Not sure what this is, but rotating a Cyrillic "У у" might do the trick.

"What's the subject of the text?"
It's a transcription of a manuscript – the notes that Johann Gottfried Herder took for an essay he published in the late 18th century, dealing with Homer and the question of his authorship of both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Also, there's an annotation a bit further on (that number 7 above) that mentions "error-free passage/section" – it's not clear to me if that might have anything directly to do with the symbol in question.
Dunno, does that help? If it's not evident from a typographic side what this should be, I will try to get more information from the author.

John Hudson to the rescue?

maybe a foozled deleatur-symbol (dele in english)?

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deleatur

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

Oh, no, that is not Herder's handwriting. The printed piece is a transcription of Herder's notes. That there is the corrections to my setting by the author/editor who has made the transcription.

I'm actually not sure if it's OK for me to share the entire thing here; I have asked back with the editors, and will be back soon hopefully with more information. Thanks so far, though. I was hoping maybe it'd be simple :-)

David, fantastic!! Thank you so much.

In the first link I only see the cover? But the second one is exactly what I was looking for. Great!

I'd love to find some higher-res images. Pierron, on p. 523, does say «C'est toujours l'ypsilon couché» but I can't make out the difference between what he calls the «diple pure» and the «diple pointée» (of which I assume I'd need the former, since no explication seems to exist of the latter :-). I wonder if I'll be fine if I just rotate a "Y" (Latin or Greek). My author seems to have a cursive form of sorts in mind.

Oh, thanks for pointing that out. I saw that, but figured it was a different symbol… and my brain was stuck in English and thought that pointée = pointed. :-)

Nina, I'd assume that the «diple pure» is what you want, because that's a (half-)translation of διπλῆ καθαρά, which is what Herder wrote in the passage quoted.

What Florian said. Thank you, gentlemen, that was great! :-)

I'm not quite sure about the actual design of this yet – the diples in Wikipedia and the Unicode charts appear to lack the «stem» of the "Y"; plus, my author also seems to have a special/cursive form of "Y" in mind. I'm trying something simple (but with stem) now, as in the sources above, and will send this to the author for review.

Andreas,

The Thesaurus linguae graecae project files can be found at the url http://escholarship.org/uc/tlg_unicode. The proposal for U+2E16 is http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3bn592k6#page-1. They call it "DOTTED RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE = DIPLE PERIESTIGMENE". Here is the justification (grab from page 11):

That is also essentially the shape found in table 2.3 of the documentation http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/metre/metre.pdf for the LaTeX metre package for classicists. The characters in that table are all drawn with tex macros using pre-existing characters; the diple simply uses the mathematical symbol for greater than, >. Here is a grab of the relevant lines

On the other hand here are a few handwritten samples taken from a facsimile of the Iliad (dated 1901), http://www.stoa.org/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Stoa:text:2003.01.0009.

There is a large variation in shapes. To my eye and understanding, the intended shape looks closer to the TeX math symbol $\succ$, corresponding to unicode U+227B, http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/227b/index.htm than to >, larger than. I am sure you could do better but TeX users (like me) usually make do with what they have got.

Michel

Great stuff. Here's a more baroque / Greek-letter-inspired form. Thoughts/input welcome.

Oh, nice. Thank you David. I'll submit something like this for review.
(And I do hope you had an index of sorts to search those papyri…!)

Looks like the problem is officially solved: I just heard back from the author and he's very happy with this second form I posted above (the rounded one), which he says is exactly good, in keeping not only with what he had in mind but also with older publications on the subject.
Thanks again everyone – this has been a powerful demonstration of what Typophile can be, and do. I'm very grateful for your help.

That's great news, Nina. I'm very glad this has been helpful. (PS - I didn't know what the mark was either, until Google led me to a papyrology website.)

Here it is in real life; the book is out now. And I've included a big fat (well actually, italic) thankyou to Typophile in the colophon!

* Congratulations. Looks very well.

And now I’d like to see the *entire* colophone ;-)