Different forms of Greek small letters (Re: Latin mxedruli)

From: "Philippe Caquant" <herodote92@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Friday, May 28, 2004 3:54 AM
Subject: Re: Latin mxedruli, or do we really need capital and small letters?


> Interesting that the French decided how to write Greek
> letters. How would we react if the Greek told us how
> to write our own letters ?
They did, long ago. That's how we got Latin, from the Western form of Greek.
They also got us to write left-to-right, because Etruscan was right-to-left
(or boustrophedon?)

> - when I look at Greek pages on the Web, I can only
> see the initial form (with descender), but I don't
> know how Greek people visualize it on their own
> system. If I try to insert special characters in a
> Word document, I also can see only the initial form:
> shall I suppose that the font is customized for French
> people ?
It all depends on the font, basically. Several letters have two or more
forms, encoded separately in Unicode as 'symbol' characters: small beta,
small theta, capital upsilon, small phi, small pi (this one looks like an
omega with the top of a pi), small kappa, small rho, small lunate sigma
(looks like our 'c'), small lunate epsilon (looks like Ukrainian 'round e').
The forms can be seen at http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0370.pdf. But
the normal practice now (according to the basic fonts like Arial/Helvetica,
Times Roman, etc.) is small beta with descender, closed small theta, small
phi without ascender, straight capital upsilon which looks like our Y...