Greek

TODO: Please add fonts that contain polytonic Greek to the last section! (See: To-Do List)

Introduction

Historically, the development of Greek language can be divided in:

• Ancient and Medieval Greek (–1453): language identifier is grc.
• Modern Greek (1453–): language identifiers are ell, ell or gre

This is different from the main two ways of writing Greek:

• Monotonic (or single–accented): diacritical marks are only the acute accent (or simply the accent) and the diairesis.
• Polytonic (or multiple–accented): diacritical marks are three accents (acute, grave and circumflex) and two breathings (rough and smooth).

After a long development, monotonic orthography became law in 1982. Greek was polytonic before and ancient Greek is polytonic because it was before 1982. This means that polytonic Greek is not only ancient Greek, since the main part of modern Greek was polytonic.

Unicode

Monotonic Greek needs the characters from the “Greek and Coptic” Unicode block (only the Greek part of it, not the Coptic part).

Polytonic Greek also needs the characters from the “Greek Extended” Unicode block.

All you need is to choose the proper font that contains the characters you require.

Just in case you wonder, there are much more fonts that contain glyphs for monotonic Greek that for polytonic Greek.

Monotonic and Acute Accent

Although the monotonic accent was acute, Unicode defines a pair of characters for monotonic accented vowels and polytonic acute accented vowels (both uppercase and lowercase and with diairesis).

These are the different characters in lowercase:

ά έ ή ί ΐ ό ύ ΰ ώ
ά έ ή ί ΐ ό ύ ΰ ώ

In theory, both characters should have the same glyphs (they should be exactly the same strokes). In practice, this is not always the case, since the monotonic accent has been drawn as (almost) a vertical stroke.

The acute accent should mirror the grave accent (it is mainly its horizontal flip). Although acute accented vowels in polytonic Greek could be taken from the Greek and Coptic Unicode block, acute–accented vowels from the polytonic block may be required (because of the mismatch between the monotonic accent and the grave accent).

The following source displays the differences for each character with both accents (uppercase and lowercase characters):

\definefontfamily[mainface][rm][Minion Pro]
\setupbodyfont[mainface]
\definecolor [tred]  [r=1,t=.5,a=1]
\definecolor [tblue] [b=1,t=.25,a=1]
\unexpanded\def\tonosoxia[#1][#2]
  {\startTEXpage[pagestate=start, offset=1ex]
    \startoverlay
      {\color[tred]{#1}}
      {\color[tblue]{#2}}
    \stopoverlay
   \stopTEXpage}
\starttext
\tonosoxia[Ά][Ά]
\tonosoxia[Έ][Έ]
\tonosoxia[Ή][Ή]
\tonosoxia[Ί][Ί]
\tonosoxia[Ό][Ό]
\tonosoxia[Ύ][Ύ]
\tonosoxia[Ώ][Ώ]
\tonosoxia[ά][ά]
\tonosoxia[έ][έ]
\tonosoxia[ή][ή]
\tonosoxia[ί][ί]
\tonosoxia[ΐ][ΐ]
\tonosoxia[ό][ό]
\tonosoxia[ύ][ύ]
\tonosoxia[ΰ][ΰ]
\tonosoxia[ώ][ώ]
\stoptext

Depending on your operative system and your keyboard layout for polytonic Greek, it might be that it composes the acute with the monotonic accent (as it seems to happen in Linux).

