Greeklish
Encyclopedia
Greeklish, a portmanteau of the words Greek and English, also known as Grenglish, Latinoellinika/Λατινοελληνικά or ASCII
Greek, is the Greek language
written using the Latin alphabet
. Unlike standardized systems of Romanization of Greek, as used internationally for purposes such as rendering Greek proper names or place names, or for bibliographic
purposes, the term Greeklish mainly refers to informal, ad-hoc practices of writing Greek text in environments where the use of the Greek alphabet
is technically impossible or cumbersome, especially in electronic media. Greeklish was commonly used on the Internet when Greek people communicate by forum
, e-mail
, IRC
, instant messaging
and occasionally on SMS
, mainly because older operating systems didn't have the ability to write in Greek, or in a unicode
form like UTF-8
. Nowadays most Greek-related content appears in native Greek.
Sometimes, the term Greeklish is also used informally for a non-standard language variety used by bilingual speakers of English and Greek, i.e. Greek with heavy admixture of English words or vice versa.
.
or phonetic. In orthographic use, the intent is to reproduce Greek orthography closely: there is a one to one mapping between Greek and Latin letters, and digraphs are avoided, with occasional use of punctuation or numerals resembling Greek letters rather than Latin digraphs. While letters are in the first instance chosen for phonetic similarity, visual equivalence, and corresponding keyboard keys, are used when phonetically similar letters are exhausted. Thus, psi (ψ) may be written as ps, 4 or y; xi (ξ) as ks, x or 3 ; and theta (θ) as th or 8.
In phonetic use, there is no concern to reproduce Greek orthography, and the Greeklish is a phonetic transcription (usually with English phonetic norms, sometimes with other languages' like German) of Greek words --- although often there is a mixture of the two. In particular, iotacism
is preserved: the various letters and digraphs now pronounced as /i/ are transcribed as i, and not differentiated as they are in an orthographic scheme (e.g. h, i, u, ei, oi for η ι υ ει οι). In a phonetic scheme, xi is usually x or ks or 3; ks or 3 is used if x has been chosen, following orthographic norms, for chi (χ). Psi and theta will usually be the digraphs ps and th. 3 is often used to represent xi (ξ) because of the similar shape of the number 3 to the original letter albeit mirrored.
An example of orthographic
Greeklish could be the word "plateia", which in Greek means "square" and using the Greek alphabet is spelled "πλατεία". The word "plateia" derives from the exact replacement of each Greek letter with its Latin respective: π=p, λ=l, α=a, τ=t, ε=e, ι=i, α=a.
An example of phonetic Greeklish could be the same word, "square", written like this: "platia". The reason the same word is, in this occasion, written without the letter "e", is the fact that, phonetically, the word "square" in Greek sounds exactly like this: "platia" (since -"εί"- is now pronounced /i/, as an instance of iotacism).
The most extreme case of orthographic Greeklish, which achieves the greater optical resemblance to the Greek prototypes, is perhaps the so-called "byzantine" or "arabesque" or "calligraphic/artistic" Greeklish introduced in the Hellas mailing list by the mathematician George Baloglou. Main characteristics of Baloglou's "byzantine" is the distinction of σ and s (σ=c ς=s), the distinction οf lower and upper letters, such as π=n, Π=TT or 5, θ=8, Θ=0 or Q, ψ=y, Ψ=4, and the unusual, but with great resemblance with the Greek prototype, transliterations σ=c, π=n ρ=p Ρ=P.
. 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 Androutsopoulos and his collaborators to publish a version of it in Greeklish.
. Before the introduction of Unicode-compatible software (web servers and clients) many Greek personal or informal web sites were written in Greeklish. This is no longer the case and most (if not all) of the sites with Greek content are written in native Greek.
Almost all electronic mail messaging was also using Greeklish, and only recently, with the introduction of full Unicode compatibility in modern e-mail client software and gradual replacement of older programs, that usage of Greek characters became widespread.
Some Internet Service Provider
s in Greece use both Greek and Greeklish in their email
s. For example, the corporate announcements sent to users via email are usually written in English, Greek, and Greeklish. This is done to ensure that the recipient can understand an important service message even if the settings of his computer for non-ASCII characters don't match those of the sender.
, Forthnet
and Vodafone
.
