![]() | This template does not require a rating on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||
|
We need something other than iso-8859-1 for this page. How do we do that? Preferably UTF-8...
Joeljkp
15:23, 20 May 2004 (UTC)
I've separated out the obsolete letters, to avoid confusion. By the way on my browser the digamma and sampi show up only in upper case, and qoppa and san don't show up at all, even with the font specification. rossb 12:52, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Hello! I've added images, sans serif and serif, for all letters of the Greek alphabet. I'm unsure if this can – but should! :) – be incorporated into this table, but I thought it neat to clearly show visitors what each of these letters looked like, as each of the letters for the English alphabet ( Latin alphabet) do. Thoughts? Thanks! E Pluribus Anthony 18:38, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
Can't this template be made smaller? Something like Template:Hebrew alphabet. In my opinion, the current version is too big - it takes up too much space on articles. Latinus 16:35, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
Hello. I find the table hard to read; I want to read down the columns, but the table is ordered across the rows. I believe it is generally more common to order items in a table across if the table is wider than it is deep, and order items down if it is deeper than it is wide. Does anyone object to reordering the table so that beta is below alpha instead of beside it? Thanks for your comments. 64.48.193.172 19:14, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
I don't know a lot about this subject, but I think that it's sure there should be an image from Stigma letter. Why it isn't in the template?
An image is available on the stigma page.
-- Nethac DIU 12:09, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
Now you say that, I think same - maybe we should do a voting about this subject. If there's already a votation, please put a link to it here. -- Nethac DIU 12:12, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
I made some small changes to the template - its shorter, but not wider, making it simply smaller. No content is changed, except that i added the "lower" case and "upper" case things at the top (to show which is which. The only reason I thought of doing this is that on the page for Mu, the picture could confuse people slightly, because showing capitol Mu and lower mu next to eachother look like "M" and "u" (Mu). When I first saw that I thought it might have just been a title as in "this is the character Mu", but its actually showing the way the capitol and lowercase letters look
Here it is:
upper lower upper lower
![]() | ||
Greek alphabet | ||
---|---|---|
Α α Alpha | Β β Beta | Γ γ Gamma |
Δ δ Delta | Ε ε Epsilon | Ζ ζ Zeta |
Η η Eta | Θ θ Theta | Ι ι Iota |
Κ κ Kappa | Λ λ Lambda | Μ μ Mu |
Ν ν Nu | Ξ ξ Xi | Ο ο Omicron |
Π π Pi | Ρ ρ Rho | Σ σ ς Sigma |
Τ τ Tau | Υ υ Upsilon | Φ φ Phi |
Χ χ Chi | Ψ ψ Psi | Ω ω Omega |
obsolete letters | ||
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Fresheneesz 22:48, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
Do we really need variant forms on the main table? Probably all of them have a variant form of two, only some of which are encoded in unicode. -- Ptcamn 11:20, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
I saw this template and thought it really needed to read correctly as you go down the columns, rather than across each row. I saw here on the talk page that several people had made this same point before, but nothing had ever been done. So I did it.
