Thursday, February 20, 2014

Android and Ancient Greek

Of the three major platforms available for those who enjoy using tablets and telephones for online engagement, Android has been the most disappointing with regard to classical Greek. The following four issue threads have been opened on Android and Nexus forums on Google to bring the issue to the attention of developers:

Android Issues (26037): Font glyphs and text rendering: polytonic Greek characters
Android Issues (3167): Font glyphs and text rendering: international pronunciation alphabet (IPA) characters
Android Issues (53154): Fonts don't support New Testament or Classical Greek (Polytonic Greek)
Nexus Forum: Polytonic fonts not displaying

It looks like it might be possible that the newest version of Android (4.3) released corrected fonts, if I understand the last message in this thread correctly. My latest phone operates on 4.0.4, so I don’t know how the new fonts support anything. Has Android indeed taken a step to fix this issue? Can anyone confirm that 4.3 displays it correctly? I’ll try to find out and let you know.

ἔρρωσθε,
Ἰάσων τοῦ Ἰωάννου

P.S. I just downloaded and installed the Android 4.3 version of the Roboto Regular to my Windows tablet and opened it up with the character map to check the font’s layout. No, it does not have the extended Greek characters. The user in that thread didn’t state what he did to get the Greek viewable on his device. It is also viewable on my device, running 4.0.4, but I had to root the phone and replace the Roboto fonts to get it to display.

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Greek to GCSE - Chapter 7

I told you in the previous post that I would send you a link to my work on chapter 7 of Greek to GCSE, and I never did. Well, this is me sending you the link. You can find my answers here.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

I’ve also re-thought the change in my pronunciation. I will stay with the Erasmian pronunciation that I’ve always used, but with just two changes: (1) omicron (ο) will be pronounced like [oː] [just like omega (ω)]; and, (2) upsilon (υ) will be pronounced like the German [ü]. I don’t like how there’s no difference in modern Greek between iota (ι), eta (η), upsilon (υ) and the omicron-iota diphthong (οι). It just seems absurd to use the modern pronunciation for ancient Greek, in which things like ὑμεῖς and ἡμεῖς would sound the same and cause absolute confusion. These words are not spelled this way in modern Greek. Confusing forms have become distinguished, and the problem doesn’t exist as it would if we used modern pronunciation for ancient reading.

I think the most important thing is consistency. I noticed in my pronunciation in the video that I sometimes used [ɑː] instead of [oː] for omicron. Hearing that today sounds very strange, so I’ve already made that shift consistent.

Ἰάσων τοῦ Ἰωάννου