Talk:-ια

Marking ι as short

@JohnC5, Barytonesis: Marking the ι (i) in this suffix as short doesn't sit well with me. It is always part of a diphthong; the iota with breve only occurs in the artificial construct of the suffix. It doesn't really have length on its own. It could even be phonemically analyzed as a doubled semivowel, like Latin intervocalic i. At the same time, -ιᾰ (-ia) does look odd. — Eru·tuon 22:36, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

@Erutuon: fair enough. I dunno. —JohnC5 22:47, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

@Erutuon: I think I agree with you. If it had a length of its own, it would influence the placement of the pitch (ἀλήθεια would be **ἀληθεῖα). --Barytonesis (talk) 18:22, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

The only other thing I might consider would be to add 'COMBINING INVERTED BREVE BELOW' (U+032F) to the entry name stripping and use -ι̯ᾰ (-i̯a). Unfortunately, it does not display very well on my browser. —JohnC5 19:11, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

I would be fine with that. We already use combinations of diacritics that display even worse in most fonts (ᾰ̓́). ι̯ displays well for me in New Athena Unicode, but Gentium Plus has the diacritic too far to the left. I'm guessing the SIL people didn't know that this diacritic-character combination was used in Ancient Greek grammars, so they didn't optimize its display as they did for many other combinations. Frustrating. — Eru·tuon 19:17, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

@Erutuon: Didn't we consider adding New Athena Unicode to the project CSS style sheets? Did that ever happen? —JohnC5 19:23, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

@JohnC5: Yes, we did. You have admin powers; why not just do it? — Eru·tuon 19:26, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

@Erutuon: Where is the request specifically? —JohnC5 19:29, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

@JohnC5: The place where I proposed it (and where the CSS resides) is at MediaWiki:Common.css. — Eru·tuon 19:51, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

@Erutuon: there's the issue of -ιος (-ios) as well, actually. --Barytonesis (talk) 10:36, 14 September 2017 (UTC)