Talk:Iota adscript

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article falls within the scope of WikiProject Writing systems, a WikiProject interested in improving the encyclopaedic coverage and content of articles relating to writing systems on Wikipedia. If you would like to help out, you are welcome to drop by the project page and/or leave a query at the project’s talk page.
???	This article has not yet been assigned a rating on the Project’s quality scale.
???	This article has not yet been assigned a rating on the Project’s importance scale.

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)