Greek Typography

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Paul Derouda
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Greek Typography

Post by Paul Derouda »

I've read a few pages of the Budé (1930) edition of Xenophon's Anabasis. I know in different countries Greek is printed with a slightly different typography. For example, French printing uses a different, medial beta for the middles of words, which I find pretty nice. Like this: βάρϐαροι. (I think it's less elegant with this font though).

But now in this book they print ὅ τι like this: ὅ,τι

That is, there seems to be a comma but no space between the words. It's not an error or a dead bug, since I've seen it at least 4 times.

Do you know anything about this? And on a more general note, do you know any good internet site about classical Greek typography? I did a little googling and found something, but nothing very interesting.

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pster
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Re: Greek Typography

Post by pster »

ὅ,τι is the indefinite relative. But your book will also have ὅτι the conjunction. Some books just have ὅτι for both which confuses guys like me.

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Paul Derouda
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Re: Greek Typography

Post by Paul Derouda »

I was just wondering... ὅ,τι does look strange and ὅ τι would seem to do the job to distuingish from ὅτι. I was wondering if ὅ,τι goes way back or whether it's a case of "l'exception française", just something that some hellennists tried that never really caught on. Like there was some guy in the 19th century who produced an edition of Homer with printed digammas.

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pster
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Re: Greek Typography

Post by pster »

Mastronarde says that writing the indefinte relative as two separate words is a "modern printing convention". He doesn't say anything about the comma version.

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