I didn't change the "obsolete letters" section; if those should be changed too, that should be easy enough. — Bkell ( talk) 20:49, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
I've added another parameter to this template, 'image' — it lets one specify the image to be used, in case the default naming convention 'Greek alphabet {{letter}}.png' doesn't apply (such as in Psi, which now uses an svg graphic). ~ Booya Bazooka 02:48, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
For some reason, the image for stigma doesn't show up. -- WolFox ( ★Talk★) Contribs 16:39, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
The letter San was not showing up properly in the table, either in Internet Explorer 7 or in Netscape 7.2. I've replaced it with an image, as used on the Greek version of this table. -- rossb 12:27, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
And of course the image is not underlined (not linked) which perhaps improves legibility and might be extended to the other letters. I might add that I'm extremely dubious about including the letter Sho, and might make a case for including the ΟΥ ligature instead. -- rossb 12:35, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I have removed image at top of box because all of the images are broken on the pages. Note: Most of the Greek Letter pages have the image shown in a separate frame. Thanks, Monkeyblu e 02:16, 5 May 2007 (UTC)
Stigma is not a "letter" -- it's a medieval ligature also used as a number in place of old digamma... AnonMoos ( talk) 08:01, 8 September 2008 (UTC)
Heta redirects to Eta. It makes sense (I think), but having what appear to be separate links that both go to the same place isn't ideal. Voxii ( talk) 16:44, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
I realize that Future Perfect has been doing a lot of maintenance here--much appreciated! In this edit, however, I disagree with the substitution of images for some of the characters that depend on images. In particular, it seems absurd that stigma and digamma, usually encountered in the real world in their lowercase forms, are here represented only by capitals. I'd prefer to keep both, or, if there is some kind of space issue I don't understand, the lower-case letters only. Wareh ( talk) 16:25, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
![]() | |||
Greek alphabet | |||
---|---|---|---|
Αα | Alpha | Νν | Nu |
Ββ | Beta | Ξξ | Xi |
Γγ | Gamma | Οο | Omicron |
Δδ | Delta | Ππ | Pi |
Εε | Epsilon | Ρρ | Rho |
Ζζ | Zeta | Σσς | Sigma |
Ηη | Eta | Ττ | Tau |
Θθ | Theta | Υυ | Upsilon |
Ιι | Iota | Φφ | Phi |
Κκ | Kappa | Χχ | Chi |
Λλ | Lambda | Ψψ | Psi |
Μμ | Mu | Ωω | Omega |
Other characters | |||
Ϝϝ | Digamma | Ϛϛ | Stigma |
Ͱͱ | Heta | Ϻϻ | San |
Ϙϙ | Koppa | Ͳͳ | Sampi |
Ϟϟ | modern Ϙ | Ϡϡ | modern Ͳ |
Greek diacritics |
Should we use Unicode for the "other characters" section? (see right)
I also added lowercase forms of
Heta and
San, and the uppercase form of
Stigma.
I wasn't sure what to do about
Koppa (I renamed it from "Qoppa" because that's how it is in Unicode and
the article title) and
Sampi, as they each have two archaic and two modern forms.
In the current version, Koppa is uppercase archaic, lowercase modern ("Ϙϟ"); and Sampi is lowercase modern, uppercase archaic ("ϡͲ").
As you can see, I decided to separate the archaic and less-significant modern forms, labeling the modern forms as "modern Ϙ/Ͳ."
I'm sure that someone can come up with a better way to separate these forms, or make the way it was in the images make more sense.
Doggitydogs (
talk)
17:20, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
Late comment: about the casing pairs, I largely agree with AnonMoos. Each of these cases is rather different:
So, to Wareh: no, of course I wouldn't say "lowercase forms should be omitted". But we should still just list one single form for most of these letters – uppercase style where uppercase is the only form in real use, and lowercase style where lowercase is the only form in real use.
About the question of whether to use characters or images, I'm for images, because of the confusion in the fonts. Epigraphic Sampi and Heta were encoded so recently that most systems won't have them; the implementation of numeral Sampi is botched due to Unicode's casing vagaries (old fonts have only the uppercase codepoint, while new fonts have the real thing at the lowercase codepoint and some ugly concoction at the uppercase); implementation of Koppa is botched owing to confusion between epigraphic and numeral forms (see File:Greek Stigma and Koppa font design.svg). Images are the only thing that guarantees readers will see what we want them to see. Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:32, 23 September 2011 (UTC) Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:32, 23 September 2011 (UTC)
By the way, some of the above comments about what will display in people's browsers are now obsolete or semi-obsolete, due to the advent of dynamically-loaded fonts... AnonMoos ( talk) 19:31, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
I see that this oddity was included in the template in 2006. Is it correct to exclude it at this point?
