On 15/7/1999, at 3:54 рм, adia@egnatia.ee.auth.gr wrote:
>In old Greek dictionaries, songbooks and other books where
>pronunciation is important, I've seen an alternate letter used
>for small iota where it's pronounced as a semi-vowel. The glyphs
>I've seen are either a normal iota with a breve below, or
>a turned iota with perispomeni (that is, the perispomeni
>(or maybe a tilde) is at the bottom).
Actually the letters are two, four with the uppercase. Both IOTA and UPSILON can be semi-vowels, i.e. pronounced together with the next vowel [e.g. "mi/a" (=one, fe.), "myal/o" (=brain)]. The correct spelling practice for those characters is to place an arc-like symbol below; the name of this symbol is "hyphen" in old Greek ("<yp\o" + "<\en", literally meaning "(pronounced) in one"), or "syndetiko" in Modern Greek (Triantaphyllides). The same symbol is used in grammar and metrics to indicate that two syllables should be pronounced as one, and also in Byzantine musical notation.
Using "perispomeni below" on the other hand was a common practice of the Greek printers, who usually did not have a hyphen/syndetiko available in their fonts. Those ingenious people simply inverted their IOTA and UPSILON WITH PERISPOMENI in order to print the semi-vowels. Of course, this was only feasible for lowercase semi-vowels, but it was usually enough, since their uppercase equivalents are extremely rare in non-specialized (linguistic, lexicographic, grammatic) context.
>Now, the first one can be encoded as U+03B9 U+032E. As for the
>second, U+2129 U+0330 seems like it should produce the intended
>glyph. Anyway, in both cases this is the same character so I don't
>think this is very appropriate. Is there an proper encoding for it?
>Should be added to Unicode as a new character?
Someone else will have to answer that. The only reference to hyphen/syndetiko that I know of is character 203F, which is described as "enotiko" (a very unfortunate - not to say misleading - description, since "enotiko" is the Modern Greek name for exactly that symbol called "hyphen" by speakers of English and other languages, i.e. a short horizontal line used to combine or hyphenate words, character 002D)
Constantine Stathopoulos,
Iris Media internet Solutions.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:48 EDT