Beta Code

Greek alphabet

Notes

• Instead of upper-case Latin letters, lower-case Latin letters may also be used (e.g. a for α and *a for Α).
• The TLG Beta Code Manual uses upper-case ASCII letters to represent Greek letters. A variant (used by the Perseus Project) uses lower-case ASCII letters instead. In both cases, the unadorned ASCII letter represents a lower-case Greek letter, and an asterisk must be added to indicate an upper-case Greek letter.
• In general, one encoding character S for Greek sigma is sufficient; it is interpreted as a final sigma at the end of words or when followed by punctuation, and as a medial sigma in other positions. In cases where this auto-disambiguation is not correct, the specific codes S1 and S2 are available.
• Some representations use J for the final sigma and S for the medial sigma. However, J is not supported/output by many applications such as Morpheus and uni2beta.

Punctuation

The character ' is used both for encoding an apostrophe and for adding a metrical breve to a vowel. The intention is disambiguated because the apostrophe is used in Greek only for elision, which normally occurs after a consonant.

Accents and diacritics

These are normally postfix operators, as in the examples above, but for capitalized words, accents come between the * and the letter. The documentation does not otherwise define a required or canonical order for accents. In some data sources, breathing is normally seen before a tonal accent, and one implementation defines a canonical order of breathing, accent, iota subscript. In some implementations, the ordering of the accents can determine the arrangement of the combining characters after conversion to Unicode. Many implementations do not implement macronization.