Greek semi-vowels IOTA and UPSILON

From: Constantine Stathopoulos (cstath@irismedia.gr)
Date: Sun Jul 18 1999 - 08:25:43 EDT


On 16/7/1999, at 4:14 ìì, adia@egnatia.ee.auth.gr wrote:

>Thanks for the info! I looked in my school grammar book (the only one
>I have at hand) and, sure enough, while it's not mentioned explicitly,
>it's used like you say. The difference is that in these cases, it
>extends below all the letters that are pronounced as one syllable,
>while in the examples I mentioned in my first message the syndetiko
>was smaller and exactly under the iota. Could this be because the
>methods used in typesetting the older books I saw made it difficult
>to set a syndetiko spanning more than one letter?

No. Same symbol, different usage/grammatical phenomenon, different glyph. Just like with PERISPOMENI the glyph is extended to match with the combining letter(s). Please read my initial message again for the iota/upsilon case.

If I understand correctly, you have looked into "Trantaphyllides, Concise Modern Greek Grammar". There is no direct reference to "syndetikó" there, although there should be a couple of examples under "synekforá" or other phenomenon. You'd better look into the original "Triantaphyllides, Modern Greek Grammar" for "syndetikó" in the chapters on "(other) punctuation marks" and "semi-vowels". A good idea would also be to look for "hyphen/yfén" in a good dictionary such as "Dimitrakos, Great Lexicon of the Greek Language" or "Stamatakos, Modern Greek Dictionary". Finally, I would highly recommend Dr. Haralambous' "From Unicode to Typography, a Case Study: the Greek Script, Proceedings of the 11th Unicode Conference, Boston, 1999" available at <http://genepi.louis-jean.com/omega/boston99.pdf>, which clarifies many of the issues concerning Greek and Unicode. (Caveat: the file is 4 MB!)

>Thanks for pointing this out. It seems then that the symbol exists
>in Unicode, but to use it properly requires full typographic
>control, since its position and size depends on which letters or
>syllables it's joining. I can't see how encoding more characters
>could cover all the cases possible.
>Anyway, how about using COMBINING BREVE BELOW for the limited case
>of semi-vowel iota and upsilon?

Perhaps. I hope that one of the Unicode gurus in this list can shed some light on this one.

Constantine Stathopoulos,
Iris Media Internet Solutions.



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