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 (), which includes five diacritics, notates Ancient Greek phonology. The simpler monotonic orthography (), introduce ...
. 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 (), which includes five diacritics, notates Ancient Greek phonology. The simpler monotonic orthography (), introduce ...
and
diaeresis can be found in the
Greek and Coptic block. Greek Extended was encoded in version 1.1 of the
Unicode Standard
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 cha ...
. As an alternative to Greek Extended,
combining characters can be used to represent the tones and breath marks of polytonic Greek.
In this block, the letters with oxia (
acute accent
The acute accent (), ,
is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Latin, Cyrillic script, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabet, Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accen ...
) and no other accent are not used in any of the
Unicode normalization
Unicode equivalence is the specification by the Unicode character (computing), character encoding standard that some sequences of code points represent essentially the same character. This feature was introduced in the standard to allow compatibi ...
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