Talk:Transliterating Greek

Accent or Apostroph

My question to this greek text: Is the second sign at second line, forth word an apostroph or a diacritical accent? What is correct: [Greek: ... estin, all' anankaion ...] or [Greek: ... estin, all anankaion ...]

I believe that's an apostrophe. Accents usually only occur over vowels (and rho). So I would go with the first version. However, you might want to ask in the Greek help thread (link at the bottom of the article). Probably not many people read this page, while many people check the forums. Acunning40 10:16, 6 June 2006 (PDT)

Thanks, I got an answer from ortonmc and lucy24 in the forum - its an apostroph: [Greek: ... estin, all' anankaion ...]--Bob.at 13:53, 6 June 2006 (PDT)

To do

It would be helpful to include on the page a note about the variant form of kappa with a picture, because it's common and a lot of proofers fail to recognise it (including me a while back). Will address when I have time. --Crb11 08:49, 10 September 2006 (PDT)

If you're talking about the shape of kappa in the example image, I think that's the normal form of kappa. It's not what it looks like in modern fonts, but I've never seen it look like a small k in a DP text; it always looks like an x. I don't think that it would belong under variant forms, since it's the most common shape of the letter for proofers to see. However, it might be good to get the whole alphabet (in images, to avoid that sort of problem). It would probably be more useful than pointing people to the PG How-To, because the modern fonts aren't as useful as seeing what it really looks like in the projects we proof. I might have time to collect images of all the letters in a few days, if no one else gets to it first. --Acunning40 10:44, 10 September 2006 (PDT)

Sorry, I'm still thinking in TeX terms. However, we do have books with modern-style fonts and a k-kappa, so having both forms in the table would help. For instance, the Dictionary of Christ... : see page 276 of part 1 (currently in P2) for an example. Another letter where two pictures might help is rho, because the tail can be straight or bent right round, and I know the latter throws some people. Many thanks for doing this table, by the way: will be very helpful.--Crb11 13:18, 10 September 2006 (PDT)

Actually, I may be able to get partway through the alphabet today. I'll see how far I get. --Acunning40 11:26, 10 September 2006 (PDT)

Nice work on the tables. I added a little to make them easier to read, I hope. -- vls 16:20, 10 September 2006 (PDT)

Thanks, it looks much better :) A couple other things on my to-do list for this page are to get a better image of the x-like kappa, and to reorder the columns (putting the images on the left rather than the right). Oh, and finding a capital rho. Feel free to work on any of those things if you want; I probably won't be able to do it for a day or two. --Acunning40 16:46, 10 September 2006 (PDT)

Cool. I'm guessing there's no way to represent these characters with code? --vls 17:22, 10 September 2006 (PDT)

I don't understand the question. --Acunning40 09:50, 13 September 2006 (PDT)

I did a row of the table here: User:Vls/SandBox. Is that what you had in mind? --vls 06:23, 13 September 2006 (PDT)

Yes, that's what I was thinking of. Do you think it's better than the current way? I was thinking that someone is going to be looking for the Greek letter itself, not the name, and normally what you're looking for is at the left in a table. Once you find it then you look across to the right to find the info about it.

Seconded: it feels much more natural to me as well. I wondered whether it was better to have the lower case characters on the left rather than the capitals - they are obviously the much more common form, but then the chances are that one or two of the more obscure capitals are going to be looked up regularly. No strong opinion either way, but thought it worth raising. --Crb11 07:48, 13 September 2006 (PDT)

Actually, maybe this layout would be better:

(On rereading this page, I realized that the above line may have come across differently than I intended. It was a continuation of my thoughts from above about the table layout, not intended to be a response to Crb11's comment above. In fact, I didn't notice the suggestion about the order of capital vs. lower case columns until now. --Acunning40)

	Capital		Lower case
Letter Name	Image	Transliteration	Image	Transliteration
alpha		A		a

There's no real reason to repeat the letter name for capital/lower case each time. --Acunning40 11:03, 13 September 2006 (PDT)

First version is here: User:Vls/SandBox. Double check it please. I hacked a little program for my editor to do this so it may have done something weird. Looks okay to me. It's all Greek to me;I'm just doing the table 8). I'll have your other layout later or in the morning. Take your pick!

And in regards to my earlier comment, I was thinking that there may have been some HTML character codes that could be used to show the Greek images. There isn't. Please forgive the obtuse phrasing. 8-] --vls 16:53, 14 September 2006 (PDT)

Both table versions up -- vls 09:47, 16 September 2006 (PDT)