Talk:Ichthys

Secret symbol myth?

I had always thought that the use of the symbol as an early Christian secret handshake was a myth. Are there better sources than a broken link? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.56.37.219 (talk) 03:45, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

It wasn't a handshake -- one person apparently idly drew an arc in the dust or dirt with one foot, and the other (if he was a Christian who wished to be recognized to the first individual) completed the Ichthys... AnonMoos (talk) 13:52, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

conjecture

I've noticed a few things about this symbol. (1) it resembles the egyption hieroglyph for mouth. Jesus is also known as Logos or The Word so there could be a connection. (2) the trident evolved to be a symbol of satan and what device is opposing to a fish? the trident of course. just wondering if this could also be a root of the devils pitchfork. rather then just pagan possieden being surpased by christianity. Bloodkith (talk)

ΙΧΘΥΣ is an acronym

The below dialog I copied from User_talk:Ian_Dalziel before commencing to revert the last change Vincent J. Lipsio (talk) 22:24, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

The Wikipedia article on "acronym" sites this as an example and I've always heard this referred to as an acronym, so please tell me how or why you'd reckon it as “a poem or other form of writing in which the first letter, syllable or word of each line, paragraph or other recurring feature in the text spells out a word or a message”, to quote the opening line of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrostic

I’m inclined to change it back, but I don’t want to start an editing war, so I’ll wait at least a day before doing anything.

Regards,

Vincent J. Lipsio (talk) 17:14, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

The phrase is writing in which the first letter of each word (a "recurring feature") forms a word - exactly as it says. What it is not is a word formed from the initial letters of the word. It is a pre-existing word, unlike "radar", for instance. The phrase was tailored to fit the word. It is wrongly given as an example in the acronym article. -- Ian Dalziel (talk) 17:49, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

The difference between an acronym and an acrostic consists not in whether it be an existing word, but rather whether it be a word scanned from the initials of a phase as opposed to a sentence or phrase scanned from the initial letters of paragraphs or phrases or sentences or whatnot.

Many contemporary English language acronyms are tailored to fit words that already exist; see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backronym

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym#Contrived_acronyms

Contrastἰχθύς to common Greek language acrostics (common in Byzantine hymnography) or those in Hebrew in the Old Testament or the English language examples given at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrostic#Examples

Methinks it is clear the ἰχθύς is an acronym.

Vincent J. Lipsio (talk) 15:21, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

No, an acronym is formed from the initial letters of a phrase. The terms "backronym" and "false acronym" which you quote have been coined precisely because these are NOT true acronyms. -- Ian Dalziel (talk) 23:31, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

The history of the graphic symbol is missing

There is no information in this article showing the history and origin of the graphic symbol (the drawing of the fish). The history of ΙΧΘΥΣ is provided but not the graphical symbol. This seems to be a major oversight... Sbwoodside (talk) 20:33, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Unicode

No Unicode character? Really? Rich Farmbrough, 14:58, 26 September 2011 (UTC).

There's no Unicode encoding for the Initial Teaching Alphabet. I just now grepped the Unicode 5 text file case-insensitively for strings such as "fish", "icht", "ixt", and "ikht", and didn't turn up anything (don't know about Unicode 6). AnonMoos (talk) 16:18, 26 September 2011 (UTC)

Maybe it (ichthys) could be encoded? – Kaihsu (talk) 05:54, 21 October 2011 (UTC)