[Biblical-languages] Apostrophe / Coronis

Peter Kirk peter.r.kirk at ntlworld.com
Sat May 3 17:16:11 EDT 2003


Thank you, Giuseppe. The article you cite is very useful, and should be
referred to by all who are working with Greek in Unicode.

I agree with Yannis' conclusions on the apostrophe, that 2019 is the
appropriate code point. There is no mention of the KORONIS (1FBD) - which I
note has exactly the same properties as PSILI (1FBF) in the Unicode database
(http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.txt).

His Rule 1 (section 1.1) always to use the monotonic accents (TONOS) for
acute accents, rather than the explicit acute accent (OXIA), is more
controversial. In some fonts TONOS is a vertical line rather than a slanting
one like a regular acute accent (although this is now recognised to be an
error). It may cause confusion to use this in polytonic texts. There is a
possible alternative rule: in polytonic texts never use TONOS but always
explicitly use OXIA or one of the other specific accents. But Yannis' rule
is a good one as long as everyone uses it consistently.

One of the problems with Unicode is that it allows so many different ways of
doing things "for historical reasons" (see Yannis' gloss on this!) but
rarely gives clear recommendations on which to prefer; when this is given,
it is published only in the printed book and not on the website
www.unicode.org. This is compounded by the refusal to change the names of
letters even when these are demonstrably misleading.

Yannis' Suggestion 6' (section 1.7) seems odd given that Unicode guarantees
the canonical equivalence of the two forms he describes here and recently
designed fonts should display them identically - if only by automatically
substituting (e.g. within the TrueType tables) the precomposed versions.
Later, he writes (section 3.3) that "software designers usually do not
implement composition of Greek vowels and diacritics (since, as they argue,
there is no explicit need for it)". Possibly this has been true, but Unicode
does require software to render decomposed characters even where precomposed
forms do exist, and recent font rendering methods provide proper support for
this.

I note that in the recently released Unicode 4.0 character list
(http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.txt) most of Yannis'
suggestions have not (yet) been taken up. Nor are they listed as proposed
new characters, (accepted, rejected or under investigation) at
http://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html, which suggests that they were
never formally proposed. (It is highly unlikely that his proposed additional
precomposed forms would be accepted.) In Unicode 4.0 only the following
Greek characters appear to be new - the capital lunate sigma is Yannis'
suggestion, but at a different code point:

03F7;GREEK CAPITAL LETTER SHO;Lu;0;L;;;;;N;;;;03F8;
03F8;GREEK SMALL LETTER SHO;Ll;0;L;;;;;N;;;03F7;;03F7
03F9;GREEK CAPITAL LUNATE SIGMA SYMBOL;Lu;0;L;<compat> 03A3;;;;N;;;;03F2;
03FA;GREEK CAPITAL LETTER SAN;Lu;0;L;;;;;N;;;;03FB;
03FB;GREEK SMALL LETTER SAN;Ll;0;L;;;;;N;;;03FA;;03FA

I am amused to see that the Greek Parliament passed a law which deprecates
its own title and text!

Peter Kirk
peter.r.kirk at ntlworld.com
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: biblical-languages-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:biblical-
> languages-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Giuseppe Regalzi
> Sent: 03 May 2003 11:54
> To: Biblical Languages
> Subject: Re: [Biblical-languages] Apostrophe / Coronis
> 
> Peter Kirk wrote:
> 
> > OK, not the Coronis then... but which apostrophe? I notice you use 0027
> > on your website, and it is called APOSTROPHE in the Unicode standard,
> > but in that document the "preferred character for apostrophe" is 2019.
> > So which apostrophe is an apostrophe is an apostrophe?
> 
> 
> Quoting from the always enlightening Yannis Haralambous ("Guidelines and
> Suggested Amendments to the Greek Unicode Tables," in Proceedings of the
> International Unicode Conference 21, Dublin 2002,
> http://omega.enstb.org/yannis/pdf/amendments2.pdf):
> 
> 
> Guidelines, Rule 7: Apostrophe vs. Smooth Breathing
> 
> rule: Use U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK rather than U+1FBF GREEK
> PSILI as an apostrophe.
> 
> rationale: the reader may ask "why on earth would anyone use U+1FBF GREEK
> PSILI as an apostrophe in the first place?" Well, the fact is that the
> shape of the apostrophe in Greek typography is exactly the one of the
> smooth breathing U+1FBF GREEK PSILI. The "Latin" apostrophe U+2019 RIGHT
> SINGLE QUOTATION MARK is a bit longer, and looks more like a comma than
> like a smooth breathing. This difference seems small, but is quite
> unpleasant when you have both an apostrophe and a smooth breathing close
> to each other, and this happens quite often in Greek. Therefore one could
> be tempted to use U+1FBF GREEK PSILI (which after all, is a spacing
> diacritic) as an apostrophe. (See also fig. 4.)
> This would be against Unicode principles: in fact, it is the rendering
> engine which should change the shape of the apostrophe in a Greek context.
> En passant, note that Greek is the only language in the world where a
> blank space is systematically inserted after an apostrophe.
> 
> 
> Hope this helps,
> Giuseppe Regalzi
> 
> regalzi at tiscali.it
> http://purl.org/net/regalzi/
> 
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