A counterargument used by forum users is that a fair number of users live abroad and access the Internet from computers they don't own (university, internet cafes, etc.). There, they are not able to install additional keyboard layouts so they don't have the ability to type in Greek, therefore Greeklish is the only option available to them.
On Greek IRC
channels and IM
applications
, most of the time only Greeklish is used because it is simpler to type and typing errors are more easily excused. However, Greeklish has been criticised because the user's text bypasses spellcheck, resulting in lowering their ability to write native Greek correctly.
On the Facebook social networking web site there are various groups against the use of "Greeklish".
Wide use for Greeklish in long texts as of 2010, is unusual.
Another current trend in Greeklish is the introduction of Leet
phrasing and vocabulary. Many Leet words or slang have been internalized within the Greek spoken language through Greek gamers online in games such as World of Warcraft
.
Examples:
has a distinct form of Greeklish, which reflects Cypriot phonology; for instance j can indicate the phone [dʒ], which is written in Cypriot Greek as τζι-, and corresponds to palatalized /k/ in standard Greek. For instance, Standard Greek και /ke/ [ce] "and" = Greeklish kai/ke; versus Cypriot τζιαι [dʒe] = Cypriot Greeklish tziai or je. Cypriot Leet/Instant Messaging uses of Greeklish reflect this. For instance:
Cypriot Greeklish:
Cypriot Greek:
IM-isms: n = en εν "not" (in Standard Greek: d = den δεν); tpt = tipote τίποτε "nothing" (tipota τίποτα in Standard Greek); j = je τζιαι "and"
The first open online application for the transcription of Greeklish to Greek, was developed by Artificial Intelligence Group at University of Patras, named deGREEKLISH.
An initiative has started to create a freely-available, open-source converter using user-supplied word transliteration: Greeklish OUT!. A similar open source Greeklish converter, written in the C# programming language, is available as a stand alone program.
ASCII
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
Greek, is the Greek language
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
written using the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
. Unlike standardized systems of Romanization of Greek, as used internationally for purposes such as rendering Greek proper names or place names, or for bibliographic
Bibliography
Bibliography , as a practice, is the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology...
purposes, the term Greeklish mainly refers to informal, ad-hoc practices of writing Greek text in environments where the use of the Greek alphabet
Greek alphabet
The Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
is technically impossible or cumbersome, especially in electronic media. Greeklish was commonly used on the Internet when Greek people communicate by forum
Internet forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...
E-mail
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
, IRC
Internet Relay Chat
Internet Relay Chat is a protocol for real-time Internet text messaging or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfer, including file...
, instant messaging
Instant messaging
Instant Messaging is a form of real-time direct text-based chatting communication in push mode between two or more people using personal computers or other devices, along with shared clients. The user's text is conveyed over a network, such as the Internet...
and occasionally on SMS
Short message service
Short Message Service is a text messaging service component of phone, web, or mobile communication systems, using standardized communications protocols that allow the exchange of short text messages between fixed line or mobile phone devices...
, mainly because older operating systems didn't have the ability to write in Greek, or in a unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
form like UTF-8
UTF-8
UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...
. Nowadays most Greek-related content appears in native Greek.
Sometimes, the term Greeklish is also used informally for a non-standard language variety used by bilingual speakers of English and Greek, i.e. Greek with heavy admixture of English words or vice versa.
History
Some older traditions of using the Latin alphabet for Greek existed in earlier centuries. The term frankolevantinika properly refers to the use of the Latin script to write Greek in the cultural ambit of Catholicism. ("Frankos" is the Greek term for Roman Catholic.) This usage was routine in the Venetian-ruled Aegean in the Early Modern era. Indeed, the autograph manuscripts of several Greek literary works of the Renaissance are in Latin script (e.g. the comedy Fortounatos by Markos Antonios Foskolos, 1655). This convention was also known as frankohiotika/φραγκοχιώτικα, "Catholic Chiot", alluding to the significant presence of Catholic missionaries based on the island of ChiosChios
Chios is the fifth largest of the Greek islands, situated in the Aegean Sea, seven kilometres off the Asia Minor coast. The island is separated from Turkey by the Chios Strait. The island is noted for its strong merchant shipping community, its unique mastic gum and its medieval villages...
.
