Page 1 of 1

Iota subscript with a capital letter

Posted: August 14th, 2017, 9:54 am
by Alan Bunning
At John 18:2, the NA28 text starts with the word Ἤιδει. Is the first iota really an iota subscript that for some reason does not show up under the Ἤ because it is a capital letter?

Re: Iota subscript with a capital letter

Posted: August 14th, 2017, 10:16 am
by Jonathan Robie
Alan Bunning wrote: August 14th, 2017, 9:54 am At John 18:2, the NA28 text starts with the word Ἤιδει. Is the first iota really an iota subscript that for some reason does not show up under the Ἤ because it is a capital letter?
Yes.

In most editors, if you convert ᾔδει to sentence case, you get Ἤιδει.

Wikipedia tells us this:
Different conventions exist for the treatment of subscript/adscript iota with uppercase letters. In Western printing, the most common practice is to use subscript diacritics only in lowercase environments and to use an adscript (i.e. a normal full-sized iota glyph) instead whenever the host letter is capitalized. When this happens in a mixed-case spelling environment (i.e. with only the first letter of a word capitalized, as in proper names and at the beginning of a sentence), then the adscript iota regularly takes the shape of the normal lowercase iota letter (e.g. ᾠδεῖον → Ὠιδεῖον). In an all-capitals environment, the adscript is also regularly capitalized (ΩΙΔΕΙΟΝ). In Greece, a more common convention is to print subscript diacritics both with lowercase and uppercase letters alike. Yet another, intermediate convention is to use lowercase adscript iotas both for mixed-case and for all-capitals words (e.g. ΩιΔΕΙΟΝ), or to use a special glyph in the shape of a smaller capital iota in the latter case (ΩΙΔΕΙΟΝ).