Mixing monotonic and polytonic acutes.

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Stephen Hughes
Posts: 3323
Joined: February 26th, 2013, 7:12 am

Mixing monotonic and polytonic acutes.

Post by Stephen Hughes »

Is it usual / acceptable / (even) expected to mix /confuse / not know (or mind) the difference between monotonic άέήίόύώ and polytonic άέήίόύώ?

To give two recent examples, the ocr output for the Abbott-Smith lexicon was a mixture of the 24 unaccented letters, vowels with monotonic acutes and letters with polytonic every other type of diacritic. The Isaiah LXX word list (.pdf) that this post links to is the same mixture.

Is that an inaccuracy that people usually live with? In most fonts they look the same. Are there advantages for sorting in mixing (or avoiding mixing) the systems? So far as I can ascertain, the Multikey IME is pure polytonic - how do the monotonic acutes come into play - they are for Modern Greek, not Ancient.
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
Stephen Carlson
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Joined: May 11th, 2011, 10:51 am
Location: Melbourne
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Re: Mixing monotonic and polytonic acutes.

Post by Stephen Carlson »

I don't like to see them mixed up, but I can't really tell in this font.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Stephen Hughes
Posts: 3323
Joined: February 26th, 2013, 7:12 am

Re: Mixing monotonic and polytonic acutes.

Post by Stephen Hughes »

Some Modern Greek sites like lexigram.gr are very particular about differentiating the two types of acutes according to which period of the language they are writing in, but surprisingly Perseus' LSJ is not.
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
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