[B-Greek] consonantal iota

John McChesney-Young panis at pacbell.net
Tue Jul 4 11:54:43 EDT 2006


At 10:48 AM -0400 7/4/06, Carl W. Conrad wrote:

>Perhaps the question to answer first is whether there is a 
>consonantal iota in ancient Greek -- or at least a consonantal Iota
>that ever had any representation in the standard Greek alphabet...
>  I don't think there is a Unicode
>character for that ...

There is: U+03F3, "Greek Letter Yot," in the Greek and Coptic block. See:

http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/yot.html

"What we have with [j], at any rate, is a sound which Greek has had 
for a long time-but never got around to having an alphabetic 
representation for. The representations we do have for the sound in 
Ancient and Modern Greek are after-the-event bolt-ons, and each has 
annoyances of its own."

(and much more)

In all but one of my fonts that include the character it's 
represented by a lower case Latin "j"; Galilee Unicode Greek uses 
instead an iota with a subscript caret.

There's also a brief discussion of it in W. Sidney Allen's _Vox 
Graeca^3_, p. 51f. He's more cautious about the evidence for a 
separate representation for the sound in Linear B than Nick Nicholas 
at the TLG page.

John
-- 


*** John McChesney-Young  **  panis~at~pacbell.net  **   Berkeley, 
California, U.S.A.  ***



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