XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Greek and Coptic

The Greek block of Unicode is used primarily for the modern Greek language. Currently, it’s the only option for the Greek-derived Coptic script, but it doesn’t really serve that purpose very well, and a separate Coptic block is a likely addition in the future. Extending coverage to classical and Byzantine Greek requires many more accented characters, which are available in the Greek Extended block, shown in Table 27-22, or by combining these characters with the Combining Diacritical Marks in Table 27-11. The Greek alphabet is also a fertile source of mathematical and scientific notation, although some common letters, such as and ∑, are encoded separately in the Mathematical Operators block in Table 27-27 and the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block in Table 27-28 for their use as mathematical symbols. The Greek and Coptic block of Unicode is shown in Table 27-12.

Table 27-12. The Greek and Coptic block of Unicode