meaning - If a “tittle” sits atop an “i” or a “j” (“ı” or “ȷ”), then where do “jots” sit?

In the KJV translation of Matthew 5:18, it reads:

For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

If a tittle sits atop an i or a j (ı or ȷ), then where do jots sit?

So what is a jot, anyway?

P.S. Here are the Unicode code points missing their tittles:

‭ i  0069       LATIN SMALL LETTER I
        * Turkish and Azerbaijani use 0130 for uppercase
        x (latin small letter dotless i - 0131)
        x (mathematical italic small dotless i - 1D6A4)
‭ j  006A       LATIN SMALL LETTER J
        x (latin small letter dotless j - 0237)
        x (mathematical italic small dotless j - 1D6A5)
‭ ı  0131       LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS I
        * Turkish, Azerbaijani
        * uppercase is 0049
        x (latin small letter i - 0069)
‭ ȷ  0237       LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS J
        x (mathematical italic small dotless j - 1D6A5)
‭ ɟ  025F       LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS J WITH STROKE
        * voiced palatal stop
        * typographically a turned f, but better thought of as a form of j
        * "gy" in Hungarian orthography
        * also archaic phonetic for palatoalveolar affricate 02A4
‭ ʄ  0284       LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS J WITH STROKE AND HOOK
        * implosive palatal stop
        * typographically based on 025F, not on 0283
‭ ᶡ  1DA1       MODIFIER LETTER SMALL DOTLESS J WITH STROKE
        #  025F
‭ 𝚤  1D6A4      MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL DOTLESS I
        = imath
        x (latin small letter dotless i - 0131)
        x (mathematical italic small i - 1D456)
        #  0131 latin small letter dotless i
‭ 𝚥  1D6A5      MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL DOTLESS J
        = jmath
        x (latin small letter dotless j - 0237)
        x (mathematical italic small j - 1D457)

    #  0237 latin small letter dotless j

Answer

Jot and tittle are both technological waste; scraps on the floor, left over from a few millennia of literacy technology. There isn't really a meaning distinction between them; both are nonce forms that refer to any small chunk of writing.

And both are used mostly as NPIs in negative contexts, especially in the open Verb + Minimal Direct Object Construction, e.g drink a drop, do a thing, give a damn/shit, lift a finger, bat an eye, eat a bite, ...

Jot comes from the Hebrew letter Yod (י), the smallest letter in the alphabet, representing /i/ and /y/ (to the extent they are different in any given language). When Greek adopted the Semitic alphabet, Yod got renamed Iota, and iota is also used in negative contexts:

He hasn't done one jot/bit/scintilla/iota of work.

Tittle is a variant of title, a word borrowed from Latin, where the sense of 'little bitty piece' of writing was fixed in Latin usage, according to the OED. It appears almost exclusively in the fixed phrase jot(s) and tittle(s).

In English, some have apparently reanalyzed jot as representing the dot on lowercase I, but that's just because it's the smallest chunk of our writing system. That dot on the lowercase I and J is just another example of a diacritic mark, like ö ő å í è ç š ū ñ.

Turkish uses both dotted i /i/ and undotted ı /ɨ/ to represent different (but related) vowels. İnterestingly, their respective capital letters are also different -- there's a dot on one (İ, i) but not the other (I, ı).

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