Orthographic and phonetic Greeklish
Greeklish may be orthographicOrthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
or phonetic. In orthographic use, the intent is to reproduce Greek orthography closely: there is a one to one mapping between Greek and Latin letters, and digraphs are avoided, with occasional use of punctuation or numerals resembling Greek letters rather than Latin digraphs. While letters are in the first instance chosen for phonetic similarity, visual equivalence, and corresponding keyboard keys, are used when phonetically similar letters are exhausted. Thus, psi (ψ) may be written as ps, 4 or y; xi (ξ) as ks, x or 3 ; and theta (θ) as th or 8.
In phonetic use, there is no concern to reproduce Greek orthography, and the Greeklish is a phonetic transcription (usually with English phonetic norms, sometimes with other languages' like German) of Greek words --- although often there is a mixture of the two. In particular, iotacism
Iotacism
Iotacism is the process by which a number of vowels and diphthongs in Ancient Greek converged in pronunciation so that they all sound like iota in Modern Greek....
is preserved: the various letters and digraphs now pronounced as /i/ are transcribed as i, and not differentiated as they are in an orthographic scheme (e.g. h, i, u, ei, oi for η ι υ ει οι). In a phonetic scheme, xi is usually x or ks or 3; ks or 3 is used if x has been chosen, following orthographic norms, for chi (χ). Psi and theta will usually be the digraphs ps and th. 3 is often used to represent xi (ξ) because of the similar shape of the number 3 to the original letter albeit mirrored.
An example of orthographic
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
Greeklish could be the word "plateia", which in Greek means "square" and using the Greek alphabet is spelled "πλατεία". The word "plateia" derives from the exact replacement of each Greek letter with its Latin respective: π=p, λ=l, α=a, τ=t, ε=e, ι=i, α=a.
An example of phonetic Greeklish could be the same word, "square", written like this: "platia". The reason the same word is, in this occasion, written without the letter "e", is the fact that, phonetically, the word "square" in Greek sounds exactly like this: "platia" (since -"εί"- is now pronounced /i/, as an instance of iotacism).
The most extreme case of orthographic Greeklish, which achieves the greater optical resemblance to the Greek prototypes, is perhaps the so-called "byzantine" or "arabesque" or "calligraphic/artistic" Greeklish introduced in the Hellas mailing list by the mathematician George Baloglou. Main characteristics of Baloglou's "byzantine" is the distinction of σ and s (σ=c ς=s), the distinction οf lower and upper letters, such as π=n, Π=TT or 5, θ=8, Θ=0 or Q, ψ=y, Ψ=4, and the unusual, but with great resemblance with the Greek prototype, transliterations σ=c, π=n ρ=p Ρ=P.
Books written in Greeklish
Giannis Androutsopoulos (see References) 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 TellerAstro Teller
Dr. Astro Teller is an entrepreneur, scientist and author, with expertise in the field of intelligent technology.-Career:Astro Teller was born Eric Z. Teller in Cambridge, England. He is the grandson of both Gérard Debreu and Edward Teller. Dr...
. 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 Androutsopoulos and his collaborators to publish a version of it in Greeklish.
Computer usage of Greeklish
In the past there was a variety of mutually incompatible systems for displaying non-ASCII characters (IBM 437, ELOT 928, ISO 8859-7 plus a few company-specific encodings) and no standard method for typing them on a computer keyboard. This situation was resolved with the introduction of UnicodeUnicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
. Before the introduction of Unicode-compatible software (web servers and clients) many Greek personal or informal web sites were written in Greeklish. This is no longer the case and most (if not all) of the sites with Greek content are written in native Greek.
Almost all electronic mail messaging was also using Greeklish, and only recently, with the introduction of full Unicode compatibility in modern e-mail client software and gradual replacement of older programs, that usage of Greek characters became widespread.
Some Internet Service Provider
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
s in Greece use both Greek and Greeklish in their email
Email
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
s. For example, the corporate announcements sent to users via email are usually written in English, Greek, and Greeklish. This is done to ensure that the recipient can understand an important service message even if the settings of his computer for non-ASCII characters don't match those of the sender.
Use in advertisements
As of 2008, business advertisements using greeklish have appeared in Attiko Metro and other areas. Companies that used greeklish in some of their advertisements include Pizza HutPizza Hut
Pizza Hut is an American restaurant chain and international franchise that offers different styles of pizza along with side dishes including pasta, buffalo wings, breadsticks, and garlic bread....
