David J. Perry a d�irt:
Scripsit Michael Everson:Recently I saw a piece of epigraphical Greek, and while Latin "h" was written in the transliteration, the letter used in the actual Greek was ETA.Yes; that is the whole point here. In all variants of the Greek alphabet except the Ionic, eta stood for the "h" sound as in English (hence the equivalent shapes of Eta and H, since it was some western form of the Greek alphabet that was apparently carried to Italy). After the Ionic alphabet was officially adopted at Athens, eta became used for long e in subsequent standardized Greek writing.
Knew that.
Epigraphers need to indicate when they are transcribing into lowercase form, or transliterating, an Eta that was intended to represent the "h" sound andWell, when Cyrillic letter SHCHA is being transliterated, either s-caron+c-caron or sometimes s-acute is written when it is Russian, and s-caron+t is used when it is Bulgarian. So when eta is transliterated by epigraphers they should use either e-macron or h.
have adopted the Roman lc h as the means for doing so.
Or is the question "when they transliterate into modern Greek fonts"? Because then you have a problem -- since the Greek inscriptions and modern Greek are the same, no transliteration should be necessary. Though then one would have to know that eta meant, um, heta and that [h] should be read. I have seen Greek text where the Latin h was substituted for the eta in this context.
Is the question "should Greek h be encoded"? In such an instance, I'd say that the need for a Latin theta and chi for IPA would be a lot more urgent, if cloning a borrowed letter were to be contemplated.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
