[B-Greek] Free Polytonic Uncial Greek Unicode Font?

John McChesney-Young panis at pacbell.net
Sun Aug 6 11:11:00 EDT 2006


At 9:25 AM -0400 8/6/06, Carl W. Conrad wrote:

>I confess to being puzzled why one would want a POLYTONIC Uncial
>Greek font; isn't that really more or less anachronistic?

To add a minor footnote to "more or less anachronistic":

The invention of the marking of breathings and accents is attributed 
to Aristophanes of Byzantium (mid-3rd to early-2nd c. B.C.), and 
although only consistently used beginning in the 7th c., sporadic 
use, especially to disambiguate problematic words, goes back much 
earlier. E. M. Thompson's _Handbook of Greek and Latin Paleography_ 
refers to a mark used in Codex Alexandrinus to distinguish different 
uses of an isolated eta (p. 73; cf. Allen's _Vox Graeca_, p. 124ff.; 
and Metzger's _Manuscripts of the Greek Bible_, p. 12).

So although it's accurate to say that using diacritics with an uncial 
font as consistently as they're used in modern editions (e.g.) is 
anachronistic, they weren't *entirely* absent from the MSS.

The uncial 
>fonts of which I'm aware, Unicode, bitmapped, and post-script, are 
>all without accents.

Since the original request had been for a free font I hadn't 
responded to the thread earlier, but there does exist a commercial 
package that includes a polytonic uncial Unicode font, Antioch:

http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~hancock/antioch.htm

You'll find more information and a .gif sample of the uncial font at:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/GrandLat/greekfonts/frameUtilities.html#Antioch

The fontographer, Ralph Hancock, is a frequent and valuable 
contributor to the Classics list and a prince of a fellow.

I *think* the URL for this page with detailed information about 
various polytonic Greek Unicode fonts has been posted to the B-Greek 
list before, but in case not:

http://gainsford.tripod.com/fonts_unicode.htm

John

***

On Aug 5, 2006, at 8:19 PM, Jim Darlack had written:

>  Does anyone out there know of a free polytonic unicode Greek font
>  that uses Uncial letters?
-- 


*** John McChesney-Young  **  panis~at~pacbell.net  **   Berkeley, 
California, U.S.A.  ***



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