From: Suedaleg@aol.com
Date: Wed Sep 27 2000 - 03:42:24 EDT
I may be too late with an addition to this thread. I had an idea of a
response to why iota subscripts sometimes show up in the middle of word.
When learning Greek we were only told of it's occurance in the dative endings
and subjunctive endings. I had however noticed occaisionally that they were
used elsewhere, but always thought they were just strange forms. When I saw
the question I started noticing them more and paying attention to the form.
I think there may be a few more obscure(?) uses:
contractions such as E-EI would become Hi. This may be the same as a
sunjunctive use where the EI is lenthened to Hi.
Augment of a ?I diphthong: EI would become in this way Hi as well as AI. I
came across an example of this today. Luke 14:18 contains the form
PARHiTHMENON, parsed as a perfect passive participle of PARAITEOMAI.
As to the importance of these marks, this subscript notified me of the
presence if the I in the root verb. A purist could argue for the omission of
these marks, and perhaps the variations among such things come from this. I
am of the opinion that such things are helpful but not worth nitpicking over.
The purpose of written language is to bring to the reader's mind the
knowledge (or memory) of the spoken language. This is why we find variations
of spelling and accent marks (even in English). For this reason standardized
spelling is relatively new, only about 200 years for English, and
standardized punctuation even newer. If you like a challenge, read a book
written 400 years ago unedited.
I just thought my two cents might be useful to someone.
Dale Greenlee
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