Talk:Iota adscript

Mixed approach?

Is adscript really a mixed approach? I thought that that capitals were always written with diacritics preceding and subscripts following and that the inclusion of subscripted capitals in some newer unicode fonts was a mistake (see here[1])--Lo2u 22:34, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

The "mixed" approach seems to be the most common in international practice, but I've seen it argued that the subscripted capitals, which seemed so strange to western scholars, actually reflected a common practice in Greece. I think it was Yannis Haralambous who demonstrated that somewhere. Fut.Perf. ☼ 17:17, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, given that the Greeks didn't themselves have miniscules until much later, that would make sense. The way I see it is:

• Originally, iota was written: ΛΟΓΩΙ
• Then, the iota was dropped, following its pronunciation loss: ΛΟΓΩ
• It was then introduced to literary texts for clarity: ΛΟΓῼ
• Miniscules and majiscules separated: λογῳ
• Adscripts were reinstated for majiscules: Ωιετο but λογῳ
• Adscripts are now bing reinstated for miniscules: Ωιετο and λογωι

But I may be misreading it. --Nema Fakei

I don't know about the exact history in the older texts. What I was just saying is that subscripts under capitals also exist: In Modern Greek printing in Greece, as opposed to printing elsewhere in the West. ΛΟΓῼ*. Western scholars are not accustomed to these, but, as the linked article provided by Lo2u describes, after the introduction of Unicode many computer fonts suddenly followed this convention. Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:21, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

• Note: This was supposed to be a Capital Ω with a subscript - it may or may not be shown like that on your machine, depending on your font. Mediawiki apparently normalises its strings, which makes it impossible to force the display desired. Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:24, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

That's cleared things up. Thanks.--Lo2u 00:16, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Unicode and the discouraged/compatibility character: Prosgegrammeni

I wonder if the contributors to this article could add anything on the discouraged use (by the Unicode consortium) of the Prosgegrammeni (which I think is the same as the Iota adscript). Unicode has the ‘Combining Greek Prosgegrammeni (Aͅ U+0345) and the Greek Prosgegrammeni (ι U+1FBE). The latter is among the canonical decomposition compatibility characters and maps straight to iota (U+03B9). which means its use is discouraged and its inclusion could be lost to some lossy normalization routines in text processing software. The subscript seems to have a slightly different appearance in the font I'm viewing it in, but there could be recent historic reasons for that (such as computer font makers trying to distinguish the two before they had been equated). It also could be an issue where Unicode expects font producers to produce a glyph variant of the iota for the releveant contexts where it serves as an adscript.

From these facts is it fair to say that an Iota adscript is the same as the Greek Prosgegrammeni? Also is the Iota adscript simply an Iota (with the adscript term used to differentiate it from the subsequen use as a subscripts)? Does an Iota become an adscript Iota only in certain contexts (when it appears next to particular letters)? Indexheavy 03:13, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Yes, they are synonymous. After all, prosgegrammeni and adscript are calques, as are ypogrammeni and subscript. Iota adscript is any iota following an η, ω or long α (except iota with diaeresis, ϊ). --Nema Fakei 15:05, 30 April 2007 (UTC)