This webpage is intended for people like me: learners of classsical Greek who wish to practice using Polytonic Greek on the internet using the Windows XP operating system. This method of typing fully-accented Greek, including diacritics and letters with combined accents, is not the most convenient way to type Greek, but at least it should be industry-standard, as it is based on the Unicode system of encoding, if I understand that correctly. Unfortunately, the diacritics do not seem to be supported in WYSIWYG editors, and I have not yet succeeded in getting the accents to show up here! This page must remain a work in progress, for now.
The accents and diacritics available in Greek Polytonic are: Dasia, Dasia Oxia, Dasia Oxia Ypogegrammeni/Prosgegrammeni*, Dasia Perispomeni, Dasia Perispomeni Ypogegrammeni/Prosgegrammeni, Dasia Varia, Dasia Varia Ypogegrameni/Prosgegrammeni, Dasia Ypogegrameni/Prosgegrammeni, Dialytika Oxia, Dialytika Perispomeni, Dialytika Varia, Makron, Oxia, Oxia Ypogegrameni, Perispomeni, Perispomeni Ypogegrameni, Psili, Psili Oxia, Psili Oxia Ypogegrameni/Prosgegrammeni, Psili Perispomeni, Psili Perispomeni Ypogegrameni/Prosgegrammeni, Psili Varia, Psili Varia Ypogegrameni/Prosgegrammeni, Psili Ypogegrameni/Prosgegrammeni, Varia, Varia Ypogegrameni, Vrachy, Ypogegrameni/Prosgegrammeni. The punctuation marks are: Ano kai kato telia, Ano Telia, Aposiopitika, Aristera Eisagogika, Dexia Eisagogika, Erotimatiko.
*Prosgegrammeni refers to "Ypogegrammeni" with capital letters.
To type in Polytonic Greek, you must first enable it. The following instructions are for XP, but are similar to the steps in Vista and Windows 7:
You have now enabled Polytonic Greek, and probably have the language bar on the taskbar at the bottom of your screen, towards the right. To begin typing in Greek, open up a typing program, email, or webpage, where you can begin typing. Click on "EN" (assuming you are using an English-based machine), and select "EL Greek." You may toggle back to English in the same way.
Select a font that supports Polytonic Greek. "Palatino Linotype" is one possible choice. Now you are ready to type Greek. The best way to understand which keys are which is to experiment yourself. However, many of the more complex characters, for example, the alpha with any kind of accent above, and the iota subscript below, are not self-evident. To type these characters, you may use the following images to help you. They are taken from the third chapter of this Microsoft White Paper. The actual images are below.
I encourage anyone who is seriously interested in learning Classical Greek to join the community at Textkit.com, which is a community with a fully-functional forum system. Good luck.
Nathan R. Bauman, 2006
