Hi Pablo,
thanks for this; it is very informative and clear. Just one short remark
and one correction:
1. "Before 1982, Greek ort[h]ography was polytonic." That's a bit of an
oversimplification. I'm no expert here, but I think many Greek print
publications had already given up on using circumflex and grave accent
or at least greatly simplified their use; the law of 1982 simple
codified what had been developing for some time. Your sentence makes it
sound like a sudden and random decision.
2. I think it would be worth pointing out that unfortunately, Greek
lowercase letters with acute accent occur separately in two unicode
blocks: the combinations in U+03AC-U+03AF and U+03CC-U+03CF ("Greek
small letter X with tonos") are functionally identical to the
combinations in the U+1F7 block ("Greek small letter X with acute
accent"). This is a source of confusion both in fonts and in
programming, because some programs normalize these letters, so for
string operations and searches, you may obtain surprising results.
Thank you for the article!
Thomas
On 1/21/23 13:16, Pablo Rodriguez via ntg-context wrote:
Dear list,
just in case it might help, I’ve rewritten the Greek entry in the wiki:
https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Greek
Although nobody seemed to have mentioned them (afaIk), there are two issues:
1. Hyphenation patterns are different for ancient, monotonic and modern
polytonic Greek. Greek ortography was polytonic before 1982.
ConTeXt includes patterns for ancient and monotonic Greek, but none for
modern polytonic Greek
(http://mirror.ctan.org/language/hyph-utf8/tex/generic/hyph-utf8/patterns/tex/hyph-el-polyton.tex).
Ironically, modern polytonic Greek patterns would be required to typeset
both the act and the decree that introduced the monotonic ortography.
2. Greek doesn’t seem to have language-dependent commands (such as
\currentdate).
In both cases, Hans will reply that nobody asked for any of them.
Of course, I totally agree. AfaIk, nobody asked for these features.
Just in case it might help,
Pablo
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