Distinguishing Greek and Greek

[Michael Everson]

At 17:11 -0800 2005-03-08, Mark Davis wrote:

>  >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.

That is still not a script difference in the way 
it is defined in ISO 15924. And I said that every 
single one of the LETTERS used is Greek, and has 
exactly the same shape etc. The only difference 
between the two is that one uses one set of 
diacritical marks, and one uses another, with 
overlap at least with the DIALYTIKA if not the 
TONOS.

>  > 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.
>  ¿ U+03AC GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH TONOS
>  Éø U+03B1 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA

There is only one alpha there.

>vs
>those plus
>  ? U+1F00 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH PSILI
>  ? U+1F01 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH DASIA
>  ? U+1F02 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH PSILI AND VARIA
>  ? U+1F03 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH DASIA AND VARIA
>  ? U+1F04 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH PSILI AND OXIA
>  ? U+1F05 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH DASIA AND OXIA
>...

That's the same alpha.

The difference is one of SPELLING, not one of 
SCRIPT. One orthography spells with lots of 
accents, the other does not.

>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.

What you propose is in no way analogous to the 
script-variant distinction between Latn and Latf 
and Latg.

Had we not disunified Coptic from Greek, a valid 
variant of Grek might have been Grcp. But that's 
not what you're talking about.
-- 
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography *  * http://www.evertype.com