Greek fonts for B-Greek
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Apr 20 16:14:57 EDT 1999
At 3:04 PM -0400 4/20/99, David Housholder wrote:
>At 12:42 PM 4/20/1999 -0400, you wrote:
>>how would you represent a rough breathing mark?
>
>If we use "h" then we lose our character for "eta." We also lose
>"i" for iota subscript.
>
>Bruce Terry circulated six schemes some time back. One was the
>"Standard digraph" that seems to me to be the simplest. The
>transliteration of eta in that scheme is "E", the only upper case
>letter used in that scheme. There doesn't seem to be an iota
>subscript available in that system.
>
>I tend to skim over the transliterated Greek and try to make sense
>of the discussion by reading the comments. I find all upper case
>very difficult to read. I'm glad to know there are others who find
>it difficult.
We are pushing pretty far back to Bruce Terry's schemes, not that any
objection is stated against them as such. I would just like to note that we
say on our FAQ that there is NO single PRESCRIBED scheme of transliteration
for Greek into ASCII that people MUST use; our rule is, in fact, "chacun à
son goût." We DO discourage the pasting of lines from Greek texts cut from
Bible study software into b-greek messages. I don't know that anyone wholly
likes any one scheme: the one used most commonly on b-greek is still not
one I would choose because it involves different equivalencies from the
keyboard and font which I use almost daily for my own work, but I've gotten
used to the standard scheme and I think that anyone who makes an effort can
get used to any scheme.
It is a little bit ironic, it seems to me, that folks should find the
upper-case letters difficult to read, considering that the earliest
manuscripts of the NT are in fact all uncial. The reason we opted for the
upper-case characters was to enable readers to distinguish the Greek
clearly from the English or whatever language in which their messages is
composed.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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