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The iota subscript is a diacritic mark in the Greek alphabet shaped like a small vertical stroke or miniature iota placed below the letter. It can occur with the vowel letters eta , omega , and alpha . It represents the former presence of an () offglide after the vowel, forming a so‐called “long diphthong”. Such diphthongs (i.e., ) — phonologically distinct from the corresponding normal or “short” diphthongs (i.e., ) — were a feature of ancient Greek in the classical era. The offglide was lost in pronunciation during the Hellenistic period with the result that from approximately the 1st century BC onwards the former diphthongs were no longer distinguished from the simple long vowels respectively. During the Roman and Byzantine eras, the iota, now mute, was sometimes still written as a normal letter but was often simply left out. 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. The alternative practice, of writing the mute iota as a full-sized letter , is known as iota adscript. ==Terminology== In Greek, the subscript is called (''hypogegramménē'', the perfect participle form of the verb , ''hypográphō'', 'write below'). Analogously, the adscript is sometimes called , from the verb , 'to write before'. The Greek names are grammatically feminine participle forms because in medieval Greek the name of the letter "iota", to which they implicitly refer, was sometimes construed as a feminine noun (unlike in classical and in modern Greek, where it is neuter.) The Greek terms, transcribed as ''ypogegrammeni'' and ''prosgegrammeni'' respectively, were also chosen for use in character names in the computer encoding standard Unicode. As a phonological phenomenon, the original diphthongs denoted by were traditionally called "improper diphthongs" in older English works.〔e.g. ; 〕 Some more recent works prefer the term "long diphthongs";〔e.g. 〕 others retain the term "improper diphthong".〔e.g. 〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Iota subscript」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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