Talk:Greek alphabet
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With some help from other Wikipedians I am now able to read the Lord's Prayer on the Greek language page, but some symbols on the page are still unreadable. These include the two mentioned at the top, the accented second letter in the second rendering of the Greek word "alpha," the letter between beta and eta in the second rendering of "beta," the second forms of stigma and qoppa, etc. The second rendering of "rho" is perhaps the worse, coming back as "ρ?ω?." How do I get to view these letters? Vivacissamamente
I've created a new stub on Greek alphabet/Temp that contains all the letters, for example. --Lumidek 23:57, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- A lot of what was in the article isn't copyvio and can probably be reused, we'd just have to make sure to paste the article history on the talk page or something so credit is given. DopefishJustin (・∀・) 02:45, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- OK, I decided to be bold and do what DopefishJustin recommended: I did a sort of manual diff on the old article and the web site (http://victorian.fortunecity.com/vangogh/555/Spell/spel-sys-mix.html) whose copyright it voilated. I think I found all of the parts that were copy/pasted. I removed each of those parts and replaced them with a bunch of XXXXXXXXXXXes, and included a brief (original) summary of what the removed parts had been about. I then pasted all of that into Greek alphabet/Temp. So now Greek alphabet/Temp looks much like the original article, except with big blisters where the copyvio text used to be. The Greek alphabet/Temp article does not actually contain any of the copyvio (to the best of my knowledge), so it should be safe to have in any history. What we need is for someone who's knowledgable in this subject to go through and either replace the removed parts with original work, or delete the placeholders for the parts that aren't necesary. I don't know nearly enough about this subject to do that. Frankly, it's all Greek to me... pun indented =o). I also took the liberty of copy/pasting the history of the old article into the Talk:Greek alphabet/Temp page, in order to preserve credit for the work done. - Eisnel 20:21, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- I decided to be bolder - I saw no way of this ever moving. From Wikipedia:Copyright problems:
- Greek alphabet. I just deleted this and then undeleted it when I changed my mind. It has 77 previous edits. The content has been used to create Greek alphabet/Temp. Isn't the original therefore needed to preserve the author attribution, even if that means some of the page history will be violating? I think if this is deleted, it makes the temp version a violation of the GFDL, so the violating parts should be removed without deleting the history. Angela. 20:11, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)
- the original author details have been put on the talk page. I think we need to be bold or we will never resolve this one. I'm going to delete and move the temp to the article page. Secretlondon 02:50, 15 Jul 2004 (UTC)
The dialect of modern Greek spoken by Greek Cypriots differs in pronunciation from 'mainland' Greek in some respects. Kappa (Qoppa) is pronounced 'G', Tau (also called Daf) is pronounced 'D'.
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Names of letters and their pronunciation
This article gives classical names of letters but not modern names. There is also a question of how to transliterate. Conventions for transliterating classical Greek differ from those for Modern Greek. "ΕΥΚΛΙΔΗΣ" is almost always transliterated into "Euclid" when one writes in English, or "Euclides" if you want to keep the suffix that changes according to whether it's nominative, accusative, etc., but if the conventions that newspapers use for transliterating names of modern Greeks were followed, then maybe it would be "Efklides" or "Efkledes". This may not be much of a problem if you're talking about Euclid or about a modern Greek politician, but in the "Mount Athos" article, should one write "Ayion Oros" or "Hagion Oros"? The latter harmonizes with the name of Istanbul's famous "Hagia
Sophia". In the "Transubstantiation" article, I wrote "Metabole is Greek Orthodox for 'transubstantiation'" (and last time I looked, no one had yet objected that "Greek Orthodox" is not a language), but I also mentioned that in modern transliterations it can be "metovole". Lest we ignoramuses continue to make these decisions, could some expert enlgihten us? -- Mike Hardy
Well, there are two typo's in Mike Hardy's remark: Eudlid's Greek spelling; the modern transcription of metabole.
