[B-Greek] Why Monotonic Greek. Was: Free Polytonic Uncial GreekUnicode Font?

Curtis Hinson curtis at curtishinson.com
Thu Aug 10 00:34:45 EDT 2006


Greetings Dave,

Since I brought up the particular issue I will answer for myself.

This link is monotonic Greek. I suppose you must be referring to the
presence of the tonos (acute). The tonos is the one surviving
diacritical in use in the monotonic system, but certainly you don't see
the presence of graves, circumflexes, diaeresis (sounds like a digestive
problem :-D).

Commenting on that, it is sensible that the tonos was the surviver.
Since Greek lost it's tonal quality long before the Koine period, it
makes sense that the one diacritical still of use to Greek speakers is
one that now indicates stress, not tone.

It's been a while since I had my hands on printed modern Greek bibles 
other than
the Vanvas, which is old enough to appear polytonically. But I bought
the 1997 modern Greek demotiki translation for someone and it was
monotonic. It was a delightful book, sewn binding, lovely paper, and an
easy on the eye san-serif font and a flowing, easy demotiki.

Dave, does your Divry only have the tonos or does it have full 
diacriticals as I have described?  Also, your Orthodox bible was printed 
a couple of years before the debate about the polytonic system came to 
head in Greece, so it is unsurprising that it is polytonic.

Bless the Name
Curtis Hinson


Dave Smith (REL110, 211,212) wrote the following on 8/9/2006 9:39 PM:
 > James,
 >
 > I failed to mention that, along with my GNT that was printed in 
Athens, my
 > Dirvey's Modern Greek dictionary also uses both accents and breathing 
marks,
 > and so do at least some online Greek newspapers (i. e.
 > http://www.enet.gr/online/online).
 >
 > Dave Smith
 > Hudson, NC
 >
 > ----- Original Message -----
 > From: "James Ernest" <j.d.ernest at bc.edu>
 > To: "Curtis Hinson" <curtis at curtishinson.com>
 > Cc: "B Greek" <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
 > Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2006 19:57
 > Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Why Monotonic Greek. Was: Free Polytonic Uncial
 > GreekUnicode Font?
 >
 >
 >
 >> Are the Bibles that are used in Greece today monotonic or polytonic?
 >>
 >> James Ernest
 >> ---
 >> B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek
 >> B-Greek mailing list
 >> B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
 >> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek
 >>
 >>
 > ---
 > B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek
 > B-Greek mailing list
 > B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
 > http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek
 >
 >

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