Typing Greek

If you pursue a degree in biblical studies, you will need to learn to type using appropriate typsetting conventions for ancient Greek. Ancient Greek (including the LXX and New Testament) uses the polytonic (multiple-accent) system. For the most part, modern Greek (officially since 1982) uses a simplified system called monotonic with the ancient accents reduced to one, and the breathing marks omitted.

What is Unicode?

Unicode is a system devised to represent all major languages and writing systems (including those with non-Western alphabets like Greek or Hebrew) without having to change fonts to do it (visit the Unicode Consortium for more information, or see the Wikipedia article). The advantage to using Unicode for ancient Greek is that the letters and accents are fully composed (no problems with letter spacing). This also means that language-specific data can travel across the Internet and across computing platforms (PC or Mac) without distortion. Unicode is replacing all other earlier input methods, so here’s your chance to be just behind the cutting edge. To make use of unicode, you must install or enable (1) Greek-language support and (2) a polytonic Greek keyboard layout for your operating system.

You can peruse the Unicode Consortium Greek and Coptic character range document as well as Extended Greek to get the full picture.

For a more thorough discussion of unicode as it relates to biblical studies, see Rodney Decker’s helpful “Biblical Language Fonts and Unicode.”

Unicode Test—Can You Hear Me Now?

If you have any of these fonts installed you should be able to read the Greek text of Acts 21:37 (translation):

GFS Didot Minion Pro GentiumAlt or Gentium Cardo

Palatino Linotype Lucida Grande BibliaLS Tahoma

Here’s the text using UTF-8 encoding (the unicode is directly in the html):

Μέλλων τε εἰσάγεσθαι εἰς τὴν παρεμβολὴν ὁ Παῦλος λέγει τῷ χιλιάρχῳ· εἰ ἔξεστίν μοι εἰπεῖν τι πρὸς σέ; ὁ δὲ ἔφη· Ἑλληνιστὶ γινώσκεις;

Here it is again using ISO standard encoding (with unicode characters converted to their ASCII values):

Μέλλων τε εἰσάγεσθαι εἰς τὴν παρεμβολὴν ὁ Παῦλος λέγει τῷ χιλιάρχῳ· εἰ ἔξεστίν μοι εἰπεῖν τι πρὸς σέ; ὁ δὲ ἔφη· Ἑλληνιστὶ γινώσκεις;

If you can read Greek above with accent marks, you’re well on your way to being able to type in Greek.

Update: a student passed on the link a brief tutorial by Smith College Classics Professor Eleanor Jefferson you might find helpful, especially for the keyboard table for Windows XP users. I'm told the keys will work on Windows 7, too.

Unicode on Windows

If you use Windows, be sure to download the Microsoft instructions for installing and using the Greek polytonic system (procedures for Vista are almost the same). This instruction file includes keyboard maps for reference, and will be invaluable in finding the keystrokes you need.

Update: Windows 7 users the instructions on how to add or change an input language are a little different.

All the files you will need may already be resident on your hard drive. To use a Unicode font (in this case, one that supports polytonic Greek) you must first swtich to the keyboard for the specific language you want to use.

SIL (the Summer Institute of Linguistics) also has a good tutorial on installing the Greek polytonic keyboard that comes with Windows operating systems. Ignore the discussion of Keyman.

The most important thing to keep in mind is to select the Greek Polytonic keyboard, because other Greek keyboards will not produce the accents you need for ancient Greek.

Unicode on the Macintosh

Microsoft Word 2008 and Word 2011 on the Mac platform include support for composing in the unicode character ranges.

Incidentally, Word on the Mac does Hebrew very poorly. Other word-processors, such as Mellel, have handled Hebrew for quite some time.

You can find a more detailed tutorial from Penn State University on how to enable unicode support and keyboards on Mac OS X. But the following instructions should do well:

To install the Greek polytonic keyboard layout (OS X 10.6):

1. Invoke System Preferences from the Dock or Apple Menu
   
2. Open the Language and Text preference pane.
   
3. On the Language and Text preference pane, choose the Input Sources tab.
   
4. Enable the Greek polytonic keyboard. This one will do ancient Greek. Be sure to enable (check) the Show Input in menu bar option.
   
5. To switch to the keyboard, use the Input menu now in your menu bar.
   

Accents and Breathings

Type just as normal for unaccented Greek letters. For letters with diacritical marks (accents, breathings, subscripts, or combinations) you type using a dead key before you type the accented letter you want. For instance, to get ά, you would type the dead key for the accute accent (q on Windows, ; [semicolon] on Mac [by the way, only use q on Windows, not semicolon, because the latter produces the wrong result), then type the key for alpha. On the Windows platform, the right-hand side Alt key (often called “AltGr”) has an effect on the behavior of these dead keys, usually adding the iota-subscript. (Computer experts debate the meaning the “Gr” part of the AltGr abbreviation. IBM says it means “Graphic.” But there is a range of opinions. I like to think of it as meaning “Greek.”)

For keyboard maps, the Word instructions from Microsoft I mentioned above will do for Windows users.

Mac users should use the Mac OS 10 Keyboard Viewer (see also the Character Viewer instructions from Apple), enabled by selecting the first option in the Input Sources tab of the Language & Text Preferences pane.

Font Installation

If you're new to computers, you may need some help learning to install fonts in

• Windows XP,
• Windows Vista,
• Windows 7,
• Macintosh OS X.

A Few of My Favorite Fonts and Foundaries

There are at least two polytonic-Greek-capable fonts already installed on your system if you have Windows 2000 or later: Palatino Linotype and Tahoma. On the Mac OS, Lucida Grande, a sans-serif font, is already installed if you have version 10 or above. But these should only be used as a last resort. Try to find a good looking Greek font.

