From: Alexej Kryukov (akrioukov@newmail.ru)
Date: Sat Jun 17 2006 - 12:00:29 CDT
On Saturday 17 June 2006 16:08, you wrote:
>
> Surely the point here is that <U+1F08, U+0345> and <U+1F08, U+03B9>
> should be different in Modern Greek.
In fact, the whole problem of iota subscript is really actual only for
texts written in classical Greek, because in most variations of
the Modern Greek orthography (even polytonic) this "mute" iota
is normally just omitted.
> The corresponding lower cases
> are <U+1F00, U+0345> and <U+1F00, U+03B9>, which are distinct in all
> styles.
In fact, both <U+1F08, U+0345> and <U+1F08, U+03B9> are semantically
identical in any version of the Greek language/writing system, so that
selecting the preferred way of representing the mute iota is just a
matter of a typographic tradition. This is basically true also for
lowercase, although the situation with <U+1F00, U+03B9> is a bit more
special: sequences of this type are often used in some classical text
editions to indicate that at the time the given text was composed this
"mute" iota was pronounced. Nevertheless, any person familiar with the
Greek writing system will easily understand that <U+1F00, U+03B9>
(without dieresis, of course!) is nothing more that a different
representation of more common <U+1F00, U+0345>.
> A classicist would probably write a diaeresis on the U+03B9
> in both the lower and title case forms of the second combination.
Adding a dieresis would be a mistake, because it would produce an
absolutely new combination, semantically NOT equivalent to those
discussed above.
-- Regards, Alexej Kryukov <akrioukov at newmail dot ru> Moscow State University Historical Faculty
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