Varlaam (
talk)
21:43, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
About this [1] recent edit, inserting standard Unicode characters in place of the inline graphics we used previously for the archaic characters: while I can obviously see the motivation behind this change, are we really certain this will now be okay for our readers? The last time I looked (in 2011), there seemed to be still some massive problems about font coverage on common computer systems, making textual characters problematic:
How reliably can we make readers see what we want them to see? Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:02, 25 July 2013 (UTC)
I recently became aware of a problem arising out of the use of this template. It is a sidebar, so it's not displayed on mobile view. This shouldn't normally be an issue because sidebars only provide links to related topics, and so are not essential for understanding the article they appear on. The trouble is that in addition to links to related articles, this template does provide one essential bit of content – the image of the letter. So anyone who access articles on Greek letters on a mobile (that's about one out of two readers), will not be able to see how these letters look. We need to move the image out of this template and display it either on its own, or as part of a newly added instance of {{ infobox grapheme}} (as is done for example at Q). – Uanfala (talk) 02:39, 18 April 2020 (UTC)
The discussions above on graphics vs Unicode are about 10 years old; at this point I expect every significant browser / OS pair to have support for archaic Greek letters, so I think we should make the change.
I've made a copy of the template with Unicode letters so people can preview the change. MattF ( talk) 17:12, 29 November 2021 (UTC)
![]() | This
edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
ϛ (6) + 2604:3D09:1482:200:9947:A1C1:D878:E79D ( talk) 09:59, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
Internet 2603:8001:2240:BA28:BC34:6B50:FF0F:A64E ( talk) 19:26, 5 July 2023 (UTC)
![]() | This
edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
The link to the archaic letter Digamma goes to the wrong place. It goes to San when it should go to here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CD%B6 38.59.172.79 ( talk) 16:34, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
Let me know if you would like this to be changed further. TG HL ↗ 🍁 22:28, 1 January 2024 (UTC)the same symbol is used to denote the unrelated letter waw (/w/) in Pamphylia (the " Pamphylian digamma")
— San (letter)
Since there are lowercase versions of archaic Greek letters, I've revamped the formatting for the history section in my sandbox. If this change could be added to make the archaic letters section more readable, that would be great. » PKMNLives -- Talk 18:01, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
![]() | This template does not require a rating on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||
|
We need something other than iso-8859-1 for this page. How do we do that? Preferably UTF-8...
Joeljkp
15:23, 20 May 2004 (UTC)
I've separated out the obsolete letters, to avoid confusion. By the way on my browser the digamma and sampi show up only in upper case, and qoppa and san don't show up at all, even with the font specification. rossb 12:52, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Hello! I've added images, sans serif and serif, for all letters of the Greek alphabet. I'm unsure if this can – but should! :) – be incorporated into this table, but I thought it neat to clearly show visitors what each of these letters looked like, as each of the letters for the English alphabet ( Latin alphabet) do. Thoughts? Thanks! E Pluribus Anthony 18:38, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
Can't this template be made smaller? Something like Template:Hebrew alphabet. In my opinion, the current version is too big - it takes up too much space on articles. Latinus 16:35, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
Hello. I find the table hard to read; I want to read down the columns, but the table is ordered across the rows. I believe it is generally more common to order items in a table across if the table is wider than it is deep, and order items down if it is deeper than it is wide. Does anyone object to reordering the table so that beta is below alpha instead of beside it? Thanks for your comments. 64.48.193.172 19:14, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
I don't know a lot about this subject, but I think that it's sure there should be an image from Stigma letter. Why it isn't in the template?
An image is available on the stigma page.
