This English Gutenberg edition, constrained to the characters of 7-bit ASCII code, adopts the following orthographic conventions: 1) Except for Greek, all literally cited non-English words that do not refer to texts cited as academic references, words that in the source manuscript appear italicized, are rendered with a single preceding, and a single following dash; thus, -xxxx-.
2) Greek words, first transliterated into Roman alphabetic equivalents, are rendered with a preceding and a following double- dash; thus, -- xxxx--.

Note that in some cases the root word itself is a compound form such as xxx-xxxx, and is rendered as -- xxx-xxx-- 3) Simple unideographic references to vocalic sounds, single letters, or alphabeic dipthongs; and prefixes, suffixes, and syllabic references are represented by a single preceding dash; thus, -x, or -xxx.
4) Ideographic references, referring to signs of representation rather than to content, are represented as -"id:xxxx"-.

"id:" stands for "ideograph", and indicates that the reader should form a picture based on the following "xxxx"; which may be a single symbol, a word, or an attempt at a picture composed of ASCII characters.

For example, -- "id:GAMMA gamma"-- indicates an uppercase Greek gamma-form followed by the form in lowercase.

Some such exotic parsing as this is necessary to explain alphabetic development because a single symbol may have been used for a number of sounds in a number of languages, or even for a number of sounds in the same language at different times.