Distinguishing Greek and Greek

[Michael Everson]

At 12:21 +0200 2005-03-16, Panagiotis Sikas wrote:
>Goodmornig to all.

Kali mera. :-)

>I think that the whole discussion is limited to what is called "modern Greek".

Well, not "archaic" Greek, certainly.

>In such case there is only one script (el). except from the absence 
>of some diacritical marks, the orthography between the monotonic and 
>the polytonic is the same. Monotonic was established (officialy) in 
>1982, and the only change
>was the removal of the diacritical marks.

Right, so there shouldn't be ISO 15924 tags, since there is not a 
script difference, and there should be RFC 3066 tags, since there is 
an orthography difference.

>Greek was a well known bi-lingual (excuse me if the term is not 
>correct) language. There were in the near past two variants of the 
>Greek language, with different orthography between them.

Orthography? I understand the difference between Katharevousa and 
Dimotiki to be one of vocabulary choice and register, not of spelling.

>In any case the script used was exactly the same. There is no 
>difference in the way letters are represented. Again only the 
>orthography changes (but we have a major orthographical change).

Again, glad to have you confirm this.

>A script change happened back in 1453. Until 1453 the script used 
>was archaic Greek (Ancient Greek) where we have some more characters 
>involved. But I believe this sould be in accordance to iso 639-2 and 
>go with the "grc" language code.

Not quite sure what you mean here.

>If the goal of language tags is to cover also orthographical 
>changes, el-monoton/el-polyton covers only the modern Greek.

And that covers the (immediate) need to have word-processing tools 
like spell-checkers for modern data.
-- 
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography *  * http://www.evertype.com