[B-Greek] IWTA -- long or short?

Barry Hofstetter nebarry at verizon.net
Thu Sep 18 21:47:36 EDT 2003


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brent Hudson" <brent at riveroflifembchurch.com>
To: "Greek Email List" <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2003 9:03 PM
Subject: [B-Greek] IWTA -- long or short?


>>I have looked through Smyth and Mounce's Morphology and several other grammars
that I have on my shelf and I have not been able to locate any "rule of thumb"
for determining the length of the iota.  While Smyth is good at marking the long
iota with a macron, LSJ isn't and so looking up suspect words is not easy or
even possible in many instances.  Any help on this one would be appreciated?  <<

One way is to read lots of Greek poetry, and pick something in an easy meter,
like dactylic hexameter.  Note every word that has the iota in the long vowel
position...  :)

Seriously, that's often the only way we know the difference between the long and
short iota, alpha, and upsilon, since the difference is not expressed
orthographically, as with epsilon/eta and omicron/omega.

N.E. Barry Hofstetter
Associate Pastor, Chinese Gospel Church
Professor of Theological and Biblical Studies
 The Center for Urban Theological Studies
         Philadelphia, PA
http://mysite.verizon.net/vze1yfx7/






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