Homework

Ancient Greek had two 'hands' -- a cursive or 'running' hand that was used for everyday writing and a 'book' hand that was used by scribes on scrolls. This book hand was called 'uncial' -- from a term that means 'twelfth part'. In short (ow), you could get twelve letters (formally called 'characters') per line on average in a scroll book.

This Greek uncial created scrolls in papyrus and much later on parchment for an early type of book called a 'codex'. But, as the ancient world gave way to the Middle Ages, this uncial hand got less readable as less-able hands put quill to vellum.

In the 9th Century, some Greek monks reformed the whole thing, creating 'minuscule'. This prompted a publishing revolution -- partly because you could get a lot more letters per book in minuscule, and partly because they were easier for copyists to make. Books got smaller, cheaper and then more widespread, as demand increased production.

But making sure scribes had the best texts to copy in the first place took painstaking research and careful forethought. Awareness that this was even necessary for holy writ took centuries, as did methods for doing it right, since ideas about and techniques for both largely passed with pagan antiquity. The whole process, such as it was, stayed inside the monastery until Renaissance humanism put another revolution in motion.

Though the famous Aldine press in Venice had been publishing typeset Greek literary classics for some time before that, the first New Testament in Greek set in movable type was printed in 1514 at a university in Spain under the auspices of a cardinal there as part of a multi-language project for the entire Bible. Some 200 characters were created for this and similar projects to represent all 24 Greek letters and their many scribal variations, along with combinations of Greek letters called 'ligatures'.

While this multi-language (called a polyglot) version was waiting for the pope's OK, Erasmus edited his own version of the Greek NT and got it published by a Swiss printer named Froben before the Catholic polyglot came out. (That's why Erasmus gets the credit. Whether he was racing to do that remains unclear.)

After the success of Erasmus, presses in France, Switzerland and Italy got busy with their versions in several sizes. Soon afterward, most of the literate Western world could get hold of a Greek book in some form with a far more familiar (to them) Latin translation on the facing page.

That's what I found, in a nutshell. However, the details of this story are much more complex. I'll let those interested find more on their own.

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BTW, the digamma's name was pronounced more like 'vau'. And there were several other Greek letters that had dropped out of the ancient written language besides that one.

And one more note: I got all the above from books I have, not from the Internet. You do need books. Written by knowledgeable people. There just is no substitute.