Greek Unicode Issues
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These pages discuss issues to do with Greek and Unicode that I have come across over the years, both in my capacity as research associate of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and independently. This is not of course the last word on Greek and Unicode, nor indeed a comprehensive guide. That honour belongs, in the first instance, to:

• P.T.O'Rourke's Unicode Polytonic Greek for the World Wide Web (UPGW3), hosted by the Stoa Consortium.

There are also other places where you should turn to for good information on Unicode, and Unicode Greek in particular:

• The Unicode Consortium site itself (of course), including its FAQ on Greek.
• Donald Mastronarde's Unicode and MacOSX page.
• The Hellenic Mac User Group site on MacOSX Unicode support.
• The TLG Unicode Test page, which I maintain, and which contains detailed information on the character coverage of the various fonts I am familiar with.
• Alan Wood's Unicode and Multilingual Resources.
• David Perry's Fonts for Scholars site, which includes his excellent tutorial information on word processing for Classical languages in general, Word Processing in Classical Languages [PDF zip].
• Rodney Decker's Biblical Language Font and Unicode site, concentrating on resources for the use of Greek Unicode in biblical studies.
• The Wikipedia article on the Greek alphabet.
• Michael Everson's pages on his work on Unicode standards.
• Yannis Haralambous' site. While Haralambous and I have several ideological differences about Unicode and Greek typography, the man is a professional typographer with an excellent knowledge of the issues involved in Classical and Modern Greek typesetting; take what he says seriously, even if I don't always. :-)

The information I give here is more of a supplementary nature:

• explanations of why Unicode has done things the way it has (and will not do things the way you might want it to);
• some of the more obscure combinations of characters and the stories behind them;
• things you will find out there in text converted to Unicode to be wary of;
• and general background information of why Greek is so messy in Unicode.

So there is a fair bit of paedagogy and pedantry here. The audience I intend this for is people who will be working with Greek Unicode at a non-trivial level, either as programmers or as text encoders. The classicists among you will I hope pardon me giving some introductions to Ancient Greek here; I also go over aspects of Greek typography, both within and outside Greece, that I have seen over the years and that Unicoders may need to be aware of.

I am not a typographer or a classicist, so of course these web pages are no substitute for doing your own reading on palaeography, typography, linguistics, text encoding, philology, or politics. As this site continues to be developed, I will be adding links to other such material online, and to references, as well as providing visual examples from existing typography. This will take a while, as might be clear.

Table of Contents

1. Greek vs. Greek Extended
   1. The Polytonic System
   2. The Monotonic System
   3. Oxia vs. Tonos
   4. Titlecase
2. Gaps In The System
   1. Unicode Characters as Platonic Ideals: The fi ligature; Cyrillic т
   2. Precomposed and Composed Characters: Composing; Decomposing; Uncomp(r)o(mi)sing
   3. Particular 'Gaps': Smooth breathing on capital upsilon; Circumflex on epsilon and omicron; Circumflex on capitals; Non-canonical subscripts; Smooth Breathing on capital rho
3. "Don't Proliferate; Transliterate!"
   1. Spoilsports
   2. Epichorica
   3. Epigraphers vs. Linguists
   4. Corinthian EI
   5. What to transliterate into
4. Titlecase and Adscripts
   1. Titlecase but not Titlecase
   2. Adscript vs. Subscript: A Culture Clash
   3. Adscripts and Diphthongs
   4. Unicode and Adscript vs. Subscript
   5. Unicode Special Casing and Adscripts
   6. Stare Decisis
5. Greek /h/
   1. The 'istory of 'eta
   2. Who Writes heta
   3. Latin heta
   4. Tack heta
   5. Unicode heta
6. Stories of Individual Characters
   1. Letters
      1. Final Sigma
      2. Lunate Sigma
      3. Symbol Variants: Maths-Only; Glyph Pedigrees; Distribution of glyphs in fonts
      4. Pseudo-Monotonic Capitals
   2. Punctuation
      1. Punctuation Shared With Latin
      2. Quotation Marks; Single Quotes
      3. Question Mark
      4. Greek Semicolon
      5. Papyrological Punctuation
      6. Editorial Signs
   3. Coronis
      1. Crasis
      2. The Preempted Coronis
      3. The Rough Coronis
      4. The Modern Coronis
      5. The Dialectal Coronis
   4. Yot
      1. The Ancient Yot
      2. The Modern Yot
      3. Do We Admit the Kludges?
   5. Numerals
      1. Stigma
      2. Koppa
      3. Sampi
      4. Capital Numerals
      5. Keraia
      6. Left Keraia
   6. Non-Attic Characters
      1. Digamma
      2. Archaic Koppa
      3. San
      4. Sho
   7. Greek Diacritics
      1. Combining Diacritics: Diacritics shared with Latin; Circumflex; Diaeresis + Acute; Breathings; Iota Subscript; Ancient Editorial; Modern Editorial
      2. Spacing Diacritics: Diacritic Abstractions; Stealth Titlecase; Cheshire Vowels; Apostrophe
   8. Ligatures
      1. Kai
      2. Abbreviation Primes
      3. Drachma
      4. Rho With Stroke
7. The "Astral Planes": Plane 1 and Greek
   1. Semi-Greek
      1. Derived from the Greek script
      2. Used to write Greek
   2. Para-Greek
      1. Musical Notation
      2. Numeric Notation: Acrophonic Numerals, Papyrological Numerals
   3. Anti-Greek
8. Characters Outside Unicode
   1. Other Non-Attic Characters
      1. Archaic Sampi
      2. Zigzag Iota
      3. Tsan
   2. Other Ligatures
      1. Stigma Ligature
      2. OU Ligature
9. Script Mixing
   1. Wakhi Kurds
   2. Hijinks in the Basilica
   3. Heta
   4. Modern Greek Dialectology
   5. Casing
10. Interloping Scripts
    1. IPA: Particularities of IPA Symbols, African Orthography, IPA Remnants
    2. Uralic Phonetic Alphabet
    3. Archaic Cyrillic
    4. Coptic
    5. Mathematics
11. Ordering
12. Maybes for Inclusion

Acknowledgements

Thanks to: Jim Allan, George Baloglou, John Cowan, Mark Davis, Alexandros Diamantidis, Pim Rietbroek, Øistein Andersen.

References

• Brixhe, C. 1976. Le dialecte grec de Pamphylie. Documents et grammaire. Paris: Maisonneuve.
• Brixhe, C. & Lejeune, M. 1984. Corpus des Inscriptions Paléo-Phrygiennes. Paris: Éditions recherche sur les Civilisations.
• Bubeník, V. 1983. The Phonological Interpretation of Ancient Greek: A Pandialectal Analysis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Buck, C.D. 1955. The Greek Dialects. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Contossopoulos, N.G. 1996. Διάλεκτοι και Ιδιώματα της Νέας Ελληνικής. 2nd ed. Athens.
• Duhoux, Y. 1982. L'Étéocrétois: Les Texts—La Langue. Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben.
• International Phonetic Association 1949. The Principles of the International Phonetic Association. London: International Phonetic Association.
• Jeffery, L.H. 1990. The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Markey, T. & Mees, B. 2003. Prestino, Patrimony and the Plinys. Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 53. 116-167.
• Pullum, G.K. & Laduslaw, W.A. 1996. Phonetic Symbol Guide. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Thompson, E.M. 1912. An Introduction to Greek and Latin Palaeography. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Trombetti, A. 1928. La Lingua Etrusca. Florence: Rinascimento del Libro.