[split] f28v

[Koen G]

Again, Mark, it's fine to have criticism but then don't replace it with something worse. Like JKP says, the first glyph could perfectly be an "i" with a serif, as they were commonly written, but it simply lacks the horizontal stroke of a "4", medieval or not.

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As an aside, the discussion about omega and whether or not the capital form would be understood reminded me of something I read while researching Bernardino.

By far the most enigmatic letter in the monogram is the eta, which is pronounced like and is parallel to a Latin ‘E’, even though it looks identical to a Latin ‘H’.

‘IHS’ is thus an ambiguous combination, in which the first letter is both Greek and Latin, the last letter is a Latin translation of the Greek, and the middle letter is wholly Greek. The confusion caused by this mixture persisted for centuries, especially as people tried to grapple with the ‘H’ form, and to superimpose on it a Latin meaning which the letter lacked. Throughout the Middle Ages, as fewer people knew Greek, the ‘H’ of IHS was commonly considered to be an aspirated letter in the name of Jesus. Many considered the correct spelling of the full name to be ‘ihesus,’ and the three-letter monogram a straightforward,_fully Latin abbreviation of it. As a result, the abbreviated forms ‘I H M’ and ‘I H U’ were often given as accusative and otherwise inflected versions of the Latin. Some awareness of Greek, however, persisted throughout the middles ages^ Innocent III, for example, decreed that in Latin the name of Jesus is written I H S but pronounced ‘Iesus’. The debates about how the name was understood and how it should be written continued until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

From EMILY MICHELSON, Bernardino of Siena Visualizes the Name of God (p. 160)