[Biblical-languages] Greek monotonic and polytonic characters
Joseph Weaks
j.weaks at tcu.edu
Wed Nov 3 10:48:55 EST 2004
On Nov 3, 2004, at 4:51 AM, Peter Kirk wrote:
> On 03/11/2004 02:09, Joseph Weaks wrote:
>
>> On Nov 2, 2004, at 6:56 PM, Norbert Rennert wrote:
>>
>>> There seems to be some overlap in the Greek unicode characters. 16
>>> characters in the monotonic range (0370-03FF) are also represented
>>> in the polytonic range (1F00-1FFF). These characters are mainly
>>> characters with the acute accent. My question is which ones are the
>>> right ones to use...
> Actually, there is an official "supposed to" hidden in the Unicode
> specifications, see the chart
> http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F00.pdf. The Greek vowels with
> oxia/acute in the Greek Extended block (1F71, 1F73, 1F75, 1F77, 1F79,
> 1F7B, 1F7D) all have canonical decompositions to the same vowels with
> tonos in the basic Greek block (03AC, 03AD, 03AE, 03AF, 03CC, 03CD,
> 03CE), and the same with the capital versions. Similarly for example
> 1FB4 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH OXIA AND YPOGEGRAMMENI decomposes
> to 03AC and an iota subscript, not 1F71 and an iota subscript. The
> clear implication of this is that the preferred forms are the ones in
> the basic Greek block, and the alternatives in the Extended Greek
> block should not be used. Indeed, if the latter are used they are
> likely to be transformed into the former by normalisation processes.
> So Norbert's keyboard is doing the right thing.
>
> See also
> http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/unicode_gkbkgd.html#oxia, and
> this page from the top for more background.
Peter,
Thanks for this. I had made a mental note to check out precisely what
you delineate--namely, to which accented vowel does a combined
character reduce. I'm still not certain that it settles the answer with
all certainty.
Joe
**************************************************************
Rev. Joseph A. Weaks
Senior Minister, Bethany Christian Church, Dallas
Ph.D. (Cand.), Brite Divinity School, Ft. Worth
j.weaks at tcu.edu
**************************************************************
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