[biblitfonts] Re: SBL Glyph Set 0.87

Scripsit Rick:

> of these characters is the unabridged Liddell & Scott (ninth 
> edition). It lists articles for the following:
> 
> Digamma: Between epsilon and zeta (p. 752).
> San: Between pi and koppa (p. 1562)
> Koppa: Between san and rho (p. 1562)
> 
> (thus: pi, koppa, san, rho)
Do you mean "pi, san, koppa, and rho"?  I think so.

The books I consulted** all give the archaic Greek alphabet in the same
order as its Phoenician source; digamma (= semitic wau) between epsilon
and zeta; and then pi, san, koppa, and rho.  San is derived from the
Phoenician letter that gave the Hebrew tsade, and koppa is of course
qof.  This same order is found on some abcdaria found in Etruria but
showing the West Greek alphabet.

** Oxford Clasical Dictionary, Buck's Comparative Grammar of Greek and
Latin, and Cook's Greek Inscriptions.  My copy of Woodhead is in a pile
somewhere . . .

This order would seem most accurate historically.  What to do with
lunate sigma, stigma, numeric koppa I'm not sure.  They are later forms
so putting them at the end would seem reasonable.  

General comment: to me it seems more intuitive to put the Greek alphabet
(perhaps with the above-mentioned letters in their historical places),
followed by the variant forms (beta1, etc.), then the vowels with
accents.  I think that if I were browsing a font utility looking for a
particular letter, I might give up looking for consonants after I
started seeing all the vowels with accents.  Putting the variants after
their base forms would also be OK in terms of users locating them;
however, I don't think we want to encourage people to use things like
the Unicode script beta or script kappa because they complicate sorting
and searching.  Putting them at the end might be the right move for this
reason.

David

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