Help with accented Greek Alpha please

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by kalwisti

In case it might be helpful, I am pasting a screenshot below from the online Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon. The basic meaning of "ananke" is 'force, constraint, necessity'.



Wikipedia has a brief entry on Hugo's interpretation of "ananke":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ananke..._in_literature

I know my ancient Greek is rusty (20 years have passed since I had it on school), but I am pretty sure the Greek characters spell 'anagke', not ananke. Strange...

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

I know my ancient Greek is rusty (20 years have passed since I had it on school), but I am pretty sure the Greek characters spell 'anagke', not ananke. Strange...

AFAIK, in Ancient Greek, a gamma followed by another gamma, a kappa or a chi was usually pronounced as a velarized n (ŋ in IPA notation).

[Jellby]

Sure, the letter before the K is the equivalent to our G, but, as Doitsu said: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Greek

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

AFAIK, in Ancient Greek, a gamma followed by another gamma, a kappa or a chi was usually pronounced as a velarized n (ŋ in IPA notation).

Like I said, it has been 20 years and it wasn't my best subject... Thanks for the info.

[kalwisti]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

Like I said, it has been 20 years and it wasn't my best subject... Thanks for the info.

The romanization system I'm accustomed to using is ALA-LC's (American Library Association - [U.S.] Library of Congress), since I work as a cataloging librarian.

The primary webpage for the ALA-LC romanization tables is here:

https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman.html

and the table for Greek is here (in downloadable PDF format), with some examples you might find useful:

https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/greek.pdf

My ancient Greek is probably as rusty as yours, and I rarely have the chance to catalog any Greek books nowadays. I studied ancient Greek for 1.5 years as a university undergraduate (I was fascinated with classical archaeology at the time), and took Modern Greek for 2 years before I entered graduate school.

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by Jellby

That's what I wouldn't do It's mixing Greek alpha and Latin a, which might look different in some fonts (kind of assuming 1 and l look the same, as they used to do in most typewriters).

If you go on that road, maybe you want to use N instead of Nu, K instead of Kappa and H instead of Eta, and ’A instead of Ά (and even use a mirrored L for Gamma if you can rely on CSS3 or SVG). If you absolutely want Ά to look like Á, I'd embed a modified font, where you have replaced that glyph, but the underlying text should have "Alpha with tonos", and not "A with acute accent".

But I'm a nitpicker

Thanks, Jellby and Freeshadow. I hope we can agree to disagree here. My original desire was to convey the original ancient Greek word, or as close as I could get it. But who am I to argue with Victor Hugo, or his printers? What I intend to do matches pretty closely the usage in the Oxford Classics and the Signet Classics edition.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by AlexBell

Thanks, Jellby and Freeshadow. I hope we can agree to disagree here. My original desire was to convey the original ancient Greek word, or as close as I could get it. But who am I to argue with Victor Hugo, or his printers? What I intend to do matches pretty closely the usage in the Oxford Classics and the Signet Classics edition.

I agree strongly with Jellby on this one. Using the exact Unicode character is the way to do it. Remember that people may also be reading the book using alternate methods (Text-to-Speech or Screen Readers).

Remember all that hoopla about the guy using the Unicode Minus Sign instead of the Hyphen? I mean... it looks exactly the same!

[WolfBack]

Why do you want to add a accent in second A instead of a straight A?
In uppercase words we never use the tonos sign in the middle of the word (in modern Greek mono-tonic system). We use the tonos sign only in the first letter if this is a vowel and use a tonos in accent.

Like Anagki, the tonos sign is on the second A.
In uppercase is written as: ΑΝΑΓΚΗ (without any tonos)
In lowercase is written as: Ανάγκη (tonos in second lowercase A)

Another example, is the word άλλος (other)
Uppercase: ΆΛΛΟΣ (tonos in first uppercase A) and άλλος in lowercase.

The poly-tonic system and ancient Greek the things is a little confusing... As mentioned already, we have dasia (δασεία) oksia (οξεία) perispomeni (περισπωμένη) and psili (ψηλή).

Like my name:
In modern Greek is: Αντώνης - ΑΝΤΩΝΗΣ.
In polytonic is: Ἁντῶνης - ἉΝΤΩΝΗΣ.

If you want a program to write in greek polytonic system and past it in a css code, then you can use this tool:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6s...lMdXBqczA/view
You must use a greek unicode character set for your system keyboard, I think.

[gawl]

Originally Posted by AlexBell

But who am I to argue with Victor Hugo, or his printers?

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).

