Distinguishing Greek and Greek

[Mark Davis]

(I've CC'ed Yannis, so that he can bring in more people conversant with
polytonic vs monotonic to this discussion.)

>The difference between monotonic and polytonic is
not a distinction of script. Every single one of
the letters used is Greek, and has EXACTLY the

Actually, I don't think that is quite true. Fonts used for monotonic tend to
have more vertical accents. But Yannis can say more.

> Not at all. Hans and Hant differ because entirely
different ideographs are used, which is clearly a
significant script variation.

Well, entirely different characters (from the user's perspective) are being
used for polytonic.
 ά U+03AC GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH TONOS
 α U+03B1 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA
vs
those plus
 ἀ U+1F00 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH PSILI
 ἁ U+1F01 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH DASIA
 ἂ U+1F02 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH PSILI AND VARIA
 ἃ U+1F03 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH DASIA AND VARIA
 ἄ U+1F04 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH PSILI AND OXIA
 ἅ U+1F05 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH DASIA AND OXIA
...

>From a practical point of view, I'm not sure that there is such a bright
line between script and orthography as you would suggest.

‎Mark

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Everson" <everson at evertype.com>
To: "IETF Languages Discussion" <ietf-languages at iana.org>
Cc: <cldr at unicode.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2005 16:39
Subject: Re: Distinguishing Greek and Greek


At 16:25 -0800 2005-03-08, Mark Davis wrote:
>That is a possibility, but it is sub-optimal. It is thus again because (a)
>country differences are generally far less important than script (including
>major orthographic variants like monotonic vs polytonic), and (b) when
>language tags are matched, they are treated as most-significant-field
first.

The difference between monotonic and polytonic is
not a distinction of script. Every single one of
the letters used is Greek, and has EXACTLY the
same shape and identity whether in monotonic or
polytonic orthography. (That is not the case with
Fraktur and Gaelic, which are clearly script
variants.)

>This is very similar in that respect to Hans vs Hant, which is a choice of
>which different subset of Han characters encoding in Unicode that are used
>to represent Chinese, and the same reasoning applies.

Not at all. Hans and Hant differ because entirely
different ideographs are used, which is clearly a
significant script variation.

In polytonic orthography, a range of Greek
diacritics are used. In monotonic orthography,
all but two of these diacritics are not used.
This is a distinction in SPELLING, not in SCRIPT.
It is the same as when you find older Norwegian
texts with ä and ö instead of æ and ø.

I don't believe that *Grkp and *Grkm are valid
script variants according to the definitions and
descriptions of ISO 15924. Monotonic and
Polytonic orthography, however, are distinct, and
are just as much orthographies deserving of RFC
3066 tags as de-1901 and de-1996 were.
-- 
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography *  * http://www.evertype.com
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