-- Nethac DIU 12:09, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
Now you say that, I think same - maybe we should do a voting about this subject. If there's already a votation, please put a link to it here. -- Nethac DIU 12:12, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
I made some small changes to the template - its shorter, but not wider, making it simply smaller. No content is changed, except that i added the "lower" case and "upper" case things at the top (to show which is which. The only reason I thought of doing this is that on the page for Mu, the picture could confuse people slightly, because showing capitol Mu and lower mu next to eachother look like "M" and "u" (Mu). When I first saw that I thought it might have just been a title as in "this is the character Mu", but its actually showing the way the capitol and lowercase letters look
Here it is:
upper lower upper lower
![]() | ||
Greek alphabet | ||
---|---|---|
Α α Alpha | Β β Beta | Γ γ Gamma |
Δ δ Delta | Ε ε Epsilon | Ζ ζ Zeta |
Η η Eta | Θ θ Theta | Ι ι Iota |
Κ κ Kappa | Λ λ Lambda | Μ μ Mu |
Ν ν Nu | Ξ ξ Xi | Ο ο Omicron |
Π π Pi | Ρ ρ Rho | Σ σ ς Sigma |
Τ τ Tau | Υ υ Upsilon | Φ φ Phi |
Χ χ Chi | Ψ ψ Psi | Ω ω Omega |
obsolete letters | ||
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Fresheneesz 22:48, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
Do we really need variant forms on the main table? Probably all of them have a variant form of two, only some of which are encoded in unicode. -- Ptcamn 11:20, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
I saw this template and thought it really needed to read correctly as you go down the columns, rather than across each row. I saw here on the talk page that several people had made this same point before, but nothing had ever been done. So I did it.
I didn't change the "obsolete letters" section; if those should be changed too, that should be easy enough. — Bkell ( talk) 20:49, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
I've added another parameter to this template, 'image' — it lets one specify the image to be used, in case the default naming convention 'Greek alphabet {{letter}}.png' doesn't apply (such as in Psi, which now uses an svg graphic). ~ Booya Bazooka 02:48, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
For some reason, the image for stigma doesn't show up. -- WolFox ( ★Talk★) Contribs 16:39, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
The letter San was not showing up properly in the table, either in Internet Explorer 7 or in Netscape 7.2. I've replaced it with an image, as used on the Greek version of this table. -- rossb 12:27, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
And of course the image is not underlined (not linked) which perhaps improves legibility and might be extended to the other letters. I might add that I'm extremely dubious about including the letter Sho, and might make a case for including the ΟΥ ligature instead. -- rossb 12:35, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I have removed image at top of box because all of the images are broken on the pages. Note: Most of the Greek Letter pages have the image shown in a separate frame. Thanks, Monkeyblu e 02:16, 5 May 2007 (UTC)
Stigma is not a "letter" -- it's a medieval ligature also used as a number in place of old digamma... AnonMoos ( talk) 08:01, 8 September 2008 (UTC)
Heta redirects to Eta. It makes sense (I think), but having what appear to be separate links that both go to the same place isn't ideal. Voxii ( talk) 16:44, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
I realize that Future Perfect has been doing a lot of maintenance here--much appreciated! In this edit, however, I disagree with the substitution of images for some of the characters that depend on images. In particular, it seems absurd that stigma and digamma, usually encountered in the real world in their lowercase forms, are here represented only by capitals. I'd prefer to keep both, or, if there is some kind of space issue I don't understand, the lower-case letters only. Wareh ( talk) 16:25, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
![]() | |||
Greek alphabet | |||
---|---|---|---|
Αα | Alpha | Νν | Nu |
Ββ | Beta | Ξξ | Xi |
Γγ | Gamma | Οο | Omicron |
Δδ | Delta | Ππ | Pi |
Εε | Epsilon | Ρρ | Rho |
Ζζ | Zeta | Σσς | Sigma |
Ηη | Eta | Ττ | Tau |
Θθ | Theta | Υυ | Upsilon |
Ιι | Iota | Φφ | Phi |
Κκ | Kappa | Χχ | Chi |
Λλ | Lambda | Ψψ | Psi |
Μμ | Mu | Ωω | Omega |
Other characters | |||
Ϝϝ | Digamma | Ϛϛ | Stigma |
Ͱͱ | Heta | Ϻϻ | San |
Ϙϙ | Koppa | Ͳͳ | Sampi |
Ϟϟ | modern Ϙ | Ϡϡ | modern Ͳ |
Greek diacritics |
Should we use Unicode for the "other characters" section? (see right)
I also added lowercase forms of
Heta and
San, and the uppercase form of
Stigma.
