Talk:Iota subscript

Loss of pronunciation caused by spelling?
The notion that people stopped pronouncing iota subscripts because they couldn't see them properly is very interesting but really has no basis at all in fact. The subscript didn't appear until a long time after the pronunciation was lost. This is still quite new to me so apologies if there are any slight errors in the article but it needed major revision.

Usage in Modern Greek
An anonymous editor has removed a paragraph on the basis that iota subscript was never used in Modern Greek. However my copy of Divry's "Modern English-Greek and Greek-English Desk dictionary" (1966) clearly (for example) gives τραγῳδία for "tragedy", and δόξα τῷ Θεῷ for "thank God" - the latter admittedly a fossilised dative but nonetheless clarly part of the contemporary spoken language. I therefore propose to reinsert the paragraph. --rossb 23:24, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Anonymous users are entitled to edit here. These aren't fossilised uses. They're simply borrowings from biblical and classical Greek, borrowings of words that would have been written in their earliest forms without an ι subscript too. You say they were part of contemporary spoken Greek but did people actually speak a subscript? Really what you're saying is a bit like arguing that the odd French phrase appearing in English is evidence that English uses an accute accent. The problem with the additional paragraph is that it says that the subscript became obsolete at the same time as breathings and grave accents and that just isn't the case. The subscript has always been obsolete and has only ever been used as a device for quoting/ translating into ancient Greek. Orthographic changes didn't make it any more obsolete than it already was, nor do they prevent someone from quoting a word with a subscript as your dictionary did. Not meaning to repeat myself but your paragraph says "iota subscript is no longer used in Modern Greek" but this makes no sense because it was never used in any form of contemporary Greek. It's simply a device for correcting omissions from earlier texts. I don't want to get into a reverting war over this but you must see that your paragraph is at best misleading. In fact the ι subscript is being used less but this is because of the recent fashion for writing an iota beside the consonant once again rather than beneath it. I suggest that the last paragraph be replaced with something along those lines. 131.111.8.97 01:10, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

Square boxes!
Could somebody please fix the missing letters? I fixed one, and I would have fixed the rest if I had the slightest idea what they were supposed to be. 64.252.100.71 11:47, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I fear the square boxes are a problem with you computer's settings - they're unicode characters for showing polytonic orthography. Please don't "fix" any more because it removes accents. To view them, make sure you've got a font like Tahoma, Palatino Linotype or Porson installed and also try changing your font for viewing en in internet options to one of these fonts. Best.--Lo2u 15:18, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

Proposing possibly corrected image
Noticing that the caption under one of the graphics (the first one under Iota subscript) says that the graphic is wrong because the diacritics are in the wrong place, I created on with the diacritics in what I inferred to be the correct place. Is this one correct and should we replace the existing one with it? Largoplazo (talk) 00:51, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

No feedback, and I think the issue is clear enough that I've made the replacement. Largoplazo (talk) 05:57, 9 March 2020 (UTC)


 * I don't think the revised version, based on a caption posted in a series of edits from an anonymous IP, is correct. According to Goodell's A School Grammar of Attic Greek: "But if the second vowel of the diphthong is ι subscript or adscript the breathing is put with the first." The same applies to accents, since the word in question is alternatively written ΩΙΔHI = Ὠιδῆι = ᾠδῇ (as in the original graphic) and not ωἰδηῖ. The anonymous editor's assertion that the "correct placement would be on the second diphthong vowel, i.e. on the iota" is unsourced. Indeed, placing the circumflex on the iota would not indicate a diphthong at all but rather two consecutive long vowels.  • ΘΕΟΔΩΡΟΣ •   06:55, 9 March 2020 (UTC)