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 ?

But this is'nt yet very clear to me. As I said:

- my manuals for ancient Greek use both forms: the one
with a "descender" as initial beta, the one without a
descender as medial beta

- my (French) manual for (modern) Greek only mentions
the initial form of beta (the one with a "descender")
for every beta, be it initial or in the middle of a
word

- the Greek book (printed in Greece) I mentioned, only
uses the "medial" form (without descender), wherever
in the word

- 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 ?


--- jcowan@REUTERSHEALTH.COM wrote:
> Philippe Caquant scripsit:
>
> > Interesting remark. 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:
>
> That is a specifically French typographical
> convention in writing ancient (not modern) Greek:
> see
>
http://ptolemy.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/letters.html#symbol
> section 3.2.

=====
Philippe Caquant

"High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)


	
		
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