, Forthnet
Forthnet
Forthnet S.A. is a Greek Internet Service Provider established in October 1995 by Minoan Lines SA and theFoundation for Research & Technology - Hellas , also known as FORTH....
and Vodafone
Vodafone
Vodafone Group Plc is a global telecommunications company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the world's largest mobile telecommunications company measured by revenues and the world's second-largest measured by subscribers , with around 341 million proportionate subscribers as of...
.
Use in business communication
Use of Greeklish for business purposes or business communication is considered as a lack of business ability or respect.Current trends
Around 2004, after most computer software became compatible with Unicode UTF-8 or UTF-16 systems, use of Greeklish was strongly discourraged in many Greek online Web discussion boards (forums) where Greeklish was in use before. Administrators threatened to ban users who continued to use Greeklish, thus making the use of Greek mandatory; but using Greeklish failed to become a serious reason to get banned. Examples include the Translatum Greek Translation Forum, the Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network Forum, the Venus Project Forum, the adslgr.com Forum, the e-steki.gr forum, the Greek Technological Forum and the e-foititis.gr Greek student forum. The reason for this is the fact that text written in Greeklish is considerably less aesthetically pleasing, and also much harder to read, compared to text written in the Greek alphabet. A non-Greek speaker/reader can guess this by this example: "δις ιζ χαρντ του ριντ" would be the way to write "this is hard to read" in English but utilizing the Greek alphabet.A counterargument used by forum users is that a fair number of users live abroad and access the Internet from computers they don't own (university, internet cafes, etc.). There, they are not able to install additional keyboard layouts so they don't have the ability to type in Greek, therefore Greeklish is the only option available to them.
On Greek IRC
Internet Relay Chat
Internet Relay Chat is a protocol for real-time Internet text messaging or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfer, including file...
channels and IM
Instant messaging
Instant Messaging is a form of real-time direct text-based chatting communication in push mode between two or more people using personal computers or other devices, along with shared clients. The user's text is conveyed over a network, such as the Internet...
applications
Application software
Application software, also known as an application or an "app", is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks. Examples include enterprise software, accounting software, office suites, graphics software and media players. Many application programs deal principally with...
, most of the time only Greeklish is used because it is simpler to type and typing errors are more easily excused. However, Greeklish has been criticised because the user's text bypasses spellcheck, resulting in lowering their ability to write native Greek correctly.
On the Facebook social networking web site there are various groups against the use of "Greeklish".
Wide use for Greeklish in long texts as of 2010, is unusual.
Another current trend in Greeklish is the introduction of Leet
Leet
Leet , also known as eleet or leetspeak, is an alternative alphabet for the English language that is used primarily on the Internet. It uses various combinations of ASCII characters to replace Latinate letters...
phrasing and vocabulary. Many Leet words or slang have been internalized within the Greek spoken language through Greek gamers online in games such as World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game by Blizzard Entertainment. It is the fourth released game set in the fantasy Warcraft universe, which was first introduced by Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994...
.
Examples:
| Greeklish | Explanation Explanation An explanation is a set of statements constructed to describe a set of facts which clarifies the causes, context, and consequencesof those facts.... |
|---|---|
| Tsagia | "Good bye", being a word meaning tea Tea Tea is an aromatic beverage prepared by adding cured leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant to hot water. The term also refers to the plant itself. After water, tea is the most widely consumed beverage in the world... s, but jokingly used as ciao Ciao The word "ciao" is an informal Italian verbal salutation or greeting, meaning either "hello", "goodbye", "bye" or "hi". Originally from the Venetian language, it was adopted into the Italian language and eventually entered the vocabulary of English and of many other languages around the world... in supposedly plural |
| Re c | Pronounced "re sy" meaning roughly "you" |
| Kalimerez, Merez | Kalimeres (καλημέρες), meaning (Good) Mornings; note that the final z is inspired from byez |
| Tpt | Tipota (τίποτα), meaning "nothing" |
| Dn | Den (δεν), meaning "not" |
| M | Mou (μου), meaning "my" or "mine" |
| S | Sou (σου), meaning "your" or "yours" |
| n | na (να), meaning "to" or en (εν), meaning "not" in Cypriot dialect |
| tr | tora (τώρα), meaning "now" |
| smr | simera (σήμερα), meaning "today" |
| klnxt | kalinixta (καληνύχτα), meaning "goodnight" |
| tlm | ta leme (τα λέμε), meaning "we will talk again" |
| sks | skase (σκάσε), meaning "shut up" |
| kn1 | kanena (κανένα), meaning "no one" |
| dld | diladi (δηλαδή), meaning "so, therefore" |
| vrm | variemai (βαριέμαι), meaning "I am bored" |
| mlk | malaka (μαλάκα), meaning "wanker" or more commonly "asshole" |
Cypriot variant
Cypriot GreekCypriot Greek
The Cypriot dialect of Modern Greek, known as Kypriaka , Cypriot Greek is spoken by 750,000 people in Cyprus and diaspora Greek Cypriots.Cypriot Greek is distinct enough that it can be classified as a distinct dialect of the Standard Greek....
