Greek and Coptic is the

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 ad ...

for representing modern (monotonic)

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

. It was originally used for writing

Coptic Coptic may refer to: Afro-Asia * Copts, an ethnoreligious group mainly in the area of modern Egypt but also in Sudan and Libya * Coptic language, a Northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century * Coptic alphabet ...

, using the similar Greek letters, in addition to the uniquely Coptic additions. Beginning with version 4.1 of the

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

Standard, a separate Coptic block has been included in Unicode, allowing for mixed Greek/Coptic text that is stylistically contrastive, as is convention in scholarly works. Writing

polytonic Greek Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period. The more complex polytonic orthography ( el, πολυτονικό σύστημα γραφής, translit=polytonikó sýstīma grafī́s), which includes fiv ...

requires the use of

combining character In digital typography, combining characters are characters that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the combining diacritical marks (including combining accents). Unicode also ...

s or the precomposed vowel + tone characters in the

Greek Extended Greek Extended is a Unicode block containing the accented vowels necessary for writing polytonic Greek. The regular, unaccented Greek characters as well as the characters with tonos and diaeresis can be found in the Greek and Coptic block. Gre ...

character block. Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was simply Greek, although Coptic letters were already included.

Block

History

In Unicode 1.0.1, a number of changes were made to this block in order to make Unicode 1.0.1 a proper subset of

ISO 10646 ISO is the most common abbreviation for the International Organization for Standardization. ISO or Iso may also refer to: Business and finance * Iso (supermarket), a chain of Danish supermarkets incorporated into the SuperBest chain in 2007 * Iso ...

. *The small stigma, digamma, koppa and sampi were withdrawn for further study. These characters were added back in for Unicode 3.0.0. *The non-spacing dasia pneumata, psili pneumata and tonos were merged with non-spacing reversed comma above, comma above and vertical line above in the

Combining Diacritical Marks Combining Diacritical Marks is a Unicode block containing the most common combining characters. It also contains the character "Combining Grapheme Joiner", which prevents canonical reordering of combining characters, and despite the name, actual ...

block. The last was replaced by the spacing tonos, while in Unicode 5.1.0 the former two were replaced by the small heta and the capital archaic sampi. *The non-spacing iota below and diaeresis tonos were renamed and moved to the Combining Diacritical Marks block. The latter was replaced by the spacing diaeresis tonos, while the former was replaced by the capital heta in Unicode 5.1.0. *The Greek question mark, the upper and lower numeral signs and the aforementioned spacing tonos and diaeresis tonos, as well as the spacing iota below were moved to new positions within the block. They were replaced by the kai, or Greek &, (in Unicode 3.0.0), the capital and small archaic koppa (3.2.0), the yot (1.1.0), an alternative capital theta and the lunate epsilon (both 3.1.0) respectively. The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Greek and Coptic block:

References

{{reflist Coptic language Greek language Unicode blocks

Block

History

See also

References