Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexBell
But who am I to argue with Victor Hugo, or his printers?
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Well, though I can appreciate your respect for Victor Hugo and his typesetter, I cannot fully agree: If you took this opinion of yours really seriously, then you'd have to decide to stop all work on an e-book edition, because this is (also) out of scope of Victor Hugo's original intentions. (He surely never thought of having his text published in electronical form...!)
What I want to say is: Every kind of re-publishing literature in a different format always involves some kind of (re-)interpretation.
The original typesetter probably used movable types made of lead and therefore was restricted to those letters that were available in his letter case. It seems very likely to me that (accented) Greek characters were simply not available to him, so that he was forced to fumble around, based on the types he had available. (That's not a wild guess of mine, I can see "ad hoc replacement characters" quite often in old books. For example, it was a typical problem in German books printed in some blackletter font that accented letters were not available at all, because these are so rare in German language that no manufacturer of lead types crafted these. Therefore the typesetters of that time simply used Latin accented letters as a replacement. But of course, that does not mean that they really liked this "emergency solution".)
Nowadays, with Unicode and electronic text formats, things are different, the "typesetter" is no longer restricted to a limited set of movable types. Therefore it is definitely recommended to (try to) typeset the text as it was originally intended (i.e. as a Greek word, therefore using correct Greek Unicode characters and using correct xml:lang attributes to clearly define this as a Greek word, so that the displaying device can do its best to optimise the visualisation).