Re: Writting Greek in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Thanos Apollo <public@thanosapollo.org>
> Cc: rms@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2024 22:08:17 +0300
> 
> > All of these characters can be obtained with the greek-ibycus4 input
> > method, which I mentioned. The advantage is that it comes out of the box
> > in Emacs. For example:
> 
> Not true, there are missing glyphs such as with macros & vrachy, e.g Ᾰ Ᾱ
> Ῠ Ῡ.  Issues with greek-ibycus4 include:
> 
> - Having "K+" translating into "Ϟ" (koppa, an archaic Greek letter) and
>   other similar keybindings, just try to imagine writing chemistry using
>   greek-ibycus4.
>   
> - Not including binds for keys such as "J", there is no J letter in
>   Greek or Coptic.
> 
> - Not following the standard keybindings for greek letters found in
>   Greek keyboards.

Our input methods are not carved in stone, so if you think some
sequences are missing, feel free to submit patches that add them.
There's no reason to complain about stuff we can easily fix, right?

> > What the monotonic reform did was eliminate accents, not create a new
> > accent (tonos).
> 
> Oxia is a tonos, just like varia and perispomeni.  Greek Unicode also
> includes Coptic, which is Egyptian with Greek letters (currently used by
> the Coptic Church) as well as "calligraphy", ligature & archaic letters.
> A greek input method should only include the 24 letters of the Greek
> alphabet & prefer the oxia from Greek Extended over the "tonos" of
> that is included in Unicode "Greek and Coptic" (Range: 0370–03FF).

It could make sense to have a separate Coptic input method.  The fact
that Greek and Coptic use the same script doesn't mean a single input
method must support both.  Emacs input methods are specific to
languages, not to scripts (i.e. Unicode blocks).

> When GNU Emacs started Greek "polytonic" was the official language.

AFAIK, Greek monotonic was make official around 1984, which is way
before Emacs started supporting multiple languages (about 12 years
later) and input methods.