On Tue, 7 Nov 2000, Lukas Pietsch wrote:
> Apparently a lot of confusion has followed from an initial
> misunderstanding that a "iota prosgegrammeni" ("adscript iota") is a
> diacritic that looks similar or alike to a "iota ypogegrammeni"
> ("subscript").
> It doesn't. [...]
> If anybody has evidence that small, diacritic-like iota glyphs were ever
> used with capital base letters in Greek writing, please let me know and
> ignore the rest of this message.
I refer you to http://genepi.louis-jean.com/omega/boston99.pdf ,
pp. 13-14. Capital subscript iota is rather commonplace in Greece, and
occasionally turns up elsewhere; we certainly have several instances in
the TLG corpus, though almost always from the nineteenth century (when
capitals also bore single accents for many printers.)
If I had to choose between Prosgegrammeni mapping to Ypogegrammeni or
Iota, I'd choose Ypogegrammeni: the prosgegrammeni is obviously a
positional (and typographical!) variant of the ypogegrammeni, and is
semantically no longer tantamount to an iota --- though in *one*
typographical tradition, it is displayed as a lowercase iota. U+1fbc (*A|
in Beta Code), being the capital version of U+1fb3 (A|) = U+03b1 + U+0345,
makes more sense as still containing a diacritic than as containing a
letter on decomposition, and would mean one less exception in collation
(especially if StudlyCaps (tm) ever took off in Polytonic Greek ---
unlikely though this might be. :-) .)
--
Nick Nicholas; TLG, UCI; nicholas@uci.edu; www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis
"Electronic editors have to live in hope: hope that the long-awaited
standards for encoding texts for the computer will arrive; hope that they
will be workable; hope that software will appear to handle these texts;
hope that all the scholars of the world will have computers which can
drive the software (which does not yet exist) to handle the texts (which
have not yet been made) encoded in standard computer markup (which has not
yet been devised). To hope for all this requires a considerable belief in
the inevitability of progress and in the essential goodness of mankind."
(Peter M.W. Robinson)
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