Writing in Ancient Greek with babel

Question

I'm using babel to write in ancient greek.

I'm interested in LGR Latin transliteration, which is described in the following table (taken from here):

Everything worked fine, except for the perispomeni (as in ᾶ) and the dialytika (as in ϊ). Here's what happened:

CODE:

\usepackage[greek, english]{babel}

\textgreek{'a, <a, >a, `a, a|, ~a, ¨i}

OUTPUT:

The last characters should be ᾶ and ϊ respectively.

How can I fix this?

Thank you!

Answer 1

The perispomeni used to work. The fix is easy, though.

For the dialytika the character to use is ", not ¨.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[greek.polutoniko,english]{babel}
\usepackage{xpatch}

\xapptocmd{\greektext}{\edef~{\string~}}{}{}

\begin{document}

\textgreek{'a, <a, >a, `a, a|, ~a, "i}

\end{document}

On the other hand, you can also directly input the precomposed letters with the diacritics (not with the combining accents).

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[greek.polutoniko,english]{babel}
\usepackage{xpatch}

\xapptocmd{\greektext}{\edef~{\string~}}{}{}

\begin{document}

\textgreek{'a, <a, >a, `a, a|, ~a, "i}

\textgreek{ά, ἁ, ἀ, ὰ, ᾳ, ᾶ, ϊ}

\end{document}

Answer 2

Here, there is my answer done with greek.polutoniko package + the \ to have the correct \~a, and \"i.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[greek.polutoniko,english]{babel}

\begin{document}

\textgreek{'a, <a, >a, `a, a|, \~a, \"i}

\end{document}

I add the screenshot compiled with LuaLaTeX.

However also your code works fine if you use the correct commands.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[greek, english]{babel}
\begin{document}

\textgreek{'a, <a, >a, `a, a|, \~a, \"i}

\end{document}

Answer 3

The \textgreek macro only changes font encoding, not the language. Using \foreignlanguage{greek} is preferred (unless you are compiling with XeTeX and LuaTeX and using Unicode fonts but still want the Latin transliteration).

The dialytika is input with the ASCII " (quotation mark) character.

The standard "monotonic" Greek orthography does not use the perispomeni accent, therefore the tilde character ~ is kept at its default LaTeX function: insert a no-break space. You can use a tilde accent command instead:

\usepackage[greek, english]{babel}

\foreignlanguage{greek}{'a, <a, >a, `a, a|, \~a, "i}

If you want to write "polytonic" Greek or "ancient" Greek, use the "polutoniko" or "ancient" modifier respectively to tell Babel. Then, the ~ character changes its meaning in Greek text parts. E.g.

\usepackage[greek.ancient, english]{babel}

\foreignlanguage{greek}{'a, <a, >a, `a, a|, ~a, "i}

Caveat: Due to side effects, the re-definition of ~ is only done with 8-bit TeX (pdftex) and only in text parts with the language Greek (i.e. not in the argument of \textgreek inside an English text part).

Hint: after a first compilation, you can replace the Latin transliteration with the literal Greek characters copied from the output. Looks better, works better, is safe for use with Xe/LuaTeX.

For side-effects and details, see the babel-greek documentation.