Please bear in mind that polytonic vowels ARE used in the language
called Modern Greek.
/Because/ of the Ancient/Attic heritage living on via Katharevousa or
the occasional person persisting in polytonic orthography. In any case,
modern writing has traditionally not used macrons (and certain not
breves), and even more so because modern Greek doesn't have such a
length distinction (as stated), so there is no reason to include them in
whatever description or character set you use anywhere for the modern
language, unless you want to explicitly be inclusive of Ancient Greek,
but /then/ that'd need to be based in an argument for using them for
Ancient Greek, so ...
Oh, and here:
Assuming that fonts containing COMBINING DOUBLE BREVE are not
required or morally obliged to support it properly.
I have not said this was required.
Yes, Philippe really hasn't implied a requirement.
[...] "Modern Greek (1453-)" — other sources argue that it is more
reasonable not to speak of Modern Greek before 1600 — whereas the
official switch to monotonic orthography took place as late as April 1982.
Okay, so for sure one needs to be able to vary typography by
orthographic period; even if the spoken language had been constant for
the past 800 years, it'd still be so. I don't want to even start
thinking about the ways in which language tags don't reflect this :-)
which is a larger issue.
Stephan
