From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Fri Dec 20 2002 - 16:30:21 EST
David J. Perry a dúirt:
>Scripsit Michael Everson:
>
>> Recently I saw a piece of epigraphical Greek, and while Latin "h" was
>> written in the transliteration, the letter used in the actual Greek
>> was ETA.
>
>Yes; that is the whole point here. In all variants of the Greek
>alphabet except the Ionic, eta stood for the "h" sound as in English
>(hence the equivalent shapes of Eta and H, since it was some western
>form of the Greek alphabet that was apparently carried to Italy). After
>the Ionic alphabet was officially adopted at Athens, eta became used for
>long e in subsequent standardized Greek writing.
Knew that.
>Epigraphers need to indicate when they are transcribing into
>lowercase form, or transliterating, an Eta that was intended to
>represent the "h" sound and
>have adopted the Roman lc h as the means for doing so.
Well, when Cyrillic letter SHCHA is being transliterated, either
s-caron+c-caron or sometimes s-acute is written when it is Russian,
and s-caron+t is used when it is Bulgarian. So when eta is
transliterated by epigraphers they should use either e-macron or h.
Or is the question "when they transliterate into modern Greek fonts"?
Because then you have a problem -- since the Greek inscriptions and
modern Greek are the same, no transliteration should be necessary.
Though then one would have to know that eta meant, um, heta and that
[h] should be read. I have seen Greek text where the Latin h was
substituted for the eta in this context.
Is the question "should Greek h be encoded"? In such an instance, I'd
say that the need for a Latin theta and chi for IPA would be a lot
more urgent, if cloning a borrowed letter were to be contemplated.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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