Does anyone know what the New Latin adaption of iens (family to eo) was?

Question

I am guessing jens since j was the most common heading alphabet for replacing i as a first letter.

Addendum for clarity: One of New Latin's nominations was the adjustment to spelling of certain words, and the negation of conventional orthography. This was done with the wholesome intent of smoothing the loan into an established and standardised Middle English (the latter word being unascribable to Old English).

One of these dictates was that i ought to be relinquished and replaced with letters that could be better pointers to pronunciation. This was mostly in words that commenced with i, but was sometimes expanded to compounds. By my knowledge, the letter j was used as the replacer in the vast majority of cases (with g being second). There may be other letters used for this caste's replacement that I am unaware of.

Since eo had heavy employment in Latin (and so must have featured dominantly in its medieval revival), the word must have been remorphed during this period by the set laws (of which I do not profess complete knowledge of). So I would like to know either what the word's spelling was transformed to, or what would have been the most likely transformation in heed of New Latin's scholarly workings/methodology?

Answer 1

If the letter J is used in Latin at all, it is generally to distinguish the consonant I (spelled as J) from the vovel I (spelled as I). So you have spellings like Ionius and Julius and so on.

Since the first letter of iens is undoubtedly a vowel, the spelling jens would be incorrect.

Edit: The Unbrutal Russian remarks not without justification that one can find texts that use J at the beginning of words, regardless of pronunciation, with more or less consistency. (Sometimes also at the end, so you have things like vtj or testes jnterfuerunt uocatj et rogatj, giving the thing an Esperanto feel. Note that the linked texts are late-nineteenth century reproductions of medieval documents.) But that is definitely not the usual rule in Neo-Latin literature.

Answer 2

Assuming I've managed to grasp the gist of the question correctly:

• I~i and J~j, U~u and V~v have been, and to some extent continue to be variant forms of the same Latin letter, like there are many ways to write the letter G, or like there are different fonts for most scripts in general.
• In some fonts or hands they look more like one or the other, but they remain the same letter with absolutely no difference in use. Any one of them can stand for a vowel or a consonant. All of these letter-forms existed as a continuum from the earliest times (some are easier to carve, others to write by hand).
• Writing consecutive occurrences of these letters with two different letter-forms has been a common, even standard practice since the Renaissance (New Latin), where you find spellings ij and vu, unless followed/preceded by another one: iij, vuu.
  • I don't remember coming across the opposite sequence (ji, uv).
• Another convention, particularly common after the Enlightenment, was to always spell i and u when lowercase, and J and V when uppercase, and this is continued even today in certain publications.
• Often you will find these two conventions employed together: J/V when uppercase + i/u when lowercase, unless following itself, in which case j/v.
• Yet another option is writing j/v when initial: jllius, vltimi, judicii, Vrbs. It seems that this was far more common for v~V: here's one example.
• The first person to propose the modern use of J~j for the consonant /j/ as opposed to the vowel /i(:)/, spelled as I/i, is said to have been Gian Giorgio Trissino in a letter from 1524. This convention has been usual in modern European languages, but didn't gain adoption with Latin till about the 19th century (rough personal estimate), specifically in works on linguistics, because science, yay. There's a name for these two letters/that convention that I can't seem to be able to find for some reason D:
  • Part of the reason it didn't gain favour with Latin is because it's not always possible to tell when it's a vowel or a consonant, and there are (many) cases where it can be treated/pronounced as either depending on personal preference.
  • Amusingly enough, modern Italian uses I~i for /j/, but Italian regional languages/dialects normally use J~j, and it's not uncommon in 18-19th century standard Italian.
• As a result of the coexistence of all these competing or even complementary conventions, this whole issue today often shows a glaring lack of consistency or logic, since many who distinguish V~v from U~u on the basis of the sound they represent don't do so with J~j and I~i (wiktionary is one example), and the Oxford Latin Dictionary even takes this mess a step further by only employing the letter-forms i, u, I and V.

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• So to answer your question as far as I understand it, jens and iens had been equivalent spellings up to about the 16th century, at which point some people started coming up with conventions to restrict where to write them, but for most people they remained equivalent spellings up to about the 19th century; and abstractly speaking, they remain the same letter even today, because Latin has no single, standard or official orthography, and people continue to employ different conventions for different letter-forms. So jens is the "wrong" spelling only from the point of view of some of these conventions, but in the abstract it's fully equivalent to the spelling iens.
• If your question is instead mainly about English orthography, it was not until the 17th century that English adopted the modern use of J~j and V~v, while before that they were used exactly like in Latin, whatever convention (of the ones described above) the writer/printer adopted. The word iens has never been borrowed into English as far as I know; if it had, it would have probably been pronounced as "eyens" and spelt as iens. In short, there's no connection between that word and recent developments in English orthography.