A workaround to avoid this would be the following:

\startluacode
fonts.handlers.otf.addfeature {
    name = "tonosoxia",
    type = "substitution",
    data = {
        Alphatonos = "Ά",
        Epsilontonos = "Έ",
        Etatonos = "Ή",
        Iotatonos = "Ί",
        Omicrontonos = "Ό",
        Omegatonos = "Ώ",
        Upsilontonos = "Ύ",
        alphatonos = "ά",
        epsilontonos = "έ",
        etatonos = "ή",
        iotatonos = "ί",
        iotadieresistonos = "ΐ",
        omicrontonos = "ό",
        omegatonos = "ώ",
        upsilontonos = "ύ",
        upsilondieresistonos = "ΰ"
        },
    }
\stopluacode

\definefontfeature[tonosoxia][tonosoxia=yes]

\definefontfamily
    [mainface]
    [rm]
    [EB Garamond]
    [features={default, tonosoxia}]

\setupbodyfont[mainface, 24pt]

\startTEXpage[offset=1em]
χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά\\
\feature[-][tonosoxia]
χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά\\
\stopTEXpage

The sample above should display the difference between the more straight monotonic accent on the second line, and the proper acute accent.

On “Character Normalization”

Depending on your search, it might be that searching for u, results might include ú ů, ü or any character composed from u and any diacritical mark. Depending on the language, these “normalizations” may belong to the same letter or not (for example, u and ü are the same letter in Spanish, but two different ones in German).

This doesn’t only affects to letters: , and ‚ are the characters for the comma and the opening single–quotation mark (used in some languages, such as German), respectively. At least, Firefox only displays the occurrences for each character when the option to match diacritics is selected (otherwise, each character displays both occurrences for commas and these opening single–quotation marks).

At least in Linux (using Firefox), the option to match diacritics doesn’t distinguish between monotonic and acute accented vowels. In other operative systems and using other programs, results might differ.

Ancient Greek

\agr or \ancientgreek are the values for ancient Greek hyphenation patterns.

A minimal sample would read:

\mainlanguage[agr]
\setupbodyfont[dejavu]
\startTEXpage[offset=3em]
\input aristotle-grc
\stopTEXpage

Monotonic Greek

Either as \mainlanguage or \language, right values are gr or greek.

A minimal sample would read:

\mainlanguage[gr]
\setupbodyfont[dejavu]
\startTEXpage[offset=3em]
Κάθε άνθρωπος δικαιούται να επικαλείται όλα τα δικαιώματα και όλες τις ελευθερίες που προκηρύσσει η παρούσα Διακήρυξη, χωρίς καμία απολύτως διάκριση, ειδικότερα ως προς τη φυλή, το χρώμα, το φύλο, τη γλώσσα, τις θρησκείες, τις πολιτικές ή οποιεσδήποτε άλλες πεποιθήσεις, την εθνική ή κοινωνική καταγωγή, την περιουσία, τη γέννηση ή οποιαδήποτε άλλη κατάσταση.

Δεν θα μπορεί ακόμα να γίνεται καμία διάκριση εξαιτίας του πολιτικού, νομικού ή διεθνούς καθεστώτος της χώρας από την οποία προέρχεται κανείς, είτε πρόκειται για χώρα ή εδαφική περιοχή ανεξάρτητη, υπό κηδεμονία ή υπεξουσία, ή που βρίσκεται υπό οποιονδήποτε άλλον περιορισμό κυριαρχίας.
\stopTEXpage

Modern Polytonic Greek?

Before 1982, Greek orthography was mainly polytonic. In fact, modern Greek orthography was mainly polytonic.

Hyphenation rules for polytonic Greek differ from both ancient or monotonic Greek.

TeX has hyphenation patterns for ancient Greek, monotonic Greek and modern polytonic Greek.

ConTeXt has patterns for ancient and monotonic Greek only.

Language–Dependent Commands

As of current latest (2023.01.15 14:04), language–dependent commands—such as \currentdate—don’t work. Nobody seemed to need them—especially for current Greek. If you need them, please send a message to the mailing list to extend this.

Fonts

Since fonts with polytonic Greek also contain monotonic glyphs and fonts with polytonich glyphs are much more scarce, here are some fonts that contain polytonic Greek:

• The Greek Font Society publishes many high–quality Greek typefaces.
• Noto Fonts include extended Greek for Noto Serif, Noto Serif Display, Noto Sans and Noto Sans Mono.
• Source Sans 3 includes polytonic Greek.