> I have a (hopefully) short question about "polytonic" Greek support. > Does anyone know what the idea was behind encoding Greek vowel+acute > combinations (without apirates, etc.) twice: first in the Basic > Greek section as vowel+tonos, for the second time in the Extended > Greek section as vowel+oxia?
It was done essentially at the insistence of the Greek National Body (ELOT) during the days of the formal merger of the repertoires of Unicode 1.0 and ISO/IEC 10646-1 DIS-1 to create the merged repertoires of Unicode 1.1 and ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993. It was a bad idea at the time, in my opinion, and reflected a not-fully-worked-out attempt by Greece to establish a polytonic Greek standard, I believe. > What is the recommended usage for > Classical Greek (and why is it better)? Greek base letters plus whatever combination of combining marks is needed, as appropriate. Better because it is a consistent approach which handles all of polytonic Greek representation without casing problems and other issues. --Ken