I wasn't sure what to do about
Koppa (I renamed it from "Qoppa" because that's how it is in Unicode and
the article title) and
Sampi, as they each have two archaic and two modern forms.
In the current version, Koppa is uppercase archaic, lowercase modern ("Ϙϟ"); and Sampi is lowercase modern, uppercase archaic ("ϡͲ").
As you can see, I decided to separate the archaic and less-significant modern forms, labeling the modern forms as "modern Ϙ/Ͳ."
I'm sure that someone can come up with a better way to separate these forms, or make the way it was in the images make more sense.
Doggitydogs (
talk)
17:20, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
Late comment: about the casing pairs, I largely agree with AnonMoos. Each of these cases is rather different:
So, to Wareh: no, of course I wouldn't say "lowercase forms should be omitted". But we should still just list one single form for most of these letters – uppercase style where uppercase is the only form in real use, and lowercase style where lowercase is the only form in real use.
About the question of whether to use characters or images, I'm for images, because of the confusion in the fonts. Epigraphic Sampi and Heta were encoded so recently that most systems won't have them; the implementation of numeral Sampi is botched due to Unicode's casing vagaries (old fonts have only the uppercase codepoint, while new fonts have the real thing at the lowercase codepoint and some ugly concoction at the uppercase); implementation of Koppa is botched owing to confusion between epigraphic and numeral forms (see File:Greek Stigma and Koppa font design.svg). Images are the only thing that guarantees readers will see what we want them to see. Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:32, 23 September 2011 (UTC) Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:32, 23 September 2011 (UTC)
By the way, some of the above comments about what will display in people's browsers are now obsolete or semi-obsolete, due to the advent of dynamically-loaded fonts... AnonMoos ( talk) 19:31, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
I see that this oddity was included in the template in 2006. Is it correct to exclude it at this point?
Varlaam (
talk)
21:43, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
About this [1] recent edit, inserting standard Unicode characters in place of the inline graphics we used previously for the archaic characters: while I can obviously see the motivation behind this change, are we really certain this will now be okay for our readers? The last time I looked (in 2011), there seemed to be still some massive problems about font coverage on common computer systems, making textual characters problematic:
How reliably can we make readers see what we want them to see? Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:02, 25 July 2013 (UTC)
I recently became aware of a problem arising out of the use of this template. It is a sidebar, so it's not displayed on mobile view. This shouldn't normally be an issue because sidebars only provide links to related topics, and so are not essential for understanding the article they appear on. The trouble is that in addition to links to related articles, this template does provide one essential bit of content – the image of the letter. So anyone who access articles on Greek letters on a mobile (that's about one out of two readers), will not be able to see how these letters look. We need to move the image out of this template and display it either on its own, or as part of a newly added instance of {{ infobox grapheme}} (as is done for example at Q). – Uanfala (talk) 02:39, 18 April 2020 (UTC)
The discussions above on graphics vs Unicode are about 10 years old; at this point I expect every significant browser / OS pair to have support for archaic Greek letters, so I think we should make the change.
I've made a copy of the template with Unicode letters so people can preview the change. MattF ( talk) 17:12, 29 November 2021 (UTC)
![]() | This
edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
ϛ (6) + 2604:3D09:1482:200:9947:A1C1:D878:E79D ( talk) 09:59, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
Internet 2603:8001:2240:BA28:BC34:6B50:FF0F:A64E ( talk) 19:26, 5 July 2023 (UTC)
![]() | This
edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
The link to the archaic letter Digamma goes to the wrong place. It goes to San when it should go to here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CD%B6 38.59.172.79 ( talk) 16:34, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
Let me know if you would like this to be changed further. TG HL ↗ 🍁 22:28, 1 January 2024 (UTC)the same symbol is used to denote the unrelated letter waw (/w/) in Pamphylia (the " Pamphylian digamma")
— San (letter)
Since there are lowercase versions of archaic Greek letters, I've revamped the formatting for the history section in my sandbox. If this change could be added to make the archaic letters section more readable, that would be great. » PKMNLives -- Talk 18:01, 23 June 2024 (UTC)