Introduction
Greeklish (or Grenglish or Latinoellinika / ËáôéíïåëëçíéêÜ
or Frankolevantinika / ÖñáãêïëåâÜíôéêá) or ASCII Greek is
Greek language written with the Latin alphabet ('English').
It is an example of transliteration.
Greeklish is commonly used on the Internet when Greek people
communicate by email, IRC or Instant Messaging. Sometimes it
is also used in SMS.
History
In the past it was difficult to make computers recognize
Greek characters, because not all operating systems or
applications had support for Greek. Today, because
modern software supports a lot of languages including
Greek, it is much easier for Greeks to communicate in
their mother tongue, Modern Greek, over the Internet.
However a lot of people still use Greeklish, maybe
because it is faster to type and they do not have to
worry about orthography and grammar.
It is reported by some people that the
first modern usage of Greeklish appeared in EMY (Ethniki
Meteorologiki Ypiresia), the national meteorological
service of Greece, several decades ago and certainly
before the Internet.
Orthographic and phonetic Greeklish
Greeklish may be orthographic or phonetic.
Lack of standard
There are many ways to write Greeklish. As there is no
commonly accepted method of transcribing Greek
characters into Latin ones between the Greek Internet
users, everyone uses their own way.
ELOT, The Greece's Standards
Organization, have proposed a standard transliteration,
used by the British Council, but not by the general
public. But only this ASCII Greek respects the original
Greek orthography and allows an automatic, fully
reversible transliteration.
Books written in Greeklish
Giannis Androutsopoulos talks about
"Exegesis", a book in Greeklish that was published by
Oxy Publications in 2000. The Greeklish transliteration
was based on the Greek translation of the original book
written by Astro Teller. A novel about Artificial
Intelligence, it describes a computer program that has
acquired a "mind" of its own. The original book was
written entirely in the form of e-mail messages,
something that prompted Mr. Androutsopoulos and his
collaborators to publish a version of it in Greeklish.
Web sites written in Greeklish
Most personal or informal web sites were
written in Greeklish in the past. Today this is not the
case, as the use of Greeklish on a web site is
considered inappropriate. However there are still many
Greek web sites which utilize Greeklish.
Greek companies which use Greeklish
Some Internet Service Providers in Greece
use both Greek and Greeklish in their emails. For
example, the corporate announcements sent to users via
email are usually written in English, Greek, and
Greeklish.
Use in business communication
Use of Greeklish for business purposes or business
communication is considered as a lack of business
ability or respect, by some.
Current trends
As of 2004, a hostile movement against Greeklish
appeared in many Greek online Web discussion boards
(fora) where Greeklish was the primary "language" of
communication. Administrators often ban users who
continue using Greeklish, making the use of Greek
mandatory. Examples include the
Translatum Greek Translation Forum.
On Greek IRC, only Greeklish is used
(as of 2004).
It is considered by many that Greeklish
is dangerous for the cultural integrity of the Greek
language.
However, others disagree and support
Greeklish. Some university professors have proposed the
official use of the Latin alphabet in the Greek language
for the sake of its modernization.
Examples
* Greek: ÊáëçìÝñá, ðùò åßóáóôå;
(goodmorning, how are you?)
* Greeklish 1: kalimera, pos isaste?
* Greeklish 2: kalhmera, pws eisaste?
* Greeklish 3: kalhm3ra, pws eisast3?
* Typing as if the keyboard layout were set to Greek,
when it is actually set to US English: Kalhm;era, pvw
e;isasteq
* Greek: ÈÞôá (theta)
* Greeklish 1: thita
* Greeklish 2: 8hta
* Greeklish 3: uita
* Typing as if the keyboard layout were set to Greek,
when it is actually set to US English: U;hta
As you can see, it is very common to
use the number 8 for the letter È/è (theta), or the
letter u (probably because u and theta are on the same
key on the Greek computer keyboards) or the combination
th. For the letter Å/å (epsilon) usually Greeks use the
English letter e or the number 3 (which looks like an
epsilon turned on its vertical axis). But most commonly
3 is used for the letter Î/î (ksi) (because of the
visual resemblance).
Greeklish-to-Greek conversion
Since the appearance of Greeklish there
have been numerous attempts to develop applications for
automatic conversion from Greeklish to Greek. Most of
them can cope with only some of Greeklish
transliteration patterns and can be found and downloaded
in the Internet. The first complete system for automatic
transcription of Greeklish into Greek, obtaining correct
spelling is
All Greek to Me!, developed and provided by
Institute for Language and Speech Processing
This article is licensed under the
GNU Free Documentation License . It uses material from
the
Wikipedia article "Greeklish" .
Links
Convert Greeklish to Greek
Convert Greek
gibberish (extended ASCII) to normal Greek
Greek to Latin (characters) transliteration chart
Convert polytonic Greek to monotonic Greek
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