Originally, Ancient Greek employed the letter digamma ( ϝ) to represent the /w/ sound. Over time, this sound disappeared, alongside the digamma that denoted it. However, to transcribe those archaic, dialectal, or foreign words that still retained this sound, lexicographers employed other letters, whose sound was close enough to /w/. Among these, there is the letter gamma (γ), attested mostly but not only in the Lexicon of Hesychius. Given what we know about the sound of gamma, it is difficult to explain this use. The most straightforward hypothesis suggests that the scribes who copied these words misread the capital digamma (Ϝ) as gamma (Γ). Presenting new and old evidence of gamma used to denote digamma in Ancient Greek literary and documentary papyri, lexicography, and medieval manuscripts, this paper refutes this hypothesis, and demonstrates that a peculiar evolution in the pronunciation of gamma in Post-Classical Greek triggered a systematic use of this letter to denote the sound once represented by the digamma.

最初，古希腊采用字母digamma（ϝ）来表示/ w /声音。随着时间的流逝，这种声音消失了，伴随着表示它的digamma。但是，为了抄写仍保留这种声音的那些过时的，方言的或外来词，词法学家使用了其他字母，其声音足够接近/ w /。其中，有字母gamma（γ），大多数但不仅在词汇中得到证明Hesychius。鉴于我们对伽玛声音的了解，很难解释这种用法。最简单的假设表明，抄袭这些单词的抄写员将大写字母digamma（Ϝ）误读为γ（Γ）。本文介绍了古希腊文学和文献纸莎草，词典编纂和中世纪手稿中用来表示古伽玛的伽玛的新旧证据，驳斥了这一假设，并证明了后古典希腊语中伽玛发音的特殊演变触发了系统的使用该字母表示曾经由digamma表示的声音。