Greek Extended is a
Unicode block
A Unicode block is one of several contiguous ranges of numeric character codes ( code points) of the Unicode character set that are defined by the Unicode Consortium for administrative and documentation purposes. Typically, proposals such as the ...
containing the accented vowels necessary for writing
polytonic Greek
Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period. The more complex polytonic orthography ( el, πολυτονικό σύστημα γραφής, translit=polytonikó sýstīma grafī́s), which includes fi ...
. The regular, unaccented Greek characters as well as the characters with
tonos
Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period. The more complex polytonic orthography ( el, πολυτονικό σύστημα γραφής, translit=polytonikó sýstīma grafī́s), which includes fiv ...
and
diaeresis can be found in the
Greek and Coptic block. Greek Extended was encoded in version 1.1 of the
Unicode Standard
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, whic ...
. As an alternative to Greek Extended,
combining characters
In digital typography, combining characters are characters that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the combining diacritical marks (including combining accents).
Unicode also ...
can be used to represent the tones and breath marks of polytonic Greek.
In this block, the letters with oxia (
acute accent) and no other accent are not used in any of the
Unicode normalization
Unicode equivalence is the specification by the Unicode character encoding standard that some sequences of code points represent essentially the same character. This feature was introduced in the standard to allow compatibility with preexisting s ...
s. Decomposition of , for example, yields followed by a , while composition yields the same letter with tonos, , from the Greek and Coptic block.
History
The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Greek Extended block:
References
{{reflist
Unicode blocks