Re: Writting Greek in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Thanos Apollo <public@thanosapollo.org>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:02:18 +0300
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> >> 
> >> έ́́́́́́́́́́́́́́́́́́́́́́
> >
> > Which problems do you see here?
> 
> It's not possible to stack accents of the same type in Greek.  There are
> many grammatical rules that are ignored in most input methods that I've
> checkout out, such as using specific accents in non vowels.

But that is a problem for the user who is typing the sequence to
solve.  Emacs allows users to type such sequences even if they are
disallowed by the script or language rules.  An input method can
decide not to support that or make it hard or impossible to type, but
I can always work around that by typing the character code directly,
e.g., using "C-x 8 RET".  And if I do, Emacs should obey.  For
example, one situation where one could want to type such "forbidden"
sequences is to document that they are forbidden.

> There are specific rules that should be followed on which accents are
> used.  Depending on the structure of the word & sentence, e.g a greek
> input method should not allow to have a "tonos (΄)" in a non-vowel.

Again, it would be hard for an input method to disallow some sequence.
The most it can do is not to provide pre-prepared sequences for such
accented characters.  But as soon as you allow to type the tonos, the
user can type it any number of times anywhere.  And even if the input
method itself doesn't provide a way to type the tonos, the user could
type it directly.

> A greek-polytonic input method should follow the keybindings that are
> already used in greek polytonic keyboards & only allow certain accents
> depending on the character.

There's no argument about that.  My point is that users have more ways
of typing characters than a single input method provides, and
therefore they can break the rules of any input method or language
quite easily.  And that is okay, from where I stand: the correctness
of the text typed by users is the responsibility of those users, not
of Emacs.