[AlexBell]

Thanks for all three comments. I'll finish the book first and come back to this problem later. I've just finished Book 3, so I have a long way to go yet.

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by WolfBack

Why do you want to add a accent in second A instead of a straight A?
In uppercase words we never use the tonos sign in the middle of the word (in modern Greek mono-tonic system). We use the tonos sign only in the first letter if this is a vowel and use a tonos in accent.

Like Anagki, the tonos sign is on the second A.
In uppercase is written as: ΑΝΑΓΚΗ (without any tonos)
In lowercase is written as: Ανάγκη (tonos in second lowercase A)

Another example, is the word άλλος (other)
Uppercase: ΆΛΛΟΣ (tonos in first uppercase A) and άλλος in lowercase.

The poly-tonic system and ancient Greek the things is a little confusing... As mentioned already, we have dasia (δασεία) oksia (οξεία) perispomeni (περισπωμένη) and psili (ψηλή).

Like my name:
In modern Greek is: Αντώνης - ΑΝΤΩΝΗΣ.
In polytonic is: Ἁντῶνης - ἉΝΤΩΝΗΣ.

If you want a program to write in greek polytonic system and past it in a css code, then you can use this tool:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6s...lMdXBqczA/view
You must use a greek unicode character set for your system keyboard, I think.

I've just finished Book 5 (of 11) so I want to do some preparation to get the word right.

Let me summarise my problems:
- The character in question is in Ancient Greek - the book is set in the 15th century
- I do not know any Greek at all, apart from a few characters used in high school maths
- The second Alpha in the word is shown as an Á in the Oxford Classic ebook version, and the Signet Classic print version; and I accept that this is incorrect
- I not have access to any example of the word shown in whatever the correct version may be.

So, can anyone tell me please what character/entity/glyph/markup I should use for the second Alpha to make the word look like the word carved on a wall of Notre-Dame de Paris in the 15th century?

[kalwisti]

Originally Posted by AlexBell

Let me summarise my problems:

- The character in question is in Ancient Greek - the book is set in the 15th century
- I do not know any Greek at all, apart from a few characters used in high school maths
- The second Alpha in the word is shown as an Á in the Oxford Classic ebook version, and the Signet Classic print version; and I accept that this is incorrect
- I not have access to any example of the word shown in whatever the correct version may be.

So, can anyone tell me please what character/entity/glyph/markup I should use for the second Alpha to make the word look like the word carved on a wall of Notre-Dame de Paris in the 15th century?

Alex,
I believe that you have two options for solving this.

Option A:
Include the diacritical mark on the second Alpha. If you choose to do this, I would use Doitsu's solution -- given in post # 4:

The first capital Alpha would be encoded like this:

http://graphemica.com/%E1%BC%88
Greek capital letter Alpha with Psili (U+1F08)
< "psili" is the Greek word for 'smooth breathing [mark]' >
HTML Entity (Decimal):

PHP Code:

Ἀ 


The second capital Alpha would be encoded like this:

http://graphemica.com/%CE%86
Greek capital letter Alpha with Tonos (U+0386)
< "tonos" is the Greek word for 'tone, accent' >
HTML Entity (Decimal):

PHP Code:

Ά 


The diacritics are typically written at the upper left of capital letters.

Option B:
Omit all diacritics, except for the initial smooth breathing mark on the first Alpha. This was suggested by HarryT in post # 7.

If you choose this option, the first Alpha would be encoded the same as it is in Option A above.

(I prefer Option A, but since you're creating the e-book, you get to decide).

I understand your confusion; I think that although using the Greek-language grammatical terms (e.g., psili, tonos, oxia, etc.) is technically correct, it muddies the water for a non-linguist / non-specialist. The comments offered here have been very educational, and have opened my eyes to the challenges encountered when encoding something in a non-Roman alphabet.

[Jellby]

For the "best" of both worlds, use the above Unicode characters with diacritics, and embed a modified font where you copy the glyph for Á into the slot for Ά. The text encoding would be correct, the presentation would match the printed book. But I'd rather "correct" the printed book in this case and use the proper Ά.

[HarryT]

Are these glyphs present in the supplied fonts on all popular readers? It's fine to want to use the correct glyph, but a compromise is a better solution if the correct glyph won't be displayed. Not all devices and apps support embedded fonts!

[AlexBell]

Thanks again to you all. I really appreciate your patience and the trouble you've taken.

- I very rarely use embedded fonts except at the publisher's insistence - I don't like to take away the users ability to change font family.
- kalwisti's response seems the simplest suggestion, and is what I will use if it works on all my readers. Otherwise I will use the cheat markup.