Iota ( / aɪ ˈ oʊ t ə / ; uppercase Ι , lowercase ι ; Greek : ιώτα ) is the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet . It was derived from the Phoenician letter Yodh . Letters that arose from this letter include the Latin I and J , the Cyrillic І (І, і), Yi (Ї, ї), and Je (Ј, ј), and iotated letters (e.g. Yu (Ю, ю)). In the system of Greek numerals , iota has a value of 10.
6-476: Iota represents the close front unrounded vowel IPA: [i] . In early forms of ancient Greek, it occurred in both long [iː] and short [i] versions, but this distinction was lost in Koine Greek . Iota participated as the second element in falling diphthongs , with both long and short vowels as the first element. Where the first element was long, the iota was lost in pronunciation at an early date, and
12-696: Is a type of vowel sound that occurs in most spoken languages , represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet by the symbol i . It is similar to the vowel sound in the English word meet —and often called long-e in American English . Although in English this sound has additional length (usually being represented as /iː/ ) and is not normally pronounced as a pure vowel (it is a slight diphthong ), some dialects have been reported to pronounce
18-635: The Hebrew alphabet. The English word jot derives from iota. The German, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish name for the letter J ( Jot / jota ) is derived from iota. For accented Greek characters, see Greek diacritics: Computer encoding . These characters are used only as mathematical symbols. Stylized Greek text should be encoded using the normal Greek letters, with markup and formatting to indicate text style: Close front unrounded vowel Legend: unrounded • rounded The close front unrounded vowel , or high front unrounded vowel ,
24-447: The phoneme as a pure sound. A pure [i] sound is also heard in many other languages, such as French , in words like chic . The close front unrounded vowel is the vocalic equivalent of the palatal approximant [j] . They alternate with each other in certain languages, such as French , and in the diphthongs of some languages, [i̯] with the non-syllabic diacritic and [j] are used in different transcription systems to represent
30-475: The same sound. Languages that use the Latin script commonly use the letter ⟨i⟩ to represent this sound, though there are some exceptions: in English orthography that letter is usually associated with /aɪ/ (as in bite ) or /ɪ/ (as in bit ), and /iː/ is more commonly represented by ⟨e⟩ , ⟨ea⟩ , ⟨ee⟩ , ⟨ie⟩ or ⟨ei⟩ , as in
36-407: Was written in polytonic orthography as iota subscript , in other words as a very small ι under the main vowel. Examples include ᾼ ᾳ ῌ ῃ ῼ ῳ. The former diphthongs became digraphs for simple vowels in Koine Greek . The word is used in a common English phrase, "not one iota", meaning "not the slightest amount". This refers to iota, the smallest letter, or possibly yodh , י, the smallest letter in
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