[Biblical-languages] Greek monotonic and polytonic characters

Patrick T Rourke ptrourke at methymna.com
Thu Nov 18 07:15:50 EST 2004


To expand a bit on Peter's comments: there is a unicode technical paper 
that describes so-called "normalization forms" - i.e., resolves exactly 
this class of questions. Normalization Form C, which is the one 
recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium for online use, and which 
I'd personally recommend for use in all situations except where it is 
not technically feasible, mandates that the "monotonic" characters be 
used in preference to the polytonic ones where they are available.

Unfortunately, many font creators have misunderstood the Unicode 
Consortium's very strong warning that the letterforms depicted in the 
code charts are not normative, and have created fonts with 
monotonic-style tonoi for the basic Greek block and polytonic-style 
acutes for the polytonic block after its example. This has lead most 
users and publishers to distinguish between these characters when the 
same letterform should be used for both sets of characters. The font 
creator must decide if his intention is to create a font that is only 
appropriate for use with contemporary Greek, in which case he should 
ignore the polytonic block altogether and use the "monotonic" style 
tonoi, or one intended for use with the full range of Greek 
orthographic history, in which case he should use the polytonic style 
tonoi for both blocks.

Patrick Rourke



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