Greek alphabet Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! == Computer encodings == For computer usage, a variety of encodings have been used for Greek online, many of them documented in {{IETF RFC|1947}}. The two principal ones still used today are [[ISO/IEC 8859-7]] and [[Unicode]]. ISO 8859-7 supports only the monotonic orthography; Unicode supports both the monotonic and polytonic orthographies. === ISO/IEC 8859-7 === For the range A0–FF (hex), it follows the Unicode range 370–3CF (see below) except that some symbols, like ©, ½, § etc. are used where Unicode has unused locations. Like all ISO-8859 encodings, it is equal to ASCII for 00–7F (hex). === Greek in Unicode === {{Main|Greek script in Unicode|Greek and Coptic|Greek Extended}} [[Unicode]] supports [[polytonic orthography]] well enough for ordinary continuous text in modern and ancient Greek, and even many archaic forms for [[epigraphy]]. With the use of [[combining character]]s, Unicode also supports Greek [[philology]] and [[dialectology]] and various other specialized requirements. Most current text rendering engines do not render diacritics well, so, though alpha with [[Macron (diacritic)|macron]] and [[acute accent|acute]] can be ''represented'' as U+03B1 U+0304 U+0301, this rarely renders well: {{lang|grc|ᾱ́}}.{{Citation needed|date=March 2013}} There are two main blocks of Greek characters in [[Unicode]]. The first is "Greek and Coptic" (U+0370 to U+03FF). This block is based on [[ISO 8859-7]] and is sufficient to write Modern Greek. There are also some archaic letters and Greek-based technical symbols. This block also supports the [[Coptic alphabet]]. Formerly, most Coptic letters shared codepoints with similar-looking Greek letters; but in many scholarly works, both scripts occur, with quite different letter shapes, so as of Unicode 4.1, Coptic and Greek were disunified. Those Coptic letters with no Greek equivalents still remain in this block (U+03E2 to U+03EF). To write polytonic Greek, one may use [[combining diacritical mark]]s or the precomposed characters in the "Greek Extended" block (U+1F00 to U+1FFF). {{Unicode chart Greek and Coptic}} {{Unicode chart Greek Extended}} ==== Combining and letter-free diacritics ==== [[Combining diacritical mark|Combining]] and spacing (letter-free) [[diacritical mark]]s pertaining to [[Greek language]]: {|class="wikitable" |- !Combining!!Spacing!!Sample!!Description |- |U+0300||U+0060||( {{lang|grc| ̀ }})||"varia / [[grave accent]]" |- |U+0301||U+00B4, U+0384||( {{lang|grc| ́ }})||"oxia / tonos / [[acute accent]]" |- |U+0304||U+00AF||( ̄ )||"[[Macron (diacritic)|macron]]" |- |U+0306||U+02D8||( ̆ )||"vrachy / [[breve]]" |- |U+0308||U+00A8||( ̈ )||"dialytika / [[Diaeresis (diacritic)|diaeresis]]" |- |U+0313||U+02BC||( ̓ )||"psili / comma above" ([[spiritus lenis]]) |- |U+0314||U+02BD||( ̔ )||"dasia / reversed comma above" ([[spiritus asper]]) |- |U+0342||||( ͂ )||"perispomeni" ([[circumflex]]) |- |U+0343||||( ̓ )||"[[Coronis (diacritic)|koronis]]" (= U+0313) |- |U+0344||U+0385||( ̈́ )||"dialytika tonos" (deprecated, = U+0308 U+0301) |- |U+0345||U+037A||( ͅ )||"ypogegrammeni / [[iota subscript]]". |} === Encodings with a subset of the Greek alphabet === [[IBM]] code pages [[Code page 437|437]], [[Code page 860|860]], [[Code page 861|861]], [[Code page 862|862]], [[Code page 863|863]], and [[Code page 865|865]] contain the letters ΓΘΣΦΩαδεπστφ (plus β as an alternative interpretation for [[ß]]). Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! Cancel Editing help (opens in new window) Discuss this page