It's Greek To Me!

It's Greek to Me! (or in the actual ancient Greek language, είναι ελληνικό για μένα!) Having successfully navigated the Greek Koiné (Koiné refers to the Ancient Greek of the New Testament Bible) classes in seminary and using that knowledge in my pastoral and theological life, it is perhaps time to talk about Greek text. I found Robert Bringhurst's (The Elements of Typographic Style, Hartley & Marks, Version 3.1, 2005) coverage of Greek fonts fascinating and noteworthy.

Bringhurst points to three important classes of Greek type, that have been with us since the fifteenth century — the orthotic, the cursive and the chancery script variations. Orthotic Greek is analogous to roman, with upright letters. Cursive Greek is like our italic faces. Chancery Greek are more elaborate forms of the cursive.Bringhurst says that "[the orthotic] is the oldest form of Greek type, first seen in the partial alphabets cut by Peter Schaeffer the Elder at Mainz and by Konrad Sweynheym at Subiaco, near Rome, in 1465. It is also the style of the first full-fledged and polytonic [using two or more breathing and diacritic marks] Greek type, cut by Nicolas Jenson at Venice in 1471." (Elements, p. 274) He notes that the "most widely used modern version is the New Hellenic type designed by Victor Scholderer in London in 1927." (Ibid)

Cursive Greek type appeared as a chancery script by Francesco Griffo in 1502 and lasted two hundred years. Bringhurst agains notes that "chancery Greeks were cut by many artists from Garamond to Cason, but Neoclassical and Romantic designers . . . all returned to simpler cursive forms . . . in the English speaking world the cursive Greek most often seen is the one designed in 1806 by Richard Porson." This face has been the "standard Greek face for the Oxford Classical Texts for over a century." (Elements, pp. 274, 278)

"Most Greek faces are like the Renaissance italics: upright, formal capitals [ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ] married to a flowing, often sloping, lower case." (Elements, p. 275) He also notes that Greek faces are often used alone or as supplementary faces intermixed with standard roman faces. Perhaps the most widely known Greek face is the Symbol font that was issued by Apple in the Laserwriter in the 1980s — "Symbol (often written as Σψμβολ in typeface) is one of the four standard fonts available on all PostScript-based printers, starting with Apple's original LaserWriter (1985). It contains a complete unaccented Greek alphabet (upper and lower case) and a selection of commonly used mathematical symbols. Insofar as it fits into any standard classification, it is a serif font designed in the style of Times New Roman. Due to its non-standard character set, lack of diacritical characters, and type design inappropriate for continuous text, Symbol cannot easily be used for setting Greek language text, though it has been used for that purpose in the absence of proper Greek fonts. Its primary purpose is to typeset mathematical expressions." (Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Symbol_(typeface))

True Greek fonts, like those used in Bible texts and classroom settings, often come from Linguist's Software. This company has been making Greek fonts for quite a while, first starting with the SuperGreek and SSuperGreek fonts supplied by that firm. They have produced a number of Greek fonts used in the United Bible Society's texts over the years. A survey of some of their font choices is in the second illustration below.