Fix needed: Tonos and Oxia in Greek
Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2012 6:27 pmBackground:
When they created Greek basic and then Greek extended in Unicode, they duplicated vowels with the diacritic tonos (modern Greek) and oxia (Ancient Greek). Tonos and Oxia must look the same, as an acute accent (´, a small slanted dash above a vowel). Unicode requires that both precomposed tonos and oxia vowels must decompose into the vowel and a combining acute accent, conflating/normalizing the two to the tonos version.
As the result, the typical rule is that the Unicode letters with oxia should not be used, instead the vowels with tonos should be used. However, some fonts (Tachoma, Lucida Grande, etc.) have erroneously described tonos as a small vertical dash, thus distinguishing between tonos and oxia. Given the existence of these fonts, most Ancient Greek documents use the oxia variant of the vowels.
Problem:
GoldenDict appears to normalize oxia vowels into tonos (for example, ἠγάπα becomes ἠγάπα; the difference is in ά) in the article view window. However, it does not conflate the two in the index algorithm (it should). For this reason, the links in articles become broken (the link containing oxia-normalized-to-tonos in the article does not lead to the word with oxia in the index). Moreover, GoldenDict shows identical words separately in the search/look-up window only because of the tonos-oxia difference. So, if there is a number of Greek dictionaries that use different tonos-oxia conventions their articles do not show together.
Fix:
GoldenDict should conflate/normalize all oxia vowels to their tonos equivalents everywhere: in the view window, the index and search. (One must not then use the broken fonts that incorrectly display tonos vowels).
Bibliography:
http://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/Greek ... ted_vowels
http://typophile.com/node/15933
http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicod ... kbkgd.html
http://www.unicode.org/charts/normaliza ... Greek.html (Unicode normalization chart)
http://omega.enstb.org/yannis/pdf/amendments2.pdf
When they created Greek basic and then Greek extended in Unicode, they duplicated vowels with the diacritic tonos (modern Greek) and oxia (Ancient Greek). Tonos and Oxia must look the same, as an acute accent (´, a small slanted dash above a vowel). Unicode requires that both precomposed tonos and oxia vowels must decompose into the vowel and a combining acute accent, conflating/normalizing the two to the tonos version.
- Code: Select all
άέήίόύώ should equal άέήίόύώ
ΆΈΉΊΌΎΏ should equal ΆΈΉΊΌΎΏ
As the result, the typical rule is that the Unicode letters with oxia should not be used, instead the vowels with tonos should be used. However, some fonts (Tachoma, Lucida Grande, etc.) have erroneously described tonos as a small vertical dash, thus distinguishing between tonos and oxia. Given the existence of these fonts, most Ancient Greek documents use the oxia variant of the vowels.
Problem:
GoldenDict appears to normalize oxia vowels into tonos (for example, ἠγάπα becomes ἠγάπα; the difference is in ά) in the article view window. However, it does not conflate the two in the index algorithm (it should). For this reason, the links in articles become broken (the link containing oxia-normalized-to-tonos in the article does not lead to the word with oxia in the index). Moreover, GoldenDict shows identical words separately in the search/look-up window only because of the tonos-oxia difference. So, if there is a number of Greek dictionaries that use different tonos-oxia conventions their articles do not show together.
Fix:
GoldenDict should conflate/normalize all oxia vowels to their tonos equivalents everywhere: in the view window, the index and search. (One must not then use the broken fonts that incorrectly display tonos vowels).
Bibliography:
http://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/Greek ... ted_vowels
http://typophile.com/node/15933
http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicod ... kbkgd.html
http://www.unicode.org/charts/normaliza ... Greek.html (Unicode normalization chart)
http://omega.enstb.org/yannis/pdf/amendments2.pdf