Iota subscript

The iota subscript was invented by Byzantine philologists in the 12th century AD as an editorial symbol marking the places where such spelling variation occurred.

In Greek, the subscript is called ὑπογεγραμμένη (hupogegramménē), the perfect passive participle form of the verb ὑπογράφω (hupográphō), "to write below".

[7] The Greek terms, transliterated according to their modern pronunciation as ypogegrammeni and prosgegrammeni respectively, were also chosen for use in character names in the computer encoding standard Unicode.

Besides these it also occurs in the roots of certain words and names, for instance ᾠδή, ode (and its derivatives: ᾠδεῖον, odeon; τραγῳδία, tragedy etc.

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 original pronunciation of long diphthongs is represented by the use of iota adscript, with accents and breathing marks placed on the first vowel.

[13] The same is generally true for works dealing with epigraphy, paleography or other philological contexts where adherence to original historical spellings and linguistic correctness is considered important.

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.

It can also be found regularly in older printed Demotic in the 19th and early 20th century, but it is generally absent from the modern spelling of present-day standard 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!

In the ASCII-based encoding standard Beta Code, the iota subscript is represented by the pipe character "|" placed after the letter.