Greek and Coptic is the
Unicode block for representing modern (monotonic)
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
. It was originally used for writing
Coptic,
using the similar Greek letters, in addition to the uniquely Coptic additions. Beginning with version 4.1 of the
Unicode
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, ...
Standard, a separate
Coptic block has been included in Unicode, allowing for mixed Greek/Coptic text that is stylistically contrastive, as is convention in scholarly works. Writing
polytonic Greek requires the use of
combining characters or the precomposed vowel + tone characters in the
Greek Extended
Greek Extended is a Unicode block containing the accented vowels necessary for writing polytonic Greek. The regular, unaccented Greek characters as well as the characters with tonos and diaeresis can be found in the Greek and Coptic block. ...
character block.
Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was simply Greek, although Coptic letters were already included.
Block
History
In Unicode 1.0.1, a number of changes were made to this block in order to make Unicode 1.0.1 a proper subset of
ISO 10646.
*The small stigma, digamma, koppa and sampi were withdrawn for further study. These characters were added back in for Unicode 3.0.0.
*The non-spacing dasia pneumata, psili pneumata and tonos were merged with non-spacing reversed comma above, comma above and vertical line above in the
Combining Diacritical Marks
Combining Diacritical Marks is a Unicode block containing the most common combining characters. It also contains the character " Combining Grapheme Joiner", which prevents canonical reordering of combining characters, and despite the name, act ...
block. The last was replaced by the spacing tonos, while in Unicode 5.1.0 the former two were replaced by the small heta and the capital archaic sampi.
*The non-spacing iota below and diaeresis tonos were renamed and moved to the Combining Diacritical Marks block. The latter was replaced by the spacing diaeresis tonos, while the former was replaced by the capital heta in Unicode 5.1.0.
*The Greek question mark, the upper and lower numeral signs and the aforementioned spacing tonos and diaeresis tonos, as well as the spacing iota below were moved to new positions within the block. They were replaced by the kai, or Greek &, (in Unicode 3.0.0), the capital and small archaic koppa (3.2.0), the yot (1.1.0), an alternative capital theta and the lunate epsilon (both 3.1.0) respectively.
The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Greek and Coptic block:
See also
*
Phonetic symbols in Unicode
References
{{reflist
Coptic language
Greek language
Unicode blocks