ἀποκτείνω kill, slay,
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ἀπέκτειναν verb 3rd pl aor ind act
Can anybody suggest another way to handle this? How effective is it to install an ancient Greek keyboard on a Debian box? If I had such a keyboard, could I search long lists like this “master glossary,”
The polytonic Greek keyboard that comes preinstalled on any Windoze or Mac machinge works just fine.
The fact that you spotted the error should be encouraging to you. It means you are getting it.
The best way is to learn your paradigms and principal parts and paradigms thoroughly. You spotted the error – do you see why the form has to be aorist?
It’s been years since I’ve used a Debian system, but I think I installed the keyboard switcher package xkb via apt or kpackage. You may have to install additional packages depending on what desktop you’re using ( KDE, Gnome, Xfce). My favourite was always KDE. I loved Debian, but that was because it gave me a great sense of accomplishment any time I got something to work (especially in the early years)! Have you looked at the keyboard page in the Debian Wiki?
I don’t have a Linux box anymore, so I’m afraid that’s about all the guidance I can give you. I can tell you it is definitely possible to set up a polytonic keyboard in Debian.
I know of two ways to get a Greek polytonic keyboard in Linux.
First, by configuring an input method in Xorg.
Second, you can get a Greek polytonic keyboard in Emacs. #start emacs #open a text file
m-x set-input-method #at the prompt type
greek-babel #to see how English keys produce Greek characters
m-x describe-input-method
I have tried both ways, and I like the Emacs way better. Because they have somewhat different correspondence between the English keyboard keys, and the characters produced on the screen, I find it better to use just one.
Note that the Emacs way does not change the Xorg system configurations; it works exclusively in Emacs.
I’ve been fiddling with the fonts in Emacs, on my Ubuntu box, to get a good appearance. ( Disclaimer: I’m no fonts guru.)
I met a couple of problems, in Emacs. Some of the fonts present the composed characters (those with accents) darker than the regular ones. A second problem is that many of them lack the descending X (chi).
To fix this I installed the Ubuntu package of dejavu fonts. You can find the Debian package with a google search. Dejavu serif book looks nice to me, and it fixes both problems noted above. YMMV
I’ve been fiddling with the fonts in Emacs, on my Ubuntu box, to get a good appearance. ( Disclaimer: I’m no fonts guru.)
I met a couple of problems, in Emacs. Some of the fonts present the composed characters (those with accents) darker than the regular ones. A second problem is that many of them lack the descending X (chi).
To fix this I installed the Ubuntu package of dejavu fonts. You can find the Debian package with a google search. Dejavu serif book looks nice to me, and it fixes both problems noted above. YMMV
Emacs–>Options—>Set-Default-Font: (this menu choice lets you choose a font for use in Emacs.)
I also have a keyboard related question. Since I’m working with documents that are partly in Greek and partly in English, I wonder if there is an easy way to handle all this.
So instead of switching between the English and the Greek keyboard on my Mac, it would readlly speed things up to keep my keyboard in English and have the Greek keyboard separately as a pop-up. Does anybody know if this is possible?
You should be able on a Mac to set things up in such a way that the same physical keyboard can input polytonic Greek, and then input English into the same document you see on your screen. When you get it configured properly, you can type Greek, hit a hot-key, and then type English. Learning which English-keyboard keys produce the Greek characters doesn’t take long.
This is not too hard in either Windows or Linux, and given the Mac’s reputation, it shouldn’t be hard on the Mac either.
With a little google searching you’ll find instructions on how to set this up. I’m not a Mac user, so I can’t provide any more than this. To see Mount Holyoke College’s directions, look here:
Thank you. Is it possible to mark the accents with this method? For when I’m using my own keyboard with the Greek Polytonic keyboard selected as the input, I am at a loss as to how to mark the accents.
If you already have the Greek Polytonic keyboard set up and (as in Hugh’s link) have “Show Input menu in menu bar” selected so you can see a little flag in your menu bar, click on that and select “Show Keyboard Viewer”. That will show you which keys give you which accents. They’re not intuitive and take a while to get used to. For example, for ῷ you have to press Shift-[ then just [ on its own, then v on a British keyboard.
I use Shift-Cmd-Space as my keyboard shortcut to switch quickly between keyboards. You can set that up by going to System Preferences>Keyboard>Shortcuts tab>Input sources>Tick ‘Select the previous input source’ - you can choose your own shortcut by clicking on the existing shortcut and typing in whatever you prefer to use.
Hugh,
i set out to demonstrate that i had done some work on my own,
before turning to you for help; i ended up turning out a verbose and floppy statement of my case;
please, do indulge me once again;
do i have this right? set-input-method + greek-babel
turns an emacs buffer from U:** to BGU:
the entire keyboard is transformed to type greek;
most bindings are obvious- a = alpha, b = beta …
but a few are handled differently from other greek maps i work with,
and these are the ones i want to a. preempt, then b.replace;
a. theta- j, sigma- s/c, ksi-x, chi-q
b. q s c x
i had a similar problem with org-mode
my global key settings worked as i wanted in org-mode,
unless they were set to some other task in org-mode-map
(bindings- mode trumping- minor trumps major, and major trumps global)
SO, i disabled the keys which
a. are globally bound in my emacs
but
b. org-mode-map had given its own special tasks-
this freed up such keys so they could work “globally;”
for theta (i won’t need to remap ‘j’,
but i must preempt ‘q’ so i can give it a new job here
(add-hook 'input-method-hook
(lambda ()
(define-key input-method-greek-babel-map “j” nil))
(lambda ()
(define-key input-method-greek-babel-map “q” nil))
(lambda ()
(define-key input-method-greek-babel-map “q”
'θ)))
(i will have to provide for upper/lower case);
the two issues i can’t successfully google are
does 'input-method hook work like 'input-mode-hook?
how do i disable a binding, then rebind the key to a new job?
set-input-method + greek-babel; yep that’s what I do.
You ask how to change to change key bindings in input-method, greek-babel.
I just don’t know the answer to this.
However, by installing the ubuntu package emacs-el, I got a huge collection of elisp files, of which one is
usr/share/emacs/26.3/lisp/leim/quail/greek.el.gz
Unzipped,this produces greek.el, the elisp source code for the Greek input methods. I repeat: this is the Emacs elisp source code for the input-methods incorporated in Emacs.
I suggest you install the Debian package that contains greek.el.gz, unzip and examine this file. You can learn how the Greek input-methods are programmed. It must be possible to customize one of the input methods, but I have never done it.
Now, I have snipped out the remainder of your query, because it is beyond my knowledge. I don’t know how to advise you on that. A little experimentation might be successful. I’d love to hear how this works out.