[NTG-context] rewrite for Greek in the wiki

[Thomas A. Schmitz]

Hi Pablo,

thanks for this; it is very informative and clear. Just one short remark 
and one correction:

1. "Before 1982, Greek ort[h]ography was polytonic." That's a bit of an 
oversimplification. I'm no expert here, but I think many Greek print 
publications had already given up on using circumflex and grave accent 
or at least greatly simplified their use; the law of 1982 simple 
codified what had been developing for some time. Your sentence makes it 
sound like a sudden and random decision.

2. I think it would be worth pointing out that unfortunately, Greek 
lowercase letters with acute accent occur separately in two unicode 
blocks: the combinations in U+03AC-U+03AF and U+03CC-U+03CF ("Greek 
small letter X with tonos") are functionally identical to the 
combinations in the U+1F7 block ("Greek small letter X with acute 
accent"). This is a source of confusion both in fonts and in 
programming, because some programs normalize these letters, so for 
string operations and searches, you may obtain surprising results.

Thank you for the article!

Thomas

On 1/21/23 13:16, Pablo Rodriguez via ntg-context wrote:
> Dear list,
> 
> just in case it might help, I’ve rewritten the Greek entry in the wiki:
> 
>    https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Greek
> 
> Although nobody seemed to have mentioned them (afaIk), there are two issues:
> 
> 1. Hyphenation patterns are different for ancient, monotonic and modern
> polytonic Greek. Greek ortography was polytonic before 1982.
> 
> ConTeXt includes patterns for ancient and monotonic Greek, but none for
> modern polytonic Greek
> (http://mirror.ctan.org/language/hyph-utf8/tex/generic/hyph-utf8/patterns/tex/hyph-el-polyton.tex).
> 
> Ironically, modern polytonic Greek patterns would be required to typeset
> both the act and the decree that introduced the monotonic ortography.
> 
> 2. Greek doesn’t seem to have language-dependent commands (such as
> \currentdate).
> 
> In both cases, Hans will reply that nobody asked for any of them.
> 
> Of course, I totally agree. AfaIk, nobody asked for these features.
> 
> Just in case it might help,
> 
> Pablo
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