[B-Greek] Adding accents

Randall Buth randallbuth at gmail.com
Wed Feb 17 06:02:01 EST 2010


>Am I the only person who finds it really counter-intuitive to type the
accent first, and then the letter?  It's not how I write by hand (does
anybody?), so I need a system that lets me do the letter first.  Or do just
the letters, and go back and put the accents in later ;-)
>
>I find I can touchtype reasonably well with a mapping that lets me 'cheat'
by equating theta with Q, omega with W, etc.  I know it's not how a modern
Greek keyboard is laid out (at least not according to the 'polytonic Greek'
keyboard mapping on my Mac), but it works for me and I'm not too proud to
use it.
>
>Ruth Mathys
>ruth_mathys at sil.org

I think that you are correct about typing accent first. There are two 'easy'
solutions with standard Windows and Mac keyboards.
a. One is to mentally pronounce each syllable to yourself as you type. I've
found that with practice one starts to feel the accented syllable at the
right place and to intuitively go to the accent first.
b. The other is to type everything without accents, especially appropriate
when writing letters to friends. Then if accents are needed one can go
back through the text and slowly add the accents with three strokes:
[accent] [vowel] [forward delete] on a PC, or
[backspace-delete] [accent] [vowel] on a Mac.

As to your comment on keyboard arrangement, the overlap of the national
Greek typewriter keyboard with English is about equal to any other
arbitrary system. For example, the Greek keyboard uses Eng. 'x' for
'chi' and 'y' for 'upsilon', which are surely excellent correspondences.
One should ask if it is a good idea when working with
a language to unnecessarily distance themselves from the 'language
owners'? Perhaps some don't think of Koine Greek being connected
in an unbroken stream with Attic in one direction and modern in another,
but it is.

ERRWSO
Randall Buth
-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth at gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life



More information about the B-Greek mailing list