Showing posts with label Greek. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Greek. Show all posts

Friday, September 10, 2010

Greekish

I've long been fascinated with other alphabets. All of these strange and unusual symbols, it's almost like a code. This love of secrets was one of the reasons that I studied Ancient Greek. After reading and writing quite a bit of Greek, reading the alphabet became second nature. I even began taking notes using the Greek alphabet but using English words (since my Greek vocabulary is sadly inadequate). Performing simple character substitution sounded like a perfect one-hour project so I whipped up a simple web page to convert English text into a Greek alphabet equivalent. I call it Greekish. For example, the phrase
So long and thanks for all the fish.
becomes
Σο λονγ ανδ θανκσ φορ αλλ θε φισh.
which would be quite confusing to a Greek speaker but perfectly natural to an English speaker who knows the Greek alphabet.

Note that some English characters do not have direct equivalents in Greek. A c would be a κ, a σ, or a χ for ch. The h is one of the more interesting stories. For a leading h before a vowel Greek uses a breathing mark. When combined with a consonant, special characters are used, like θ for th, χ for ch, and φ for ph. I chose to use φ only for the English f, not ph, since ph does not make the f sound in some English contexts. The word uphill is one example. Also, I didn't bother to handle the special case of s at the end of word, for which ς is used instead of σ.

Now that you know more than you ever wanted to about the Greek alphabet, what is a simple project that you can tackle in an hour? Don't just think of one, go do it!