Re: Writting Greek in Emacs

[Thanos Apollo]

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


[...]
>
> All of these characters can be obtained with the greek-ibycus4 input
> method, which I mentioned. The advantage is that it comes out of the box
> in Emacs. For example:

Not true, there are missing glyphs such as with macros & vrachy, e.g Ᾰ Ᾱ
Ῠ Ῡ.  Issues with greek-ibycus4 include:

- Having "K+" translating into "Ϟ" (koppa, an archaic Greek letter) and
  other similar keybindings, just try to imagine writing chemistry using
  greek-ibycus4.
  
- Not including binds for keys such as "J", there is no J letter in
  Greek or Coptic.

- Not following the standard keybindings for greek letters found in
  Greek keyboards.

Not including macros & vrachy letters would be acceptable if it did not
try to include archaic Greek & Coptic letters.  This is not a greek
polytonic input method for it can't be used for daily workloads, this is
a niche greek-like input method.

Schools & some newspapers in Greece still use polytonic, we can't expect
users who type Greek daily to switch to greek-ibycus4.  =greek-polytonic
input method should follow the standard greek qwerty keyboard, which is
already implemented in "greek", just without the extra diacritics.

[...]

> What the monotonic reform did was eliminate accents, not create a new
> accent (tonos).

Oxia is a tonos, just like varia and perispomeni.  Greek Unicode also
includes Coptic, which is Egyptian with Greek letters (currently used by
the Coptic Church) as well as "calligraphy", ligature & archaic letters.
A greek input method should only include the 24 letters of the Greek
alphabet & prefer the oxia from Greek Extended over the "tonos" of
that is included in Unicode "Greek and Coptic" (Range: 0370–03FF).

>
>> Additionally, I do not think it's proper to call it Classical Greek,
>> since it's the same script used by the current "greek" input method,
>> just with the addition of extra diacritics (many "tonous", polytonic).

[...]

>  However, I agree with RMS that "ibycus4" sounds quite cryptic and
> should be renamed, maybe polytonic-greek?

No, ibycus4 cannot be used as a greek polytonic method nor do I think it
tries to do that.

When GNU Emacs started Greek "polytonic" was the official language.
Polytonic might be the official system once more in Greece, that's why
we should implement it correctly.

I've already replaced "greek" with my implementations and it's almost
1:1 compatible, just haven't added all the Greek Extended characters as
I'm still testing the keybindings.  Feel free to try it out and share
your thoughts.

-- 
Thanos Apollo
https://thanosapollo.org

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