thePIV dictionary),[4] or, sometimes, as&.[3]
La vorto 'kaj' ne sole ne estas maloportuna, sed ĝi ankaŭ tute ne estas arbitre elpensita (ĝi estas vorto greka = la latina 'et').[The word 'kaj' is not just not inopportune, but it is also absolutely not arbitrarily devised (it is a Greek word = the Latin 'et').].
This article incorporates material fromEcon 7800 class notes by Hans G. Ehrbar, which is licensed underGFDL.
