Re: Latin mxedruli, or do we really need capital and small letters?

Philippe Caquant wrote:
I checked in an edition of the
> Little Prince (O mikros prigkipas), and it seems that
> you're right: in "sto basilia", the initial "b" is has
> the same form as in the middle of a word. Yet when I
> was learning some ancient Greek, we always wrote the
> "b" of "basileus" a different way, more or less like:
>
>  bbb
> b   b
> bbbb> > b   b
> bbbbb
> b
> b
.....
>(I just noticed that my (modern Greek) manual uses the
> "b" I drawed before as the printed lowercase form,
> while the other book uses only the other form...)
The one you drew above is the only form of beta that I know. There is
another???  Although Alt+0223 (ß) is actually ess-zet, it can stand in for
l.c. beta.

> But nowadays, the beta doesn't sound any more like
> "b", but like "v". The Greek had to reinvent a new "b"
> for foreign words, composed of "m" + "p", like in
> "mpar" = "bar".
That I knew, after visits to various Greek restaurants in Detroit, where
among real Greek things they offer something called "mpar mpe kiou".