5 ms·

If you really want some fun, try explaining to people the difference between modern Greek tonos (e.g. ή, Unicode 03ae) and ancient Greek oxia (e.g. ή, Unicode 1

If you really want some fun, try explaining to people the difference between modern Greek tonos (e.g. ή, Unicode 03ae) and ancient Greek oxia (e.g. ή, Unicode 1f75). Or in UTF-8: paul@tal:~$ od --format=x1z tmp/tonos-oxia 0000000 74 6f 6e 6f 73 3a 20 ce ae 0a 6f 78 69 61 3a 20 >tonos: ...oxia: < 0000020 20 e1 bd b5 0a > ....< It's super fun when you are the only tech person in a Classics grad program and everyone else is turning in papers that look like ransom notes, because every fourth vowel has a different x-height from all the other letters. :-) Here are the two Unicode ranges (PDF): modern Greek: http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0370.pdf http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0370.pdf ancient Greek: http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F00.pdf http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F00.pdf Then again, try explaining to tech people the difference between ή and ἠ and how you can get ἤ or ᾔ. :-)

memco 9y ago
My kingdom for a good monospaced font and supporting editor to handle these and RTL languages. I've found Setups that work with one or the other, but none seems to do it all just yet.
- eadmund 9y ago
  The combination of Adobe Source Code Pro & emacs works well for me.
Grustaf 9y ago
You're not saying the classicists confuse the smooth breathing with the acute accent, right? Only they can't figure out how to typeset them? How do you enter them nowadays by the way? In the early days of the internet before unicode there were special fonts from SIL for example that first of all were using Latin characters (you'd type W and it would look like Ω) and secondly I think had the diacritics as separate characters, so the font would combine them. It was messy but at least you could type it on a normal keyboard. You could even read it in its ASCII form, most of the hacks were pretty reasonable.
- pjungwir 9y ago
  Not smooth breathing and acute, but Unicode has two codepoints for acute accents (sort of). One is the modern Greek tonos, which often looks just like an acute accent but sometimes appears as a dot or straight vertical line, and the other codepoint is the ancient Greek oxia (the ancient term for the acute accent), which appears with all the other marks and their combinations (grave, circumflex, smooth/rough breathing, iota subscript). Personally I type Greek using a vim keymap file, usually when writing LaTeX. I believe my keymap file is influenced by those older non-Unicode fonts, because I type w for ω and ;h for ή and >~h| for ᾖ. But my fellow students would mostly use Word. I don't know how they would type the letters, but commonly they would mix the tonos letters with everything else. I think what was happening is that Word would automatically substitute fonts that offered those codepoints, so it would end up showing Times for the letters with tonos and Palatino for the others (or something like that). Hence the ransom note effect.

memco 9y ago

My kingdom for a good monospaced font and supporting editor to handle these and RTL languages. I've found Setups that work with one or the other, but none seems to do it all just yet.

eadmund 9y ago
The combination of Adobe Source Code Pro & emacs works well for me.

Grustaf 9y ago

You're not saying the classicists confuse the smooth breathing with the acute accent, right? Only they can't figure out how to typeset them? How do you enter them nowadays by the way? In the early days of the internet before unicode there were special fonts from SIL for example that first of all were using Latin characters (you'd type W and it would look like Ω) and secondly I think had the diacritics as separate characters, so the font would combine them. It was messy but at least you could type it on a normal keyboard. You could even read it in its ASCII form, most of the hacks were pretty reasonable.

pjungwir 9y ago
Not smooth breathing and acute, but Unicode has two codepoints for acute accents (sort of). One is the modern Greek tonos, which often looks just like an acute accent but sometimes appears as a dot or straight vertical line, and the other codepoint is the ancient Greek oxia (the ancient term for the acute accent), which appears with all the other marks and their combinations (grave, circumflex, smooth/rough breathing, iota subscript). Personally I type Greek using a vim keymap file, usually when writing LaTeX. I believe my keymap file is influenced by those older non-Unicode fonts, because I type w for ω and ;h for ή and >~h| for ᾖ. But my fellow students would mostly use Word. I don't know how they would type the letters, but commonly they would mix the tonos letters with everything else. I think what was happening is that Word would automatically substitute fonts that offered those codepoints, so it would end up showing Times for the letters with tonos and Palatino for the others (or something like that). Hence the ransom note effect.