Greek Letters

Greek Letters are the twenty-four characters of the Ionian alphabet as adopted by the Tower for use in subsidiary designation, and, since the reform of Ordinance 44, for the marking of any series too brief or too provisional to warrant a Roman numeral. They are the Tower's second class of designation: never primary, never final, and always subject to recopying. A Greek letter does not name a thing. It holds a place for a thing until a name is found, and in most holdings the name is never found.

Adoption and the Forty-Fourth Ordinance

The characters entered administrative use through the Ordinance of Perpetual Echo, which employed them in its own formal title at a time when the title was still under revision. Clause 12 of that Ordinance established what it called the "lesser hand" — the practice of setting subsidiary matter in Greek so that the primary hand, in Roman, would not be encumbered. The Concordance of Working Letters later recopied the sequence in full, and it is to that recension, not to the Ordinance, that most floors now refer.

The order of the letters is fixed. The order of their precedence is not, and has never been settled. The Seventh Concordance devotes its Annexes to Greek letters but declines to state which annex outranks which, on the grounds that "precedence is a matter for the floor, and the floor is a matter for the day" (The Seventh Concordance, Annex 3, preamble).

The Aperture sequence

Greek letters are most visible in the Aperture practice, where each Aperture within a Spiral is designated by a single character — alpha for the first, beta for the second, and so on until the Spiral closes or the sequence is interrupted. An interrupted sequence is not resumed. A Spiral that reaches epsilon and stops is recorded as having five Apertures, the fifth of which is epsilon, and no Aperture beyond epsilon may be added later without a fresh Letters Patent of Incumbency.

This rule has caused difficulty chiefly on Floor Ȣ, where a long-running Aperture sequence was found in 1204 to have been advanced by one letter too far some four decades earlier. Rather than renumber, the floor's Librarians inserted a null Aperture between delta and epsilon, designated by no character at all and recorded in the register as a blank. The blank has since acquired its own file, its own seal, and a standing request for designation that has been refused eleven times.

The dispute over the digamma

Scholarly disagreement turns on the archaic characters. The Foundationalist-Autogenist Correspondence records a dispute of long standing between those who hold that the sequence properly contains the digamma, the koppa and the sampi, and those who hold that it contains only the twenty-four characters recopied in the Concordance of Working Letters. The Foundationalists argue from the Ordinance, which they claim lists twenty-seven; the Autogenists argue from the recension, which lists twenty-four and notes the others as "withdrawn from circulation."

"A letter withdrawn is not a letter unmade. The place it held remains, and a place that remains may be filled."

— Foundationalist-Autogenist Correspondence, letter 19, unsigned

The Subcommittee for Provisional Realities has declined to resolve the question, observing in its minutes of 1188 that both positions are "administratively survivable." Three separate recensions of the Fifth Concordance assign the withdrawn characters three different positions, and the Extension to Non-Greek Characters was drafted in part to permit floors to sidestep the question by designating in Coptic instead, a practice that has been adopted twice and regretted both times.

Greek letters as detachable matter

A Greek letter that becomes detached from its designation is handled as orthographic artifact and falls to The Aisle of Dropped Letters on Floor 313, jointly administered by the Board of Serifs and Spacing. Detachment occurs most often in recopying, when a character is set at the margin and lost to the trim. The Aisle holds some nine hundred recovered characters in trays, sorted by shape and not by value, and a recovered letter may be returned to its designation only if the designation is still open.

Most are not. The trays are accordingly fuller than the registers, and the Aisle's custodians have adopted the practice of returning nothing and recording everything. Transfers of affectively potent letters to Floor 33002 the Reservoir of Unspoken Letters pass through the Liminal Scriptorium and are not affected by this rule, though the Scriptorium has complained that the distinction is invisible to the letters themselves.

Restrictions on use

Greek letters may not be used for floors, for Concordances, or for the naming of persons. They may not appear in a title unless the title is itself subsidiary, as in Supplement Ψ or Appendix to the Thirty-Seventh Concordance. A Greek letter may not be reused within the same volume until the volume is closed, and a volume is closed only by the death or transfer of its registering clerk; the clerks of the Senior Appointments Office have been known to delay transfer for years rather than close a volume mid-sequence.

Where a floor requires more subsidiary designations than twenty-four, the sequence is doubled rather than extended, giving alpha-alpha, alpha-beta, and so on. Doubling was introduced by the Ω-series edict and is distinct from the Series Ω edict, which governs something else entirely. A doubled designation is written without a space. Greek letters are not to be used in correspondence with the Guild of Acoustic Cartographers, who do not read them, and who return such letters unopened with the character circled.