[B-Greek] consonantal iota
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Jul 4 14:05:10 EDT 2006
At any rate it is admitted that the sound has no actual
representation in the ancient Greek alphabets. So it must be
represented by either a phonetic symbol or a borrowed character from
the Roman alphabet ("Y" or "J").
On Jul 4, 2006, at 11:54 AM, John McChesney-Young wrote:
> 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. ***
> ---
> B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek
> B-Greek mailing list
> B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
More information about the B-Greek
mailing list