[B-Greek] Iota subscript with uppercase?

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sun Nov 23 20:46:47 EST 2003


At 8:20 PM -0500 11/23/03, bgreek at ntresources.com wrote:
>Does koine and/or classical treat the iota in, say, the word hAiDHS or
>HiDEIN [pluperf of OIDA] as an iota *subscript* ~if~ the word is
>capitalized? I know that it is not *written* below an uppercase letter; if
>written, it appears (I assume) as a normal iota to the right of the capital.
>
>I hadn't ever thought of this situation, so in the Unicode version of my
>Galilee font I did not include the code points for uppercase letters with
>"iota adscript"--assuming that they didn't occur in the NT (partly because
>the Unicode chart shows the iota as a smaller iota, but I've been told that
>the Unicode charts are in error at this point). I don't know if either of
>the two forms cited above do occur in the NT (or if there might be other
>such instances that do), but would guess that some such combination is at
>least theoretically possible.
>
>(I'm at home tonight, so don't have any resources at hand to check.)

I'd be greatly surprised that this should ever arise in dealing with the
NT; in upper-case letters the convention for printed classical Attic is to
use an adscript Iota, such that the verb AiDW (Homeric AEIDW), "sing,"
would, if written in upper-case letters only, be spelled AIDW; of course in
the NT era that would have pretty much the same sound as EDW. Ironic.

The growing tendency in recent years is to use the adscript even in
lower-case for literary texts of 5th or 4th c. b.c. wherein it's assumed
that this is still pronounced as a diphthong. The subscript itself is
nothing but a spelling convention indicating that this particular A, H, or
W was at some point in the past pronounced as a diphthong with iota as the
second vowel. Even in our printed GNT texts, the subscript Ai, Hi, and Wi
vowels are nothing more than anachronizing conventions: those who spoke
Greek and wrote Greek in the NT era didn't use that Iota at all. I think
it's a Byzantine invention.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



More information about the B-Greek mailing list