[B-Greek] Long/short vowels, macrons, and Unicode
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Mar 7 16:49:20 EST 2006
On Mar 7, 2006, at 1:48 PM, Steve Westfall wrote:
> I've noticed that Athenaze occasionally prints a vowel with both a
> macron
> and an acute accent over it, e.g., on page 8, the IWTA in
> KATATRIBEI, the
> UPSILON in KATADUNEI. (I haven't run across any ALPHAs with both
> macron and
> an accent yet, but I assume I'll run into one eventually.) From
> this I
> deduce that the authors of Athenaze do not consider the presence of
> an acute
> accent to be sufficient evidence, by itself, that the vowel is long.
> (Whereas a circumflex does indicate that the vowel is long; cf.
> Weir # 4).
>
> The question of "IWTA -- long or short?" was discussed briefly on
> this list
> in 4 postings from Sept., 2003, and appears to me to have reached
> the same
> conclusion about IWTA.
Certainly an acute accent may appear on a long vowel or a short
vowel, and yes, only a circumflex must appear only on a long vowel or
on the second vowel of a diphthong. An acute on a long vowel is by no
means uncommon.
>
> In light of this, I was interested to discover that Unicode's code
> chart for
> "Greek Extended" does not provide a code-point for any vowels
> having both a
> macron and an accent (of any kind). Is this an oversight in
> Unicode, or is
> the combination unnecessary?
>
> Steve Westfall
>
> ---
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Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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