Can one combine ancient and modern Greek with Babel?

Question

Using Polyglossia, it's possible to use ancient and modern Greek in a single document. Unfortunately, Polyglossia's support for Greek is broken under LuaLaTeX. Is is possible to accomplish this using Babel?

According to the babel-greek documentation, polutonikogreek and greek cannot be used in the same document; it doesn't explicitly say that there is no way to mix ancient and modern Greek, but it seems that the \usepackage[greek.ancient,english]{babel} or \languageattribute{greek}{ancient} options can only be used in a preamble.

Answer 1

Using Monotonic Greek, Polytonic Greek and Ancient Greek at the same time in babel is possible, but you have to resort to the ini locale files, because the basic ldf style still has this limitation.

In the following example, the option provide*=* means ‘load all declared languages as ini locale files’. I’ve colorized the fonts to show the different languages. It works with both xetex and luatex.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[polytonicgreek, ancientgreek, greek, provide*=*]{babel}

\babelfont{rm}{FreeSerif}
\babelfont[polytonicgreek]{rm}[Color=993300]{FreeSerif}
\babelfont[ancientgreek]{rm}[Color=339900]{FreeSerif}

\begin{document}

Greek text (monotonic): \figurename, \alsoname.

\selectlanguage{polytonicgreek}

Polytonic Greek: \figurename, \alsoname.

\selectlanguage{ancientgreek}

Ancient Greek: \figurename, \alsoname.

\end{document}