[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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