Love this.

The way the Greek is displayed isn't very helpful, though. Specifically, any vowel with a grave accent displays the accent as a separate letter, which makes it very distracting to read. I don't think it's a problem with the encoding, as I can copy the inline text and it displays just fine - though with some weird spaces before commas or periods:

ΕΝ ΑΡΧΗ ἦν ὁ λόγος , καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν , καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος .

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nephihaha 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I recognise that quote. :) But am I right in noticing a lack of breathings? Unless the tilde indicates it. I'm not sure of the difference between the acutes and graves here. I am used to seeing only one kind of accent on ancient Greek vowels.

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mkehrt 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

There are in fact rough breathing marks there on the articles, stacked under the inverted breve accents. Which is an alternate form of tilde.

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DonaldFisk 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The breathing marks are clear in the Ancient Library texts (e.g. St John's Gospel), but difficult to make out on Hacker News.

A propos of breathing marks, iota subscripts, and the three different accent marks of Classical Greek, when I learned it at school we had to remember the breathing marks and iota subscripts, and would lose marks if we omitted them, but we didn't need to learn the accents. Modern Greek now has only (acute) accents, which you need to know to stress the correct vowels, exactly where the accents were in the equivalent Classical Greek words.

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milkcrate 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Could vary by text? I see breathing marks in Homer.

	▲	retrac an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Modern editions usually use modernized spellings. There are no breathing marks in the oldest manuscripts; they are a classical innovation (circa 400 BC) several centuries after Homer was first written down (600 BC or earlier). Though most of Homer as we receive it today is through medieval manuscript copies, and copyists often "corrected" the spellings just like we do today.