"Constantine Stathopoulos" <cstath@irismedia.gr> wrote:
>Actually the letters are two, four with the uppercase. Both IOTA and
>UPSILON can be semi-vowels
...
>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).
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?
>>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"
...
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?
-- Alejandros Diamandidis * adia@egnatia.ee.auth.gr
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:48 EDT