[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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