From: Daniel Ria–o (danielrr@mad.servicom.es)
Date: Mon Dec 29 1997 - 16:04:18 EST
Edward Hobbs wrote, inter alia
........
>Then there are some list members who prefer to use lower-case letters for
>Greek transliteration, together with various punctuation marks which (I
>guess) represent accents and the smooth breathing. Now I recognize, again,
>that under b-greek list protocol they are completely free to do so. But I
>confess that I skip over reading those posts, because they require me to
>learn yet another transliteration scheme (and I am quite content with the
>one recommended by Edward for the list).
>
>I am wondering whether there could be others on the list like me, who find
>difficulty with these alternate transliterations (especially those that use
>the lower-case scheme), and if so whether we should say so, so that those
>who do chose to use such other schemes can be aware that as a consequence
>they reduce the numbers of those who can read there (otherwise) helpful posts.
...........
I rarely enter into standard debates, since:
a. almost everything in such questions is arguable,
b. People are very reluctant to change considerably the way they do
commonly things for only a small difference in the results, specially when
the advice comes from a perfect strange
c. It is the matter of large scientific projects, corporations, etc
to establish standards.
But since I always use a scheme to transliterate Greek in ASCII
characters that is different from the main system used in this list, and I
understand one should always have good reasons to separate from the rest,
it seems that the best thing I can do is exposing my criteria for choosing
a different scheme of transcription. First I give the scheme I (following
many others) use, and then I give the reasons I have to choose this
particular encoding:
The encoding:
alpha A,a nu N,n
beta B,b xi C,c
gamma G,g omicron O,o
delta D,d pi P,p
epsilon E,e rho R,r
zeta Z,z sigma S,s
eta H,h tau T,t
theta Q,q upsilon U,u
iota I,i phi F,f
kappa K,k chi X,x
lambda L,l psi Y,y
mu M,m omega W,w
acute accent = /
grave = \
circumflex = Ç=È
soft suave = )
rough ‡spero = (
iota subscript = |
dieresis = +
ap—cope = '
littera dubia = ?
littera amissa = !
In resume: use one and only one letter for each Greek sign. For the Greek
letters without equivalent in the Latin alphabet, use the Latin letter that
resembles the shape of the Greek letter (chi with an "x"), and the same for
the accents, etc, when possible. Type the letters in the same order you'll
do in hand writing.
---------------------
And here's my reasons for advocationg for that scheme:
- This scheme is practically the same as the BetaCode, which is the
only commonly accepted standard for the transliteration of Greek into ASCII
(it is the scheme employed in the TLG and PHI CD ROMs). The main difference
is that every letter is used in the correspondent case (minuscule for
minuscule).
- With this codification, you avoid the unpleasant appearance over
the screen of all-caps text (the betaCode) or mingled-case text.
- The diacritics resemble the appearance of the real signs (and
that makes them easy to remember), and they are always typed in the
hand-writing order (and that makes them easy to use).
- You don't need to use the encoding scheme of a specific
commercial computer font.
- There are at lest one freeware font that corresponds exactly to
this representation scheme. It is called *SPIonic* and you can download it
from the Yamada server (or mail, me, and I can send it to you, since it is
freeware, but I am not the author). Then, if you don't like reading Greek
with ASCII characters (and who likes it?) you can cut&paste the text to
your word processor and, voil'a, here's your text in GREEK characters.
IMHO, a codification scheme where every Greek sign corresponds with an
ASCII character has clear advantages vis-a-vis another scheme where the
aspiratae are represented with two characters (*ph, th, etc.) in as much as
you need a conversion program to convert text from such code into Greek
characters
- The same software programs and routines used to convert text to &
from Beta Code can be used to transcribe text in this scheme, only after
doing some changes (you can build a macro for that).
- Finally, you can use accents normally. I understand people who
doesn't like to type accents and other diacriticals in ASCII characters,
since, I must recognise, they make the text unappealing and hard to read.
But (and I beg the heroic reader who has been able to read this mail to
this point not to take this as just a pedantic assertion) I've always taken
to the letter the second rule of M. Lejeune to learn the Greek accent
system (I translate): "Avoid writing a Greek word without accent, and
accent every word immediately, even in scribble. Every word, once written,
must receive its accent". On the other hand, you usually don't recognise
the cases where the unacented word is ambiguous when you type it: the
difficulties arises when other people read it.
I do read the mailings of people using other encoding schemes. The
hard part is to *write* using a new scheme, but to understand most of the
other schemes is not difficult, as long as they have a logic and they are
employed with consistence. As I said, I am not advocating that this list
change it's habits, just exposing the advantages of other schemes.
Valete.
___________________________________________________________________
Daniel Rian~o Rufilanchas
c. Santa Engracia 52, 7 dcha.
28010-Madrid
Espan~a
e-mail: danielrr@mad.servicom.es
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:38:43 EDT