Re: hALAS (was Re: ALAS)

From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Sun Oct 04 1998 - 07:48:10 EDT


At 9:38 PM -0500 10/3/98, Steven Cox wrote:
>...poor Yorick I knew him well :-)

Yes, that's what I thought the subject was going to be too: a new beginning
for our erstwhile thread on MAKARIOS KTL. Now if you'd written hALAS, I
would have known at once what the subject was ... Our most
commonly-employed ASCII convention for transcribing Greek uses upper-case
letters primarily to distinguish the cited Greek text for the surrounding
English (or Spanish, Swahili, or what-have-you), NOT because we are
imitating upper-case Greek script characters; but using a lower-cased "h"
to indicate a rough breathing or a lower-case "i" to indicate an iota
subscript surely is a refinement that makes it easier for our weary eyes to
envision how a cited Greek text in ASCII actually might look if we had
authentic Greek characters to use in e-mail. I would like to urge using
these conventions for the sake of clarity, although I certainly continue to
agree with Edward Hobbs, who always notes that we make no attempt to IMPOSE
an orthodox mode of transcribing Greek texts on the list. We simply urge
some scheme that is easily understood by others.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cconrad@yancey.main.nc.us
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/

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