Overleg:Heta

Corrections

Okay, sorry for the trouble. It's a bit ironic I suddenly find myself in agreement with Wikinger, and reverting to his edits. The thing about this article is:

There's an ambiguity about what "heta" means. It could mean any of the following:

1. The normal archaic Greek letter Η, called by its original name "hēta", at the stage when it still denoted the consonant "h", in any of its various epigraphic shapes (, , , , ...)
2. The special tack symbol , which was invented in lieu of the old Η in Tarento in the 4th cent. BC, and was used in a small part of the Greek-speaking world for a short span of time.
3. The Unicode character U+037ß (Ͱ), which was recently added to encode this tack symbol
4. The convention in a very small section of modern scholarship, of using the tack symbol as a modern typographic representation of "heta" in sense (1), i.e. in modern editions of epigraphic texts that have any of the older forms in (1) in the original.

• "Heta" in sense (1) has a name in Greek. That name is conventionally spelled in the normalized classical way, i.e. as ἧτα (vocalic η with a rough breathing). This version of the name is historically attested.
• Whether the tack symbol in sense (2) had any name at all is unknown. We don't know whether its users would have called it "heta". If they had done so, and if that name had found its way into an actual inscription (unlikely), then a modern epigraphy expert would still render that name as "hῆτα" in a modern print description of the inscription. Few would render it as "Ͱῆτα". Anybody else except in technical contexts of epigraphy would still normalize the name to "ἧτα". But probably people in antiquity were just calling it "that thingamabob we use for marking aspiration", or something to that effect.
• The Unicode character (3) is called "heta", in English, by convention of the Unicode consortium. That name is defined only in English, not in Greek. It has no conventional Greek spelling when used in this sense.
• Authors who use convention (4) also call it "heta" in English. This isn't done in Greek.

So, which of the meanings (1)–(4) is the current article actually about? From its sparse content, it looks like it is primarily about meaning (2). In that case, the name "heta" should not be used in any Greek spelling at all in this article, because it's probably anachronistic. That's why I removed the Greek spelling, before we all keep edit-warring about it further.

Confused? You should be. It's Greek to us all. :-) Future Perfect at Sunrise 17 sep 2010 15:01 (CEST)