Re: Writting Greek in Emacs

[Thanos Apollo]

Juan Manuel Macías <maciaschain@posteo.net> writes:

[...]
> I will answer these two questions in general terms, because everything
> depends on each person's field of study (in addition, now I am not
> dedicated to active philology, but rather to editorial production and
> translation). Some archaic letters are necessary in certain texts. To
> give a simple example, Sappho's poems are edited with the digamma to
> note the sound of the semivowel /w/, a sound present in the Lesbian
> dialect. In editions of papyracean fragments, the lunate sigma is used,
> since many times it cannot be determined whether a sigma is in the
> middle or final position. Etc. But If you study Aristotle (for example)
> you will not need to use those characters in your workflow.

Interesting, most of the work that I'm familiar with is with Aristotle,
early Roman period (Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius), Eastern Roman Empire,
(Procopius, Agathias, Anna Komnene) plus the Gospels & Septuagint.  The
only time ligature letters are used are to represent numbers, such as
the number of the beast in the Gospels (χξϛ) using stigma (ϛ) for 6.

One could code στ to become ϛ, but this is not an expected behavior in
current keyboards.  Maybe this could be done by having a
greek-polytonic-ligatures variable that can be either nil or t?

After switching to Arabic numerals (~11th century) Greek does not use
ligature letters, they are considered calligraphy-like letters and
stigma ϛ is considered the same as στ.  You will find the same text
written with either or, depending on the publisher & the font they
prefer.  A classic example case for this is Adamantios Korais
biographies, such as for Hippocrates, which you can find using ϛ or στ
depending on the publisher, both considered just as historically
accurate, kinda like using ϒ or Υ.

If anyone has any ideas on how to implement ligature letters I'm all
ears.  In most Greek keyboards you'd use a modifier key (which we can't
in quail) for them and they are really, really uncommon, especially
today.

-- 
Thanos Apollo
https://thanosapollo.org

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