| Greek | Traditional transcription | Modern transcription | Proposed transliteration |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eυκλειδης | Eukleides | Efklidis | eykleídes |
| Aγιov Oρoς | Hagion Oros | Ayion Oros | ágion óros (classical accent) |
| μεταβoλη | metabole | metavoli | metabolé |
Note that the traditional transcription is not exactly the same as the latinisation (i. e., transcription to Latin)
which results in Euclides and so on. -- In the transcription, I have used the vowels as pronounced in many European languages, e. g. Italian, because a transcription using the English pronunciation is too difficult for me.
I would propose to write Ayion Oros, because that is more similar to how it is called by the local population.
What concerns Hagia Sophia: as the local population does no more speak Greek,
we may use a more traditional transcription.
In the meantime, I have added modern pronunciation of the letter names. Is that what you mean by modern names, Mike? -- dnjansen 13:17 Jan 5, 2003 (UTC)
It is very important to include the names of the letters in both Greek and in English (actually Latin -- these names are the same in all Western European languages), and very important to include their phonetic value in both Ancient and Modern Greek. However, I see no good reason to include the pronunciations of the names of the letters in either ancient or modern Greek, since both pronunciations are completely predictable. That is, given the Greek spelling, you can determine the pronunciation in ancient and in modern Greek unambiguously. So I propose to remove both columns under Name / Pronunciation. This should make the table more readable. --Macrakis 16:57, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Various distinct articles on Greek letters have distinct formats (e.g. on specifying the graphical representation of the letters -- some include it in the main paragraph, others at the end of the article and others not at all); maybe they should be unified as format at some time in the future? Not an urgent issue, just something to consider. -- Gutza 23:04, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
- Working on this using Delta_(letter) as a template. If anyone wants to help that'd be great, because I'll probably get bored around epsilon ;) -- Karl Naylor 08:56, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Why is Bernal being used as an authority on the Greek alphabet? Are you people aware of how controversial his views are? There is no archaeological evidence that Phoenicians widely colonised Greece. We have one trading post at Kommos in Crete during the early Geometric Period (10th-9th century B.C.) that did indeed have Semitic speaking traders and artisans confined to one area of the town and their sanctuary, but no widespread colonisation that Bernal's comment implies. There is no doubt there are Semitic loan words in the Greek language but that does not mean the Aegean region was widely settled by Phoenicians, and it's more likely as a result of trading contact along coastal emporia.
See J.W. Shaw, "Phoenicians in Southern Crete," AJA 93 (1989) 164-83. -- Leanne
Isn't sampi a modified form of san? In that case, why is it listed separately at the end of the table, instead of along side it in the middle?
The table at the top shows a greek small letter gamma (γ) where a delta should go. I suppose it's a typo in the numeric code entry. I don't know how to edit the "msg" table thing; it's not in the main article.
- There we go, it's been fixed. To edit the contents of {{msg:Table_Greekletters}}, edit Template:Table Greekletters. —Bkell 20:38, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)
We need something other than iso-8859-1 for this page. How do we switch it to UTF-8?
--Joeljkp 15:42, 20 May 2004 (UTC)
Zeta: not [dz] but [zd] or [z:]
According to Michel Lejeune (Phonétique historique du mycénien et du grec ancien) and many other scholars (e.g. Leslie Threatte in the "Greek alphabet" section of The World's Wrinting Systems by Daniels and Bright), ζ has never been pronounced [dz]. In classical Greek, it was [zd].
Hence Ἀθήνασ-δε (-δε as in οἴκαδε "to one's house", from οἶκος and -δε suffix) → *Ἀθήναz-δε → Ἀθήναζε, "to Athenes", etc. Cf. also aeolic ὔσδος ~ attic ὄζος, etc.
