Wednesday, September 9, 2015

ἀλήϑεια != ἀλήθεια

Sad day today, to discover there are two thetas, the Greek letter θ, and the mathematical symbol ϑ; Unicodes U+03B8 and U+03D1 respectively. Some clever chaps, like Wikipedia and Google, are aware that both forms refer to the same character when embedded in words, and fold the mathematical symbol into the Greek letter. Sadly Adobe PDFs and Microsoft are clueless. If you search Bing for ἀλήϑεια, you get a bunch of papers by Thomas Sheehan, who, thankfully, appears to the only Heideggerian to use the mathematical symbol instead of the Greek letter. I discovered this looking up the definition of ἀλήθεια-1 in the PDF version of Sheehan's Making Sense of Heidegger.

I can fix this in the GA app, since all the texts I entered get their Greek normalized anyway -- all the ersatz Greek fonts from Win95 and Mac 9 days are converted to Unicode and non-standard diacritics fixed. The goal in the GA app is to make things easy to find, and not to resolutely follow the original text.