Long i (Latin: i longum or [littera] i longa), written ⟨ꟾ⟩, is a variant of the letter i found in ancient and early medieval forms of the Latin script.

History

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In inscriptions dating to the early Roman Empire, it is used frequently but inconsistently to transcribe the long vowel /iː/. In Gordon's 1957 study of inscriptions, it represented this vowel approximately 4% of the time in the 1st century CE, then 22.6% in the 2nd century, 11% in the 3rd, and not at all from the 4th century onward,[1] reflecting a loss of phonemic vowel length by this time (one of the phonological changes from Classical Latin to Proto-Romance). In this role it is equivalent to the (also inconsistently-used) apex, which can appear on any long vowel: á é í ó v́ /aː uː/. An example would be fIliI, which is generally spelled fīliī today, using macrons rather than apices to indicate long vowels. On rare occasions, an apex could combine with long i to form Í, e.g. dÍs·mánibus.

The long i could also be used to indicate the semivowel [j], e.g. ⟨IVSTVS or CVIIVS,[2] the latter also CVIVS, pronounced [ˈjʊstʊs, ˈkʊjːʊs]. It was also used to write a close allophone [i] of the short i phoneme, used before another vowel, as in CLAVDIO, representing [ˈklau̯.di.oː].[3]

Later on in the late Empire and afterwards, in some forms of New Roman cursive, as well as pre-Carolingian scripts of the Early Middle Ages such as Visigothic or Merovingian, it came to stand for the vowel ⟨i⟩ in word-initial position. For example, iNponunt in umeroſ⟩, which would be inpōnunt in umerōs in modern spelling.

In Unicode

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The character exists in Unicode as U+A7FE latin epigraphic letter i longa, ⟨ꟾ⟩, having been suggested in a 2006 proposal.[4]

Examples

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References

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  1. ^ Gordon, A. E. (1957). Contributions to the Palaeography of Latin inscriptions. p. 216.
  2. ^ Allen, Sydney (1978). Vox Latina: The Pronunciation of Classical Latin (2nd ed.). Gateshead, England: Athenaeum Press. pp. 37–39. ISBN 0-521-22049-1.
  3. ^ Allen, Vox Latina, pp. 51-52, giving the examples dIes, prIvsqvam, pIvs
  4. ^ Davud J. Perry (2006-08-01). "Proposal to Add Additional Ancient Roman Characters to UCS" (PDF). Retrieved 2018-09-30.

See also

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