[B-Greek] Re: Change of prefered Language

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Mon Nov 22 10:56:29 EST 2004


At 4:25 PM +0100 11/22/04, Wieland Willker wrote:
>Raymond Regalado wrote:
>> Allow me to go ahead and see if this works.
>> This is in English.
>> ??t?? est?? ?????????.
>
>Obviously not.
>:-)

Actually it does show up as Greek unicode characters in the archives at our
web-site, but it shows mis-placed breathing marks and wrong
accentuation--and that brings up a related problem with any of the schemes
of transliteration or use of Unicode: it takes a bit of acquired skill (and
patience in its acquisition) to key-in the Greek correctly: one must KNOW
the equivalent keys to use for each Greek character and/or combined
characters, breathing-marks, accents, and subscripts. My experience is that
many composers of messages tend to take one short-cut or another, be it
their own guess-work transliteration scheme (e.g. "on" for hWN or WN), or
copy-and-paste from an on-line Greek text, or an attempt at Unicode--and
these efforts, more often than not, show up as gobbledygook in the messages
as displayed on our own screens.

>As long as almost all email messages from mailing lists and discussion
>groups are sent out in plain text format (at least as an option), this
>discussion is ahead of the times. Even if individual mails are possible
>in html, the daily digests are in plain text. Normally also the
>archives.

In our case, the archives--and perhaps the HTML-digest format will show up
Unicode, but the individual messages as distributed by our list-software
will not. What Wieland says is really the simple (plain-text ASCII?) truth.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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