, which is found also in the earliest Syriac and Palestinian inscriptions with little modification. Ultimately in Hebrew it became reduced to a very small symbol, whence comes its use as a term of contempt for things of no importance as in “not one jot or tittle” (Matthew v. 18). The name passed from Phoenician to Greek, and thence to the Latin of the vulgate as iōta, and from the Latin the English word is derived. Amongst the Greeks of Asia it appears only as the simple upright I, but in some of the oldest alphabets elsewhere, as Crete, Thera, Attica, Achaia and its colonies in lower Italy, it takes the form
or S, while at Corinth and Corcyra it appears first in a form closely resembling the later Greek sigma Σ. It had originally no cross-stroke at top and bottom. I being not i but z. The Phoenician alphabet having no vowel symbols, the value of yōd was that of the English y. In Greek, where the consonant sound had disappeared or been converted into h, I is regularly used as a vowel. Occasionally, as in Pamphylian, it is used dialectically as a glide between i and another vowel, as in the proper name Δαμάτριιυς. In Latin I was used alike for both vowel and consonant, as in iugum (yoke). The sound represented by it was approximately that still assigned to i on the continent. Neither Greek nor Latin made any distinction in writing between short and long i, though in the Latin of the Empire the long sound was occasionally represented by a longer form of the symbol I. The dot over the i begins in the 5th or 6th century A.D. In pronunciation the English short i is a more open sound than that of most languages, and does not correspond to the Greek and Latin sound. Nor are the English short and long i of the same quality. The short i in Sweet’s terminology is a high-front-wide vowel, the long i, in English often spelt ee in words like seed, is diphthonged, beginning like the short vowel but becoming higher as it proceeds. The Latin short i, however, in final syllables was open and ultimately became e, e.g. in the neuter of i-stems as utile from utili-s. Medially both the short and the long sounds are very common in syllables which were originally unaccented, because in such positions many other sounds passed into i: officio but facio, redimo but emo, quidlibet but lubet (libet is later); collīdo but laedo, fīdo from an older feido, istis (dative plural) from an earlier istois.
(P. Gi.)
IAMBIC, the term employed in prosody to denote a succession of verses, each consisting of a foot or metre called an iambus (ἵαμβος), formed of two syllables, of which the first is short and the second long (
). After the dactylic hexameter, the iambic trimeter was the most popular metre of ancient Greece. Archilochus is said to have been the inventor of this iambic verse, the τρίμετρος consisting of three iambic fed. In the Greek tragedians an iambic line is formed of six feet arranged in obedience to the following scheme:—
Much of the beauty of the verse depends on the caesura, which is usually In the middle of the third foot, and far less frequently in the middle of the fourth. The English language runs more naturally in the iambic metre than in any other. The normal blank verse in English is founded upon an iambic basis, and Milton’s line—