Greetings

There may be no exception concerning the fact that the students of western classical literature, philosophy or history have a strong wish to utilize not only European modern languages — English, German, French, Spanish or Italian — but also classical Greek, on the computer.

I, Prof.Kenji Mizuochi, who have been engaged in the late ancient and early mediaeval philosophy, have also continued various kinds of trial to realize multilingual environment on the computer since I began to use it more than fifteen years ago.

Here, we present a package named "CGreek", a classical Greek package on the multilingual editor Emacs. By installing it, along with the European languages or other modern languages (e.g. Japanese, Chinese, Korean etc.), classical Greek can also be dealt with on the computer on the "letter level". It also supports the automatic conversion of multilingual texts to the TeX format and offers an easy way to utilize TLG (Thesaurus Lingua Grace) CD-ROM. Accordingly, I am convinced that the package would surely be useful for every student of classics, philosophy or history who has been worried about the Classical Greek on the computer.

The CGreek project has substantially begun in a Home Page in NiftyServe (it is the Japanese branch of CompuServe), where a few students graduated from Graduate School of Kyoto University have discussed various kinds of problem concerning the classical texts on the computer and exchanged Latin E-texts they had manually typed in by themselves. Though the discussions there were mainly concentrated to the problems of Latin (e.g. the possibility of building Latin spell checker), as most of them were students of mediaeval philosophy, the discussions were gradually widened to the problems of classical Greek.

Meanwhile, one of the members of the Home Party, Prof.Kenji Mizuochi was accidentally acquainted with the existence of Mule (the multilingual version of Emacs) and began to exchange E-mails with one of the developers of Mule Mr.Naoto Takahashi (Information Technology Research Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)). It was in July 1996 when the Japanese mailing list for constructing classical Greek environment on Emacs/Mule was established in AIST.

After I have designed three Greek fonts (14, 16, 24 dots) and offered an idea of Greek type-setting, Mr.Takahashi has created the core of "Classical Greek Environment" by responding to our requests in the mailing list, and it turned out to be the proto-version of the current environment.

Then, Mr.Masatoshi Kamata conducted bug-fixes of Yannis Greek TeX package (unfortunately, inapplicable to Emacs-20 at present), and I wrote a support routine of IbyGreek TeX package and a lisp program to convert TLG format data to Emacs, which was thereafter rewritten with C by Mr.Takahashi. The current environment has thus been embodied.

Now, our project aims to realize the following subjects for future:

1. To extend this environment further.
2. To make CGreek environment an international standard through communi- cations with foreign students. (We held a workshop inviting Mr.Yannis Haralambous, who was the Chairman of the TeX Users Group and an author of TeX Greek package, in February 1999. There, we discussed mainly on the problem of archaic letters (Digamma, Sampi, Koppa etc.).)

Thus, the "Classical Greek Environment" is now still on the developing pro- cess. If you have any advice or suggestion to improve the package, we hope you to make contact with us without hesitation. We always welcome you to join our mailing list. Even if you do not write programs, it is no matter.

At any rate, we wish our CGreek package would be helpful for the students who are engaged in classical languages and enable to offer them a comfortable environment for handling Greek on the computer.

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