has a distinct form of Greeklish, which reflects Cypriot phonology; for instance j can indicate the phone [dʒ], which is written in Cypriot Greek as τζι-, and corresponds to palatalized /k/ in standard Greek. For instance, Standard Greek και /ke/ [ce] "and" = Greeklish kai/ke; versus Cypriot τζιαι [dʒe] = Cypriot Greeklish tziai or je. Cypriot Leet/Instant Messaging uses of Greeklish reflect this. For instance:
Cypriot Greeklish:
ego n 3ero re pe8kia.. skeftoume skeftoume omos tpt.. n mporo na me fantasto na asxoloume tin ipolipi m zoi me ena single prama.. kathe mera jini i idia i doulia. enna spaso. omos me tes epilogies p ekama .. tino pros iatrika j etsi.. (http://www.varkoume.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=558876&sid=07416b68bb274b6bb6954cba283449bb , 2006-03-25 )
Cypriot Greek:
Εγώ εν ξέρω ρε παιθκιά... σκέφτουμαι σκέφτουμαι όμως τίποτε... εν μπορώ να με φανταστώ να ασχολούμαι την υπόλοιπή μου ζωή με ένα single πράμα... κάθε μέρα τζιείνη η ίδια η δουλειά. Εννα σπάσω. Όμως με τες επιλογές που έκαμα... τείνω προς ιατρικά τζιαι έτσι...
IM-isms: n = en εν "not" (in Standard Greek: d = den δεν); tpt = tipote τίποτε "nothing" (tipota τίποτα in Standard Greek); j = je τζιαι "and"
"Καλημέρα, πώς είστε;"
- Greeklish 1: kalimera, pos iste? (phonetic)
- Greeklish 2: kalhmera, pws eiste; (reconciling with spelling rules) (Baloglou's "byzantine" variant: kalhmepa, nws eicte;)
- Typing as if the keyboard layout were set to Greek, when it is actually set to US English: Kalhm;era, pvw e;iste?
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 ProcessingThe first open online application for the transcription of Greeklish to Greek, was developed by Artificial Intelligence Group at University of Patras, named deGREEKLISH.
An initiative has started to create a freely-available, open-source converter using user-supplied word transliteration: Greeklish OUT!. A similar open source Greeklish converter, written in the C# programming language, is available as a stand alone program.
External links
- Online Greeklish to Greek Converter by Qoolsoft.gr . API present to use it from any page or desktop.
- Online Greeklish to Greek and Greek to Greeklish Converter developed by site e-Greeklish.GR, Greece
- Online Greeklish to Greek Converter developed by George Galatas and Artificial Intelligence Group at Patras University, Greece
- Greek Conversions (GCNV32) v3.00 by CyLog Software ©1995-2002. Free program converting Greek-to-Greeklish and greelish-to-Greek, using customizable conversion schemes.
- TSIK Greeklish - Free Greek to Greeklish translation tool by Kyriakos Stavrou - TSIK
- Greeklish-to-Greek Conversion by Institute for Language and Speech Processing
- Greek-Greeklish Converter by ASDA
- Greek-Greeklish Converter by Translatum
- Transliteration Chart by Translatum
- Reading Greek ASCII
- ELOT928 to ASCII Greek Converter
- e-Chaos freeware greeklish converter
- A Firefox extension which automatically converts Greeklish text to Greek text.
- A Firefox addon which if you enter Greek letters in the URL bar or in special fields like password and username, it converts them automatically to English as if you were typing in English.