Concepts

An abstract interface

GreekOrthography is an abstract type for functions that understand the phonology of ancient Greek as it is represented in specific orthographic systems, and can therefore:

• sort Unicode Greek strings by the logic of the Greek alphabet
• syllabify Greek strings
• work with accents, including correct placement for recessive and persistent accent patterns, respecting morpheme boundaries in compound verbs
• support reduplication and augment (both temporal and syllabic) of verbal stems
• concatenate strings in a specified orthography with appropriate phonological adjustments, optionally including elision
• implement the OrthographicSystem interface (from the HCMID Orthography package), with semantic tokenization of text in polytonic Greek

Generic features of an orthographic system

The GreekOrthography abstract type is a subtype of OrthographicSystem. Concrete implementations of GreekOrthography are therefore also implementations of an OrthographicSystem. In the following code blocks, you can see that LiteraryGreekOrthography inherits from OrthographicSystem via GreekOrthography, and can be used like any other OrthographicSystem to assess the validity of characters and strings, and analyze strings of characters as sequences of classified tokens.

The GreekOrthography abstraction

GreekOrthography is an abstract type, which in turn is a subtype of the Orthography package’s OrthographicSystem.

Implementations of GreekOrthography can therefore:

1. use the functions specific to implementations of GreekOrthography to remove and add accents to words, to break words into syllables, and to sort words according to the logic of the Greek alphabet
2. use the generic functions of the Orthography package to assess the validity of characters and strings, and to tokenize a string into a series of explicitly classified tokens.

Concrete implementations

This package includes PolytonicGreek, an implementation of the GreekOrthography type for literary Greek as it appears in standard printed editions.

Other implementations are possible. Examples are:

• ScientificGreekOrthography, for texts that including numeric and synmbolic content used in Greek mathematical and scientific texts
• ManuscriptOrthography (from the Homer Multitext project) for working with the orthography of polytonic Greek in medieval manuscripts
• AtticGreek, an implementation for the epichoric alphabet used in Athens before 403 BCE