Later, [zd] (Hellenistic period) became [z:], then [z] in Modern Greek. Vincent Ramos 15:42, 24 May 2004 (UTC)
Digamma
On my computer system, I can't see the Digamma character. Possibly, that's because I don't have a Greek font that includes digamma. The same applies to San, Oopa and Sampi. What can I do to remedy this?
Cosmo 09:37, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)
P.S. I'm new to Wikipedia, and I am not too savvy about fonts, except the fonts that came with the MS WORD. Although I can read modern Greek text such as news and advertising (up to a point), I've never come across Digamma, San, Qopa or Sampi.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Digamma"
I answered at Talk:Digamma Pjacobi 09:02, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)
merge from Greek letters
I took the sentence "In ancient Greece, its letters were also used to represent numbers, called Greek numerals, in analogy with Roman numerals." from Greek letters which is now a redirect to here. Kappa 11:21, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)
More on fonts
I changed some of the Greek text (actually the Greek names of the first few letters in the Main Table) to Arial Unicode MS, which on my browser at least makes most of the characters display correctly. If there are no objections I could continue doing the same with the rest of the Greek text in the article. rossb 15:35, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Having been further advised on this, by Etz Haim (see Template talk:Polytonic), I've now changed to using the {{polytonic}} template rather than specifying the actual font. rossb 09:23, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)
First and latter Greek literation
Under the the "Greek" column, what's the difference between the first literation and the latter literation, separated by a solidus (slash)? - Centrx 23:45, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Do any other languages use the Greek alphabet?
Is Greek the only language written in the Greek alphabet or are there also others? Michael Hardy 20:56, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- AFAIK, there is only modern Greek with dialects, but I'm not sure.
- There seem to be some distinct dialects of Greek still used, Pontic Greek, 2-400.000 speakers http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=PNT Southern Tsakonian (Less than 300 speakers?) http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=TSD Yevanic (Less than 50 speakers) http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=YEJ I believe these languages could, arguably, be classified as other languages than Greek, and that they use the Greek alphabet. I guess that would be all, unless you're counting mathematical usage, and similar.
- There are no other major uses of the Greek alphabet today. However, there have been some interesting ones in the past. In my article "Character Codes for Greek: Problems and Modern Solutions" (in Greek Letters: From Tables to Pixels, 1996 ISBN 1884718272), I summarize some of this history. I was just thinking about adding this info to the Wikipedia article yesterday! Someday soon.... --Macrakis 02:54, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)
pronunciations
I tried my best to convert all the pronunciations given from SAMPA to IPA, but I'm pretty sure some of those prons weren't SAMPA. I hope someone who knows could check these and fix them if there are errors. In particular I am concerned about the transcription of 'e', 'o', and 'g' in letter names. Nohat 00:31, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- I've converted some more from SAMPA to IPA, but once again I would welcome anyone checking these. rossb 16:47, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Why Hebrew?
Question: what is a comparison to Hebrew doing in an English encyclopedia? Any objections against removing this? −Woodstone 11:46, 2005 Mar 12 (UTC)
- It is a comparison of alphabet entities and names. It is relevant. Do not delete. Evertype 12:04, 2005 Mar 12 (UTC)
- Why Hebrew? Because those two alphabets are very closely related to each other. The letters have almost a one-to-one correspondence, and their names are even similar. I say keep it.
Foobaz·o<21:24, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)
May I suggest to move this comparison to the Greek and/or the Hebrew version of Wikipedia. It is not relevant for the English version. It would not be practical to start comparing all the alphabets of the world to each other in this fashion. −Woodstone 21:09, 2005 Mar 12 (UTC)
- It's not a random comparison. It's worth showing where the Greek letters came from, and they came from the Phoenician alphabet. The Hebrew alphabet is the closest relative of the Phoenician alphabet that's still in common use. I could see switching it to the ancient letters, if those are available, but otherwise the comparison should be kept.
