User:ArielGlenn/Unicode hell

Fun facts about Unicode and polytonic Greek

So one day I was writing a little script to transliterate Ancient Greek text to Roman characters, following the information on User:Atelaes's About Ancient Greek page. Once I thought I had it working pretty well, I decided I needed a good chunk of text to test. so I went to the one place I knew had some polytonic text: τα μούτρα του George Le Nonce. I cut and pasted a heading and fed it into my transliteration script: κατηγορίες ἱστολογημάτων and was horrified to see the output katēgor es histologēm tōn

Where did the accented vowels go? For further investigation I found another page with some text from Euripides on it, and tried that. It soon became clear than *only the vowels with a single acute accent* were causing problems.

So, what was going on?

Well, here's ά as I type it, and here's what it really is:
$ echo -n ά | od -c
0000000 316 254
0000002


here's what happens when I use the other ά from the blog:
$ echo -n ά | od -c
0000000 341 275 261
0000003


That's right, they are from two different code blocks! Augh! One is from the monotonic greek code block, and the other is from the *polytonic* greek code block of unicode. You can go look at the two code blocks in Wikipedia's article on the Greek alphabet.

OK, so here is a fun experiment you can try. Take the word γάρ (typed on a linux system in greek keyboard layout). This has α with acute accent, *not* with oxeia (how do you spell that in English? οξεία εννοώ anyways). Now do a Google search with that: Αποτελέσματα 1 - 10 από περίπου 208,000 για γάρ. (0.03 δευτερόλεπτα) with the first result is the (unaccented) γαρ at el.wiktionary.org

OK, now do a Google search with the word with the οξεία: Αποτελέσματα 1 - 10 από περίπου 137,000 για γάρ. (0.10 δευτερόλεπτα) and the first entry is at perseus.tufts.edu. Specifically, search for *this* γάρ with site:en.wiktionary.org and you will get: Η αναζήτηση - γάρ site:en.wiktionary.org - δε βρήκε κάποιο έγγραφο. (No results.) But search for the other one, same modifier, Αποτελέσματα 1 - 9 από 9 από το en.wiktionary.org για γάρ. (0.03 δευτερόλεπτα) (look at that, it found nine pages).

No good? You are right. It's no good. Do I have a solution? Nope, not a one.

Note that the dictionary lookup at perseus has the same issues; it only finds things typed with characters from the extended code block. You have been warned!

Note that these shenanigans have been going on for years. Here are a couple of links to dicussions about this very issue, still unresolved, at the hellug mailing list and at the linux-utf8 mailing list.

For a comprehensive discussion of all things Greek and Unicode, look at this site on Greek Unicode Issues.

Update

Wikimedia software apparently (or maybe it's the browser, but I doubt it) silently takes the α with οξεία and converts it to ά so on this page you can't actually tell the difference. But if you go to the blog mentioned above and cut and paste, you too can try these tests.

Update two

Some fun can be had by looking at the earlier versions of the Corinth article. Early on, User:Muke entered translations for Ancient Greek and (Modern) Greek. He used both accents: [1] is the last revision that preserves this difference. The next revision, [2], hs both accents as ό which surely was a feature of a change in the MediaWiki software. Just as well, since we can't search for the other version of the letter any more...

Update three

As of fedora 9, entering accented characters from the polytonic layout no longer produces three-byte characters. This means that you cannot use them to search with in Google! Cut and paste from the unicode chart here: [3] if you get truly desperate.