Typing toned letters in Greek

The Greek keyboard lets you type only one diacritic, namely ΄ as in ή

The Greek polytonic keyboard lets you type all the other diacritics for ancient Greek: ἦ ἢ ῆ ὴ ἠ ἤ ῠ ῃ

Why is it that Greek Polytonic provides a Tonos instead of an Oxia? This seems wrong to me. Tonos was created for Greek Monotonic.

This may help explain it

https://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/Greek_Unicode_duplicated_vowels

Are you using a font where the tonos has the wrong slant? In that case I think there are 3rd party keyboards which input the other one.

Thank you for your answer Tom. I am actually comparing strings in JavaScript, for example:

var alphaOxia = 'ά'; var alphaTonos = 'ά'; if (alphaOxia == alphaTonos) { document.write('identical'); } else { document.write('not identical'); }

There seems to be a major confusion in the the article you linked which states: "A notable exception is Adobe Garamond Premiere Pro and Adobe Minion Pro, which observes the false distinction introduced in the 1980s by setting the oxia in the Greek and Coptic block at almost a vertical angle, and in the Greek Extended block at a slanted, ca. 45-degree angle.". But if you take a look at the Greek and Coptic Block (http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0370.pdf) there is no mention of oxia at all.

It is also not true that there is no semantic difference since the oxia marks a pitch accent and the tonos marks a dynamic accent (hence it's sometimes unslanted representation).

It seems to me that the polytonic greek keyboard should produce an oxia and the monotonic greek keyboard a tonos, whereas at the moment both produce tonoi.

André Huf wrote:

It is also not true that there is no semantic difference since the oxia marks a pitch accent and the tonos marks a dynamic accent

My understanding is that from the point of view of the underlying data represented by Unicode, no difference exists. Which one the keyboard produces only really matters if for some reason you need to display or print oxia and tonos with different shapes or slants and are using a font which does that. Here is a another reference

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_diacritics#Unicode

Are there words that have a different meaning depending on whether one of their letters has "oxia" instead of "tonos"?

The author of that other article seems to use the term oxia = acute to refer to both of them, which I agree can be confusing.

Historically the three greek accents oxia (´), varia (`) and vrachy (῀) in hence "polytonic" greek all got replaced by the tonos (´) in 1982 - effectively rendering it "monotonic" thereby. To signify that the newly created tonos represents any of three different old accents it was sometimes rendered quite differently from the oxia, e. g. as a dot or a stroke with a 90 degree angle whereas an oxia always is a stroke with a very roughly 45 degree angle. If a tonos looks like an oxia it is merely by chance and if someone is typing polytonic greek he expects that 45 degree stroke as his accent and not something else which a tonos could be. The meaning of the word however is - to my knowledge - not effected at all by different accents.

From http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F00.pdf I understand that eg. "

1F71 ά GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH OXIA ≡ 03AC ά  greek small letter alpha with tonos

var GREEK_SMALL_LETTER_ALPHA_WITH_OXIA = '\u1F71'; var GREEK_SMALL_LETTER_ALPHA_WITH_TONOS = '\u03AC'; GREEK_SMALL_LETTER_ALPHA_WITH_OXIA.normalize() == GREEK_SMALL_LETTER_ALPHA_WITH_TONOS; // true

It is a flaw in Unicode already that I don't understand since oxia and tonos have different meaning and often different rendering. Maybe the reasoning behind this is to ease the writing of monotonic greek on a polytonic keyboard? In regard to the keyboard layout I think there should not be a tonos but an oxia on a polytonic keyboard since oxia is the right accent and it should get decomposed to tonos anyway.

You can ask Apple to change their keyboard via

http://www.apple.com/feedback

But I don't think they will. I'm pretty sure there are 3rd party keyboards which do it the way you want, at least there were when the topic came up 10 years ago.

greek polytonic

While I understand your idea that tonos and oxia have a different "meaning", from a data point of view they are identical. Differences in appearance are determined entirely by the font which is being used at the moment.

Updated links for alternative keyboards

http://www.benjaminblonder.org/sophokeys/

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/46870715/k/GreekPolytonic.bundle.zip