Romanization of Greek

The American Library Association and Library of Congress romanization scheme employs its "Ancient or Medieval Greek" system for all works and authors up to the Fall of Constantinople in 1453,[3] although Byzantine Greek was pronounced distinctly and some have considered "Modern" Greek to have begun as early as the 12th century.[4]

For treatment of polytonic Greek letters—for example, ᾤ—see also the section on romanizing Greek diacritical marks below.

ELOT approved in 1982 the ELOT 743 standard, revised in 2001,[6] whose Type 2 (Greek: Τύπος 2, romanized: Typos 2) transcription scheme has been adopted by the Greek and Cypriot governments as standard for Romanization of names on Greek and Cypriot passports. It also comprised a Type 1 (Greek: Τύπος 1, romanized: Typos 1) transliteration table, which was extensively modified in the second edition of the standard.

International versions of ELOT 743, with an English language standard document, were approved by the UN (V/19, 1987) and the British and American governments. The ISO approved in 1997 its version, ISO 843, with a different Type 1 transliteration system, which was adopted four years later by ELOT itself, while the U.N. did not update its version. So the transcriptions of Modern Greek into Latin letters used by ELOT, UN and ISO are essentially equivalent, while there remain minor differences in how they approach reversible transliteration.

The American Library Association and Library of Congress romanization scheme employs its "Modern Greek" system for all works and authors following the Fall of Constantinople in 1453.[3]

In the table below, the special rules for vowel combinations (αι, αυ, ει, ευ, ηυ, οι, ου, ωυ) only apply when these letters function as digraphs. There are also words where the same letters stand side by side incidentally but represent separate vowels. In these cases each of the two letters is transcribed separately according to the normal rules for single letters. Such cases are marked in Greek orthography by either having an accent on the first rather than the second vowel letter, or by having a diaeresis ( ¨ ) over the second letter. For treatment of accents and diaereses—for example, ϊ—also see the section on romanizing Greek diacritical marks below.

The traditional polytonic orthography of Greek uses several distinct diacritical marks to render what was originally the pitch accent of Ancient Greek and the presence or absence of word-initial /h/. In 1982, monotonic orthography was officially introduced for modern Greek. The only diacritics that remain are the acute accent (indicating stress) and the diaeresis (indicating that two consecutive vowels should not be combined).

When a Greek diphthong is accented, the accent mark is placed over the second letter of the pair. This means that an accent over the first letter of the pair indicates vowels which should be taken (and romanized) separately. Although the second vowel is not marked with a superfluous diaeresis in Greek, the first-edition ELOT 743 and the UN systems place a diaeresis on the Latin vowel for the sake of clarity.[10][9]

Apart from the diacritical marks native to Greek itself or used to romanize its characters, linguists also regularly mark vowel length with macrons ( ¯ ) marking long vowels and rounded breves ( ˘ ) marking short vowels. Where these are romanized, it is common to mark the long vowels with macrons over the Latin letters and to leave the short vowels unmarked; such macrons should not be confused or conflated with those used by some systems to mark eta and omega as distinct from epsilon, iota, and omicron.

Greece's early Attic numerals were based on a small sample of letters (including heta) arranged in multiples of 5 and 10, likely forming the inspiration for the later Etruscan and Roman numerals.

This early system was replaced by Greek numerals which employed the entire alphabet, including the nonstandard letters digamma, stigma, or sigma-tau (placed between epsilon and zeta), koppa (placed between pi and rho), and sampi (placed after omega). As revised in 2001, ELOT 743 provides for the uncommon characters to be given (in Greek) as $ for stigma, + for koppa, and / for sampi. These symbols are not given lower-case equivalents.[8] When used as numbers, the letters are used in combination with the upper keraia numeral sign ⟨ʹ⟩ to denote numbers from 1 to 900 and in combination with the lower keraia ⟨͵⟩ to denote multiples of 1000. (For a full table of the signs and their values, see Greek numerals.)

These values are traditionally romanized as Roman numerals, so that Αλέξανδρος Γ' ο Μακεδών would be translated as Alexander III of Macedon and transliterated as Aléxandros III o Makedṓn rather than Aléxandros G' or Aléxandros 3. Greek laws and other official documents of Greece which employ these numerals, however, are to be formally romanized using "decimal" Arabic numerals.[8]

Ancient Greek text did not mark word division with spaces or interpuncts, instead running the words together (scripta continua). In the Hellenistic period, a variety of symbols arose for punctuation or editorial marking; such punctuation (or the lack thereof) are variously romanized, inserted, or ignored in different modern editions.

Modern Greek punctuation generally follows French with the notable exception of Greek's use of a separate question mark, the erotimatiko, which is shaped like the Latinate semicolon. Greek punctuation which has been given formal romanizations include:

There are many archaic forms and local variants of the Greek alphabet. Beta, for example, might appear as round Β or pointed throughout Greece but is also found in the forms (at Gortyn), and (Thera), (Argos), (Melos), (Corinth), (Megara and Byzantium), and even (Cyclades).[14] Well into the modern period, classical and medieval Greek was also set using a wide array of ligatures, symbols combining or abbreviating various sets of letters, such as those included in Claude Garamond's 16th-century grecs du roi. For the most part, such variants—as ϖ and for π, ϛ for στ, and ϗ for και—are just silently emended to their standard forms and transliterated accordingly. Letters with no equivalent in the classical Greek alphabet such as heta (Ͱ & ͱ), meanwhile, usually take their nearest English equivalent (in this case, h) but are too uncommon to be listed in formal transliteration schemes.

Uncommon Greek letters which have been given formal romanizations include: