Iota Subscript - Usage

Usage

Uppercase Different styles of treating mute iota with capital letters

The iota subscript occurs most frequently in certain inflectional affixes of ancient Greek, especially in the dative endings of many nominal forms (e.g. τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ, τῇ πολιτίᾳ, τῇ γλώσσῃ) as well as in certain verb forms of the subjunctive mood (e.g. λύσῃς, -ῃ). Besides these it also occurs in the roots of certain words and names, for instance ᾠδή 'ode' (and its derivatives: ᾠδείον 'odeion'; τραγῳδία 'tragedy' etc.); ᾅδης 'Hades'; θρᾴκη 'Thrace'.

The iota subscript is today considered an obligatory feature in the spelling of Ancient Greek, but its usage is subject to some variation. In some modern editions of classical texts, the historical spelling with a restored full-size adscript 〈ι〉 is preferred. The same is generally true for works dealing with epigraphy, paleography or other philological contexts where adherence to original historical spellings is considered important.

Different conventions exist for the treatment of subscript/adscript iota with uppercase letters. In Western printing, the most common practice is to use subscript diacritics only in lowercase environments and to use an adscript (i.e. a normal full-sized iota glyph) instead whenever the host letter is capitalized. When this happens in a mixed-case spelling environment (i.e. with only the first letter of a word capitalized, as in proper names and at the beginning of a sentence), then the adscript iota regularly takes the shape of the normal lowercase iota letter (e.g. ᾠδεῖον → Ὠιδεῖον). In an all-capitals environment, the adscript is also regularly capitalized (ΩΙΔΕΙΟΝ). In Greece, a more common convention is to print subscript diacritics both with lowercase and uppercase letters alike. Yet another, intermediate convention is to use lowercase adscript iotas both for mixed-case and for all-capitals words (e.g. ΩιΔΕΙΟΝ), or to use a special glyph in the shape of a smaller capital iota in the latter case (ΩΙΔΕΙΟΝ).

In Modern Greek, subscript iota was generally retained in use in the spelling of the archaizing Katharevousa. It can also be found regularly in older printed Demotic in the 19th and early 20th century, but it is often absent from the modern spelling of present-day Standard Modern Greek. Even when present-day Greek is spelled in the traditional polytonic system, the number of instances where a subscript could be written is much smaller than in older forms of the language, because most of its typical grammatical environments no longer occur: the old dative case is not used in Modern Greek except in a few fossilized phrases (e.g. "ἐν τῷ μεταξύ" "in the meantime"; "δόξα τῷ θεῷ" "thank God!"), and the old spellings with -ῃς/ῃ in subjunctive verbs have been analogically replaced by those of the indicatives with -εις/-ει (e.g. θα γράφῃς → θα γράφεις). In the monotonic standard orthography, subscript iota is not used.