Transliteration of Greek punctuation and capitals

Greek Learning Greek
1

I am interested in punctuation transliteration of Greek. I understand that they didn’t have as many signs as we do today, and that the vertical position and number of points indicated full stop, semicolon, and colon. However, if I got it correct, the colon (:slight_smile: did not mean to them what it means to us. It used to be more of a break at the end of a paragraph, whereas we have it as the mark for the oncoming list or a quote. My question would be if they had something of a similar kind, that would be used for lists? If so, what would that be, and how would it be transliterated to Latin alphabet?

And second question: are diacritics being used in transliteration of Greek text that is written out in capital letters? For instance, the word ὕμνος would be transliterated to hýmnos, but would ὕΜΝΟΣ then be HÝMNOS or HYMNOS? Some online sources I have stumbled upon claim one should not use diacritics when transliterating capitals, but I don’t know if that is a rule or not.

Thank you in advance.

2

Hello again Franz. There were no rigid rules for punctuation, and manuscript practice is very variable. That goes double for transcription of Greek into Latin. It seems copyists did not normally treat punctuation as part of the actual text.

3

Thank you, mwh. The absence of rigid rules therefore applies to titlecase script and accents, too (in transliteration)?

4

In antiquity there was no distinction between upper and lower case; most literary scripts approximate our upper case. Some ancient manuscripts have some accents, others none. Punctuation was usually a single stop. With the advent of “minuscule” script at the beginning of the middle ages accentuation became regularized.

As for Greek>Latin transliteration, when Latin scribes came across a word in Greek they tried to copy the Greek letters, or if they knew Greek would simply write the Greek word (usually without diacritics). They didn’t transliterate.