The whole remainder of the article has no mention of Hebrew. That's why the current state is confusing. If the reason is as explained here, that should be mentioned above the table for clarification and also in the section on history. Could one of you add that? −Woodstone 21:51, 2005 Mar 12 (UTC)
- I've mentioned in the overview. I hope it's adequate.
It could have been closer to the table, but thanks and discussion closed. −Woodstone 22:30, 2005 Mar 12 (UTC)
Precomposed vs. combining characters
Right now, the names of the letters are written using both characters and using combining accents. This is confusing, because users will naturally think that there are two versions because there is some distinction being made. I propose that we systematically use precombined characters only, as is done on the other polytonic pages I've looked at. If a user's system doesn't support the precomposed characters (how common is this?), how likely is it that it will render the combining characters correctly? If in fact it is necessary sometimes to show both precomposed and combining variants, I suggest we simply define it as a "Small Matter of Programming" for the polytonic template....
PS I actually prefer combining diacritics in principle, but in practice precomposed work better.... --Macrakis 23:27, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
- I agree that we shouldn't have two different versions of the names - particularly as at present without explanation (at least one reader has queried this before). On my browser, both on-screen and printed, the first (precomposed) version looks much better. Also in some cases (for instance omega) the two have different diacritics (the combining version seems to be wrong). rossb 09:32, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
- I should have mentioned that I deleted the second version some days ago. rossb 13:18, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Greek cursive
Is there any form of cursive for the Greek alphabeth? I didn't find one in the internet.
Font variants (was: Missing letter)
The lunate form of Σ (Ϲ) is missing from the table in section 1. Gdr 23:51, 2005 Apr 5 (UTC)
- Many variants of letters are missing, but that is as it should be. There should probably be a separate chart of variant shapes, with images of characters (not Unicode references) from a variety of sources. There is a particularly wide variety of shapes in early inscriptions (alpha written "on its side", sigma written with 3 strokes rather than 4, theta with a dot rather than a line in the middle, etc.), but there is also a whole history of uncials, cursives, etc. etc. Unicode happens to encode some of the variants used in mathematics, but this is far from a complete list of variants. What's more, they are marked in the Unicode standard as symbols, not as letters, and should not be used for representing Greek in text: curled beta U+03D0 Template:Polytonic; script theta U+03D1 Template:Polytonic; script phi U+03D5 Template:Polytonic; omega pi U+03D6 Template:Polytonic; script kappa U+03F0 Template:Polytonic; tailed rho U+03F1 Template:Polytonic; lunate sigma U+03F2 Template:Polytonic; capital theta U+03F4 Template:Polytonic; lunate epsilon U+03F5 Template:Polytonic. --Macrakis 14:03, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
- But for some reason we've already got the script theta in the main table! rossb 14:25, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
- No longer. --Macrakis 16:57, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
"Alternative theory" of history
User:Xpo_FERENS inserted a reference to an alternative theory (http://www.grecoreport.com/phoenician.htm) of the history of the Greek alphabet which denies its Phoenician origin. This link leads to an article from the Greek newspaper Apogevmatini (http://www.apogevmatini.gr) quoting an article from the Greek magazine Davlos (http://www.davlos.gr) which claims, among other things, that "the Greeks were writing using not only Linear A and B, but also a type of writing identical to that of the alphabet since at least 6000 B.C." The article has many more extravagant claims like this, for example that Greek is not descended from Indo-European (which doesn't exist), that "every (ancient) Greek word is basically an acronym...where every letter provides a significant or less significant notional [i.e. semantic] element", that "Greek is the first and only created language of the human species which provided the basis for all "conventional" languages, as are all the other languages of the world (where there is no causative relationship between the form and the meaning). These other languages are a corrupt form of Greek.", etc. The Davlos site (in Greek only) has much more along these lines. I didn't read the details, but there were also articles on the "technology of the ancient gods", etc. I don't think this is noteworthy enough to report on (the way Wikipedia reports on holocaust denial etc.), but I'd like to hear others' opinions. --Macrakis 22:59, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC) (revised)
