Transliterate Latin to ancient Greek letters

Question

There is a simple way to transform Latin letters to Greek letters, using the stringi package for R which relies on ICU's transliterator here:

library(stringi)
stri_trans_general("abcd", "latin-greek")

Is there a similar simple way to convert Latin to ancient Greek (αβγδ) instead of Greek (ἀβκδ)?

Interesting, i didn't know you can do that with `stringi`... — David Arenburg, Jul 28 '14 at 08:17
BTW, I wonder why "b" is mapped to β in the Unicode standard (and thus in ICU and therefore in stringi). In modern-Greek (correct me if I'm wrong) β is spelled like "vita"... Just a food for thought for the curious people out there :) — gagolews, Oct 15 '14 at 10:21

gagolews · Answer 1 · 2014-10-17T10:16:34.867

I guess what you'd like to do (at least, as a part of your task), is to remove all accents.

Here's a way to do that with stringi.

library("stringi")
stri_flatten(
   stri_extract_all_charclass(
       stri_trans_nfkd(
          stri_trans_general("abcd", "latin-greek")
       ),
   "\\p{L}")[[1]]
)
## [1] "αβκδ"

First we transliterate a stringi to Greek script. Then we perform Unicode normalization NFKD -- this splits accented characters to characters and accents separately. Next its time to extract all the letters and concatenate the results. HTH

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

There are no real differences between the modern and the ancient greek alphabet. Maybe the biggest one is that the ancient greek alphabet did not have lowercase letters. So both αβγδ and ἀβκδ are modern greek (With the accent on alpha being probably something that has to do with pronunciation, modern greek does not have it any more).

Now, what stri_trans_general does is transliterating while trying to take into account the pronunciation:

pronounceable: transliteration is not as useful if the process simply maps the characters without any regard to their pronunciation. Simply mapping "αβγδεζηθ..." to "abcdefgh..." would yield strings that might be complete and unambiguous, but cannot be pronounced. (see here)

There are different standards to do the transliteration, like ISO 843 and UN (see here and here). c can be transliterated as "κ" or "σ" and the former is chosen.

Since SO is about programming, here is some code if you want to make your own mapping:

## You have to complete the mapping
map <- data.frame(latin = c("a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f", " "),
                  greek = c("α", "β", "γ", "δ", "ε", "φ", " "),
                  stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

mapChars <- function(latin) {
    a <- strsplit(latin, "")[[1]]
    res <- sapply(a, function(x) map$greek[map$latin == x])
    paste(res, sep="", collapse="")
}

mapChars("abcd")
## [1] "αβγδ"

Hope this helps you,

alex (or άλεξ)

Thank you for the detailed infos! I get "aßγd" with your code. With `chartr("abc","αβγ",c("a","b","c"))` I get strange results and `library(gsubfn); tmp <- list(a='α',b='β',c='γ'); gsubfn('.', tmp, 'abcd')` works but is not for string vectors ;) — ckluss, Jul 28 '14 at 20:04
I checked my code again and it works for me. Also `chartr` returns `"α" "β" "γ"`. And `gsubfn` works for me too: `gsubfn('.', tmp, c("aa", "abcd"))` returns `"αα" "αβγδ"`. Maybe you have some encoding problem with your editor? I use emacs wich seems to handle unicode quite well. — alko989, Jul 28 '14 at 20:50
ok, thank you very much! Seems to be a RStudio + Windows problem :( "beta" works, "alpha" not, realy strange. — ckluss, Jul 29 '14 at 15:52

Transliterate Latin to ancient Greek letters

2 Answers2