[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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