From: Alexej Kryukov (akrioukov@newmail.ru)
Date: Sat Jun 17 2006 - 04:05:50 CDT
On Saturday 17 June 2006 07:01, you wrote:
>
> Well yes and no. Pretty much any Greek typography expert will
> probably tell you that the adscript is correct following the relevant
> uppercase Greek vowels in the polytonic system. One does sometimes
> see subscript iotas in this context, and they are understood by
> readers, but they are not correct according to the canons of quality
> Greek publishing.
This is not exactly true. The fact is that iota subscript below
capital vowels was rather uncommon for European typography (outside
Greece) of 19th and 20th centuries. As a result, one can see that in
99% of editions of classical (ancient) authors combinations with iota
subscript are always capitalized to an uppercase vowel + regular
lowercase iota. This practice is described in any manual of Ancient
Greek language, and so most Western classicists consider any other
practice unusual or even illegal. However, this rule was never
considered mandatory in Greece itself: in fact most Gree editions
of the same time have subscript iotas even below capitals.
For this reason I probably would never use iota subscript
with capitals when publishing monuments of Ancient Greek literature
(since the standard orthography here is formed by the Western practice)
but would consider these forms even preferrable for any other types of
texts (i. e. Byzantine texts, liturgical books of Greek Orthodox Church,
etc.), since in this case the subscript glyph will better correspond to
the canons of quality Greek publishing.
Note that in most Unicode fonts prepared by Greek designers all
combinations with subscript/adscript are implemented by this way (see
for example http://www.greekfontsociety.org). Particularly I prefer
such fonts (and follow this practice in my own fonts) for the following
reasons:
-- if one absolutely dislikes iota subscript below capitals, (s)he
always can type a capital letter and small iota separately, while the
opposite is hardly possible;
-- generally speaking, all digraphs encoded as a single character
are very inconvenient for typesetting, because they are not spaced out
when we change letterspacing for the piece of text which contains them.
That's why IMHO the ideal solution for this situation might look as
follows: the font itself contains only combinations with iota subscript
encoded to the appropriate slots, which, however, are replaced with
capital vowels followed by lowercase iota by applying an OpenType tag
(which may be enabled by default). Unfortunately, I don't know such
an OpenType tag which would allow replacing a single glyph with multiple
glyphs in Wester scripts...
-- Regards, Alexej Kryukov <akrioukov at newmail dot ru> Moscow State University Historical Faculty
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