Websites listing places to get fonts abound; here are a few:

• My favorite foundry is the Greek Font Society, offering many beautiful Greek typefaces for download, all of them free. The most versatile of these seems to be GFS Didot because it will set well with Times Roman fonts (or you can use GFS Didot’s own Roman range).
• The Thesaurus Linguae Graece website has a font download page with one of the most complete Unicode font lists available on the Internet.
• Alan Wood’s unicode fonts page.
• The Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) provides the Gentium font family and Galatia SIL fonts as well as other fonts and lots of research through its Non-Roman Script Initiative.
• The Society of Biblical Literature is developing SBL Greek and SBL Hebrew in conjunction with Tiro Typeworks. The initial fonts work well, but there is still more to be done on these.
• Garamond Premier Pro is a commercially available Greek font, and I think one of the most beautiful Greek fonts ever designed (I think you will agree when you look at the full glyph complement pdf). But at $200, it’s pretty pricey—I wish I had that much to plunk down just for a font!

Many others abound, and can be found simply by searching for polytonic Greek in any good search engine. Just make sure that the font you choose can handle polytonic Greek, not just Greek—there is a big difference.

Text Critical Signs

Right now, the unicode standards are pretty comprehensive for ancient Greek. But text-critical signs are still a bit of a challenge. Check out the blog entry on FourSenses.net for text-critical signs. Many fonts don't support these yet, but SBL Greek and Cardo (though this one is still a bit aesthetically unappealing to me) fonts do to some extent.

Embedding Fonts

The fonts you use on your own computer may not be installed on other computers (such as the computers at the local copy store or in the campus library). So if you intend to print using a computer other than your own, verify that the other computer has your fonts. Depending on license restrictions for the font you use, you may be able to embed the fonts in the document. While this increases the file size (sometimes dramatically), it may save some headache because your fonts will be available in the document itself. Not all font vendors allow their fonts to be embedded. For instance, Linguist's Software, though their fonts are some of the finest available (the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft uses them for UBS and NA editions), allows embedding only if the user pays an annual license fee. In Microsoft Word (Windows version only), choose Tools…Options and then click on the Save tab. Select the option Embed TrueType fonts. Another factor to consider (if you work on both Mac and Windows platforms) is whether the font you use is available for both Windows and Macintosh platforms. So-called TrueType fonts and OpenType fonts generally work very well on both platforms.

Some Style Tips

For more information, acquire and use D. A. Carson, Greek Accents: A Student's Manual (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1985). The online Accentuation Tutorial by Berkley University’s Donald J. Mastronarde is also very helpful. Many documents require a mixture of Greek and English; for this you will need a few tips:

1. Always use all the appropriate accent and breathing marks. Otherwise, your finished product will look unprofessional (i.e., not up to the standard of graduate-level studies).
2. Do not use quotation marks when quoting a Greek text; simply type (or paste) the Greek. The change to a Greek font signals the quotation clearly enough.
3. You may also need to change some grave accents to accute accents, especially when you copy and paste from a Bible software. Remember that the grave accent is only used when another Greek word follows without intervening punctuation (such as periods or commas). For instance, suppose you’re writing about John 1:2 οὗτος ἦν ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν θεόν. If you want to talk about the phrase πρὸς τὸν θεόν, leave the text the way it is. But if you want to talk about just the preposition, type it with the accute accent rather than the grave: πρός.
4. If you wish to talk about the definition of a particular word, it’s best to use the lexical form whenever possible. In our example, if you wish to talk about the Greek word for “God,” use the form θεός.

Trouble Breathing

The smooth-breathing character, GREEK PSILI by itself ᾿ is character code 1FBF and can be entered using the Greek polytonic keyboard layout. However, the appropriate character to use when showing apocopation when a word with initial vowel or diphthong follows certain prepositions is the GREEK KORONIS, character code 1FBD, although the shape of the glyph is the same in most fonts I’ve seen. Strangely enough, no obvious way of entering it using the ordinary Windows keyboard exists. Perhaps the trouble is gone with Windows Vista or Windows 7, but I won’t hold my breath (so to speak). I have not had opportunity to test this. The Mac OS X polytonic Greek keyboard produces the correct output. For instance when the preposition ἐπί becomes ἐπ᾽, the last character should be (in hexadecimal) 1FBD. You should not try to use PSILI overstriking a space to acheive this combination. To enter this character in Word on Windows, you could use the Insert…Symbol… command and hunt through the symbols looking for GREEK KORONIS. Much easier would be to enter the keystrokes 1FBD and then the keyboard command Alt-X. Create AutoCorrect entries for the common sequences like δι᾽, ἀπ᾽, κατ᾽, καθ᾽, μετ᾽, μεθ᾽, ὑπ᾽, ὑφ᾽, etc. You can download a Word document from Ralph Hancock with many useful autocorrect entries pre-defined.

Follow up: I've posted some additional help on AutoCorrect entries and an Applescript to help with using them.

Greek Texts

Bible software packages like acCordance (Mac), BibleWorks, Gramcord, and Logos (for Mac, too) are the best way to get Greek texts in electronic format. And each of these can export unicode characters right to the clipboard. Mark Goodacre’s website lists several Greek texts. But you can also get the NA²⁷ text in unicode by visiting the German Bible Society's Web Portal. If you don't read German, you can still take a guess at the interface, or use a German-English Dictionary for help.
Update: An English interface is available for this page, too. But you really should learn German, anyway.