L/V 10 Tip of the Day #10 Greek transliteration and technical gobbledygook

MJ. Smith

Another tip of the day (TOTD) series for Logos/Verbum 10. They will be short and often drawn from forum posts. Feel free to ask questions and/or suggest forum posts you'd like to see included. Adding comments about the behavior on mobile and web apps would be appreciated by your fellow forumites. A search for "L/V 10 Tip of the Day site:community.logos.com" on Google should bring the tips up.

This tip is based on the forum post: Interactive Media: Text Converter - Faithlife Forums (logos.com)

The tool under discussion is Text Converter. Bellingham, WA: Faithlife, 2014. It is available in the Library under the resource type Interactive; It is available in the Tool menu under the Interactive heading. The documentation for the resource in internal under Help.  In this post, only the transliteration of Greek will be discussed. Because many of the transliterations shown are technical, the language of Help is daunting.

The following forms may be considered as fonts/computer coding schemes that are required by some software. Unless you are copying the transliterated text into one of these software applications, you may safely ignore these options:

• Beta Code - ASCII code which comes from telegraph teleprinters of the early 1960's.
• Unicode Composed - a contemporary Unicode code using composite glyphs -- think combining a diacritical mark with a base letter
• Unicode Decomposed - a contemporary Unicode code that does not support composite glyphs

Note that for each of these transliterations, Help provides an external link with the technical details.

One form is not technically a transliteration. Rather, it simply removes marks that have been added for a particular apparatus:

• No Apparatus Marks does not change the transliteration but rather removes any marks that may have been added to it for the apparatus.

Another form is missing in the documentation:

• Isolated Accents is missing in the documentation

That leaves only two forms of Greek transliteration of interest to the average user.

• SBL Greek transliteration maps the Greek alphabet to the (American English) Latin alphabet using the rules provided by the Society of Biblical Literature.
• Spanish transliteration maps the Greek alphabet to the (Spanish) Latin alphabet.

What is the difference between the American English Latin alphabet and the Spanish Latin alphabet? The pronunciation of certain letters in context. The smallest unit of sound with a distinct meaning is called a phoneme. As transliterations often try to represent the sound of the word, these differences in sound makes a difference in the transliteration. I would suspect that other languages, e.g. German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch ... - either have entries that do not appear in my installation. Or, there should be a push to have them added through suggestions on the Feedback site.

The transliteration rules from: SBL Press. The SBL Handbook of Style. Second Edition. Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2014. They are likely familiar from your first Greek textbook.

[quote]

5.3 GREEK

Whereas for Hebrew both academic and general-purpose transliteration styles are provided, for Greek only a general-purpose style is provided; for academic readers, Greek should be given in Greek characters. (In books meant for a broad audience, editors may elect to use a Greek font only in notes and parentheses, transliterating Greek words that are necessary in the main text.) Thus no provision is made for transliteration of iōta subscript, diaeresis, digamma, accents, and the like; where these matter, use a Greek font.

5.3.1 Alphabet

               Character                                                     Transliteration

5.3.2 Notes

(1) When a gamma appears before a γ, κ, ξ, or χ (gamma nasal), it is transliterated n.
(2) The vowels ēta and ōmega should be indicated with a macron.
(3) Initial ῥ is transliterated rh. The second rhō in medial double rhō is also transliterated rh: e.g., Πύρρος = Pyrrhos.
(4) When upsilon is part of a diphthong, it is transliterated u (au, eu, ēu, ou, ui). When it appears independently, it is transliterated y: e.g., κύριος = kyrios, not kurios.
(5) The rough breathing mark (῾) is transliterated h preceding an initial vowel or diphthong: e.g., ὕμνος = hymnos; αἵρεσις = hairesis.

SBL Press, The SBL Handbook of Style, Second Edition (Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2014), 59–60.

No link is provided for the Spanish transliteration rules (another appropriate suggestion request.)