Phoenician Deception
I would like to comment that I added the link to the article in belief that it was a good source for others to get an idea that their is a theory that that questions the current Phoenician orthodoxy. I would appreiciate it if the reference I added to the article was re-inserted by he who removed it. - Xpo FERENS
- The theory in question makes extravagant claims which are not accepted by any serious scholars (do you have evidence to the contrary?). Of course, following the Wikipedia NPOV philosophy, it should be reported on if it is noteworthy in itself, just as Holocaust denial is noteworthy, belief in the healing power of crystals is noteworthy, etc. But as far as I can tell, this is just the point of view of one crank publication, Davlos (http://www.davlos.gr). --Macrakis 15:17, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)
- In the article many serious scholars are noted who's work has been cited to logically lead to the author's conclusion. One serious scholar I can cite off the top of my head who's beliefs I would say are in accord with that of the author's is that of Dr. Aris Poulianos. I certainly think a theory of such magnitude deserves a whole article in itself let alone the minor reference I made. Now my request of you still stands to re-insert my reference, I would be more than glad to do it myself though I would rather not put myself through the headache of it being repeatedly removed. - Xpo FERENS
- I invite other editors to look over the link and to the general content of the grecoreport and davlos sites and draw their own conclusions. There are two questions, I think: 1) does this content represent a serious contribution to scholarship? and 2) if it is pseudoscience or pseudohistory (as I believe), is it noteworthy enough to document in the Wikipedia, and if so, in what article? Perhaps we need an article on Nationalist pseudoscience? --Macrakis 16:10, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
- I think archeaological finds that suggest the complete refutation of the Phoenician theory are meritable enough to be a contribution to scholarship. It is your belief that it is pseudo-history, it is by belief that the problem of the Greek alphabet needs to be seriously reconsidered. - Xpo FERENS
The exact development of writing in Greece might be open to question - I remember the plates that were hard to explain. However, saying the alphabets have no relation and only look somewhat similar is obviously wrong. That site is plainly not a reliable resource, for instance, it goes on to claim that Greek isn't Indo-European. On the main page they explicitly state their aim is to show Greek culture was a gift from God, and so deny any debts to anyone. If there is anything worth mentioning here, we should be able to find a better source. Josh
Transliterations
I collected some transliterations of classical and modern Greek at Transliteration of Greek into English. I suggest to include at least one of the modern transliterations in the main table (my favourite is the UN/ELOT scheme). The next step would be IMO to use this transliteration for articles about modern Greek geographical and personal names (for instance shouldn't the "c" in Constantine Karamanlis and Costas Caramanlis be "k"), see discussion at Talk:Greece. Markussep 10:33, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
In English, many Greeks use the English equivalents of their names rather than direct transliterations or transcriptions of their Greek names. George Seferis is known as George, not Giorgios or Yorgos, in English—as shown by Google and Amazon search, and despite what Wikipedia currently uses; similarly for Aristotle Onassis. On the other hand, Yannis Ritsos is never referred to as John. Some cases are unclear: John Capodistrias and Ioannis Kapodistrias are both used. Note, however, that though both Ritsos and Kapodistrias were officially Ιωάννης, one is referred to using the informal form and the other using the formal form.... So I think you have to follow the general Wikipedia convention of using the most familiar name, even if that leads to inconsistency. Of course, the first paragraph of the article should give the person's full name in Greek letters for full clarity. See my comments in Talk:Greece for related discussion. --Macrakis 22:35, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Variations of Ancient Greek Letters
I haven't seen any ancient Greek alphabet variations in this article. It might be useful to have a table with the various alphabet variations used in various areas of the ancient Greece.
Missing image
Alphabet-en003.jpg
Image:Alphabet-en003.jpg
I have indicated with a red square the letters that resemble Latin letters.
--Odysses 16:53, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)