I need to find a font that will display the symbols for marking the long and short syllables in poetry in Greek or Latin. The font could even be Unicode. Any suggestions? Thanks!
Dean
Hi Dean,
Any Unicode font should do, e.g., Arial Unicode MS. See the macrons in Carola’s posts at http://discourse.textkit.com/t/exercise-65/4747/1
But please note that, as far as I know, there are no pre-combined Unicode characters that represent vowels combined with both macrons or vrachys and any other diacritical mark. Hence you cannot depict, say, small letter alpha with both macron and oxia (acute accent).
It may be possible to represent such characters by means of combining characters. But my experience of combining characters is that browsers do a poor job of rendering them.
Cordially,
Paul
<?xml version="1.0"?>
In light of the above malfunction, I withdraw my former exsultation.
hi Dean, i’ve been using a workaround for a while.
e.g. here is all of iliad A which I’ve scanned using Bosphoros unicode:
http://www.freewebs.com/mhninaeide/IliadAScannedWestTextBochan2005.pdf
I’ve had to make some adaptions though because bosphoros doesn’t have combined macrons + diacritics over long vowels, capitals &c. It still generally does the job though.
Will is particularly impressed that i use lunate sigma and iota adcript for my documents, which he acknowledges are far preferable to the medial/final sigma distinction and to iota subscript, each of which has no basis in the greek inscriptions or papyri from the period we study!
(i’m sure he will confirm this by following post) 
Oy!
By that standard, neither do case, spaces between words, or accents make sense.
hi will, yep you already know i agree with that; i.e. i study greek papyri and try to convert other texts into papyrus format.
scanned unicode is useful only for pronunciation, like pinyin for chinese. but if you studied chinese and only learned pinyin you’d be missing out on a crucial part of the language… and that’s what everybody does in greek.
my point is that if you strip out of a text everything but the letters and apply a papyrological font, it would all look similar to a greek papyrus… except for iota subscript and medial/final sigma, which are modifications to the actual alphabet, and are being phased out (like ligatures in the past) of good modern editions.
I simply don’t understand this. What useful purpose could this possibly serve? A language is sound and meaning — a language is not its alphabet! When I studied classical Chinese, all our texts were printed in a standard modern version of the characters, not, say, the version used in the Mawangdui finds, nor the lesser or greater seal scripts. Was there some mystical significance I missed because of that?
There is no intrinsic value in the shape of the letters used for Greek texts, except for palaeography of course. All this fiddling about serves no good but to make the texts even more difficult for non-native speakers (i.e., everyone) to read.
Ἄννις γ?αμματικός, ποῖον τὸν μῦθον ἔειπες;
there is a difference to me between a language and a code. a code to me is just something you can get meaning out of if you apply rules. if language was like that i wouldn’t study it.
if chinese was a major interest of mine, and someone told me that i didn’t need to study the characters at all because chinese could be reduced to non-chinese graphemes easier for me to read, i’d still study the characters because i’m studying the language out of interest, to see and engage with the way that native speakers wrote and read. possibly that factor is redundant in a semantic sense in a codebreaking approach to language but it is interesting to me anyway. similarly if e.g. hieroglyphs were a major interest of mine, i wouldn’t just stick with roman transcriptions and grammar books to decrypt meaning and express consonantal approximate sounds. there’s something interesting about hieroglyphs themselves, even if they don’t have modern punctuation and spacing and are hard to read! similarly with cuneiform for hittite.
i have intro books for chinese, hieroglyphs, hittite and greek… in only one of these they don’t teach you the written language as it was written.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
? i’m referring to greek. the ancient egyptians i’m thinking of wrote hieroglyphs, hittites wrote cuneiform (and other types of symbols), but ancient greeks didn’t write modern greek letters. what do you mean?
byzantine greek is different to ancient greek, just as hieratic is different to hieroglyphs, and yet my ‘learn hieroglyphs’ book doesn’t teach hieroglyphics through hieratic, because that doesn’t make sense, just like us approaching ancient greek through modern greek letters and format as you suggest above
i didn’t say throw out, i said above, byzantine greek for pronunciation, at least for now until someone makes a good papyrological font with the nice accents, e.g. long flat acutes, like i’ve seen in papyri; but for reading i’d like an edition of an ancient greek book in ancient greek, that would be cool but i’ve never seen one.
what’s strange to me is that the possibility of presenting an ancient greek text the way the ancient greeks wrote it is seen as bizarre, even though this is done for other ancient languages.
why does every single edition need to be modernised in this way? the value of trying an ancient greek approach, like i said above, is not to correct one letter, but to approach a greek text similarly to the way a native speaker might have, which is the historical interest which interests me in languages rather than codebreaking
the stuff that was added for us barbarians, e.g. accents breathing elision marks &c was added before lowercase, spacing &c were introduced!!! the alexandrians introduced these things a long time before the current editing conventions of spacing, caps v lowercase &c were introduced. it would be possible to produce an edition, like the alexandrian editions, with diacritics but still in ancient greek format, i.e. without spacing, lowercase &c. it would be interesting to try to read that. i’m not suggesting burn the current editions though?!?
but anyway the editors of the major editions will do things as they want and i’ll continue to buy them all the same
There are two situations in your list. In one camp are Chinese and Greek. In the other are Hittite and Ancient Egyptian.
Both Chinese and Greek have linguistic, cultural and historical continuity with people living today. For both of them we use contemporary or near contemporary punctuation and letter (or character) forms. When I read Daoist texts, the characters are modern, not the versions used two and a half millennia ago. In both cases, the knowledge of the ancient language was preserved in parallel with orthographic and linguistic change.
Egyptian and Hittite are only taught in their ancient forms because that’s the only form they’ve ever appeared in (note on Egyptian below). I’d add as an aside that Sumerian is often taught with Assyrian standard cuneiform shapes, not the most ancient ones. Again, most of the Sumerian we have comes from later sources.
byzantine greek is different to ancient greek, just as hieratic is different to hieroglyphs, and yet my ‘learn hieroglyphs’ book doesn’t teach hieroglyphics through hieratic, because that doesn’t make sense, just like us approaching ancient greek through modern greek letters and format as you suggest above
That’s not quite true. A number of standard texts presented in hieroglyphs are actually preserved for us in hieratic. The switch is justified for most people because hieratic is just fast hieroglyphs. Demotic is somewhat different case (non-Demotic Egyptian is usually in a chancery language, like Latin in the early Middle ages).
what’s strange to me is that the > possibility > of presenting an ancient greek text the way the ancient greeks wrote it is seen as bizarre, even though this is done for other ancient languages.
The other ancient languages left no offspring who came up with tools to write more quickly.
We can go on and on about this, but one question drives me: would using an majuscule font, without spacing, accents or breathing marks, etc., etc., help me understand Plato better? And not just better, but better in proportion to the great effort it would be taken to read Plato this way? Such a presentation would be valuable practice for text critics and palaeographers, but until someone can point to solid benefits to the general reader, I remain unconvinced any other purpose would be served by it that isn’t already addressed by a good apparatus.
I agree with Annis on this one. As long as it’s in an alphabet I’m comfortable with, I do not care if the Ancient Greek texts I read are in the Greek alphabet, the Latin alphabet, or even Katakana (okay, maybe not katakana, but you get the idea), let alone whether it’s all upper cases or not.
By the way, I once did experiment with transcribing my Greek into a “purer” form - all caps, no spaces, no accents. The only benefit was that the elisions came more naturally when I read aloud, but that was at the expence of having more mispronounciations overall.
That said, I think the lunate sigma makes more sense than the standard sigma, though the latter is second nature to me now so I don’t care that much.