[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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