HYVERNAT, hi'ver'nat, Eugene Xavier Louis Henri, French-American Oriental scholar: b. S. Julien-en-Tarret, Loire, 30 June 1858. He was educated at Saint John's Semi nary and the University of France, Lyons, the Seminaire de S. Sulpice and Seminaire d'Issy, Paris. In 1882 he was ordained to the priest hood and the following three years was chaplain of the church of Saint Louis of the French, at Rome. From 1885 to 1889 he was employed as interpreter of Oriental languages at the Propaganda, Rome, and also in 1885-88 as professor of Assyriology and Egyptology at the Roman Seminary. He also spent a year in Armenia on a scientific mission for the French government. Since 1889 he has been chief of the department of Semitic and Egyptian litera tures at the Catholic University of America, Washington, D. C., where he is also professor of Oriental languages and archaeology. He is a member of the Pontifical Roman Academy dei Nuovi Lincei, the Roman Academy of Archaeology, the American Oriental Society and many other learned and scientific societies of both America and Europe. He has published actes des martyrs (1886) ; bum de paleographie cote' (1:::) • with Paul Muller-Simonis, Caucase au Golfe Per sique> (1892). He compiled 'Acta Martyrum," with Coptic text and Latin translation, with G. Balestri (Paris 1907-08). He edited tores ; scriptorum christian orum orientalium> and collaborated in Vigou roux's (Dictionnaire de la Bible> and The Jew ish Encyclopedia,' of which he was consulting editor.
ninth letter and third vowel of all the alphabets of western Europe, came into the Latin alphabet from the Greek. It is named in Greek iota, which is the yod of the Hebrew and the corresponding let ter of the Phcenician alphabet from which the Greeks derived it. Iota and yod (whence jot) being the smallest letter in the Hebrew and Greek, gave occasion for the New Testament j phrase cone jot or one tittle? In ancient Latin the i appears to have stood for a semi-vowel like y as well as for the vowel i: thus the Latins would write Ianus, Iulia, pronouncing them Yanus, Yulta. And till a comparatively recent date words beginning with I and I were in English dictionaries classed together.
The dot over the i appears first in MSS. of the 13th century. The sound value of i in all languages except English is constant and is equal to e in he and to i in him. What is called the long sound of English i as in hide is a diph thong made up of the two vowels a and i: this value of i in English is believed to have been given to the letter not earlier than the 16th cen tury; till then the letter had the same sound in English as in other languages.
In the standard alphabet of philologists the values of the vowels are about as in the lan guages of continental Europe, in which i is sounded as English e.
It is the general rule in English pronuncia tion that i followed by two consonants in the same syllable is short; yet when the two con sonants are Id or nd the i is nearly always long and diphthongal, for example, mild, rind; in wind (noun) it is short, but in wind (verb) it is long. Combined with o it forms a true diph thong of as in oil; it also forms diphthongs with e and a, as rein, aisle, or mere digraphs repre senting sounds in which often the i has no part; examples: seize, pier, friend. Usually a final e indicates that the i in a word is to be pro nounced as the diphthong; for example, fine as contrasted with fin; yet genuine is genuin; or the i is pronounced as e long,— quinine, Augustine.
In Pope's time and long after oblige was pronounced obleege and rhymed with besiege: the i in oblique is pronounced either e or i.
i.e. stands for id est, the Latin for "that is? I. H. S., an abbreviation for Jesus (Greek the H representing the long e. To mark the contraction, the abbreviation was formerly written I H C (Greek which in later times became I H S. The H being mistaken for the Latin H, the idea arose that I H S meant Jesus Hominum Salvator, ((Jesus Saviour of Men? and the mark of contraction over the H being thus rendered unmeaning, was turned into a cross, as on modern chasu bles and altar-cloths. By some the letters were taken to mean In Hoc Signo, "In this sign' (i.e., the cross), and by others In hac (Crate) S'alvo "In this (Cross) Salvation?