Greek on your Computer

Often, the biggest barrier to truly utilising one's computer for language learning is configuring the operating system and various applications to support other languages. While there are workarounds for a lot of common languages (eg French and Spanish can be simulated quite reasonably using only English characters), there is no choice for a language such as Greek with its totally different characters - you really have no choice but to set up your computer to at least read this new alphabet (and preferably write in it too!)

Below are instructions for setting up all the common operating systems, and many common applications, to display the Greek alphabet, and permit entry of Greek characters from your (presumably non-Greek) keyboard. If any of the instructions below are incorrect or incomplete, or if you have further instructions for other applications, please don't hesitate to contact us.

Operating Systems

Windows XP

As usual with Windows, you should close down all applications you're not using before installing anything else. Next, go to Start -> Control Panel -> Regional & Language Options - from there, click the "Languages" tab, then "Details" (at the top of that page, beside the message "To view or change the languages and methods you can use to enter text, click Details").

In the next pane, you can add new keyboard layouts, configure the language bar and change key shortcuts for switching between layouts. The ins and outs of all this are beyond the scope of this guide, if you get into trouble, consult the XP help documentation, or failing that, Microsoft.

Windows 95/98/2000

First you need to install 'Multilanguage Support' - close all other applications, and have your Windows installation disc to hand. Go to: Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs - then click "Windows Set-up" tab. There, tick the Multilanguage Support box and click "Details". Tick the "Greek Language Support" checkbox, and click "OK". Click "OK" again, and the system should start installing the Multilanguage support. You may be asked to insert your windows CD and then to restart your computer.

Once Windows '95/'98 has restarted, you need to install the keyboard drivers for Greek : go to Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Keyboard -> Language. You will probably have only English there, so if you do not see Greek, click on Add..., and select Greek from the list.

You should now see "GR Greek". There are various layouts available, highlight the line for Greek, and click on Properties, there you can select other Greek keyboard layouts, though it's questionable whether there's any benefit to this unless you're looking to type Ancient Greek text, which uses extra characters (specifically, extra accents).

Before clicking the OK button, choose which key combination you want for the Switch languages option (Left Alt+Shift seems to be a common choice). Ensure that the "Enable indicator in taskbar" option is checked. Also, depending on which language you will be using more often, you can chose to set one of the languages as the default (indicating which keyboard driver should be active when Windows starts up).

Linux - All Flavours

Linux, being very much a multi-national effort, has always supported internationalisation from the outset, so it is very likely that multi-language support is already configured in whichever flavour of Linux you have. If this is not the case, unfortunately the solution is beyond the scope of this guide - you could do worse than try the Linux Documentation Project for more information. In fact, their Hellenic HOWTO covers exactly the sort of ground we're interested in - but beware, the document is written in Greeklish!

For the GNOME Window Manager, ensure you have the control-center component installed. This contains a program called gnome-keyboard-properties, from which keyboard mappings can be installed and configured. After starting gnome-keyboard-properties (either from a terminal window, or from the GNOME menus - it lives under System -> Preferences), choose the "Layouts" option, then add the keyboard mappings you require - presumably "Greece". You can ignore the options for "Extended", "Polytonic" or "Eliminate Dead Keys", unless you're planning on doing anything in Ancient Greek.

For the KDE Window Manager, everything takes place via the KDE control centre. Further instructions to follow!

Macintosh

(We have no information for configuring Mac OS to support Greek - can anyone help? Please contact us if you have any instructions)

Typing

Assuming you have followed the above instructions, and now have a Greek keyboard installed, it won't be long before you become aware of the difference between the Greek keyboard layout, and the layout you are accustomed to. Yes, that's right, your fingers will need a bit of retraining (not to mention your brain!), as apart from the numerals and some of the punctuation characters, the Greek layout is totally different.

This image shows the layout of a standard Greek keyboard. The eagle-eyed reader will notice that there are no keys which produce accented vowel characters - this is correct. The way the Greek keyboard works - along with many other layouts, in fact - is to use dead keys (ie keys which do not produce any output by themselves, but affect the output from other keys). So where a US or UK keyboard has the colon and semicolon characters - the key to the right of the 'L' key - the Greek keyboard has its accent key (this is the key marked in red on the image linked above).

To produce an alpha with a (tonos) accent, you press this accent key, then the alpha key (US/UK "A" key). To produce an iota character with a diaresis (umlaut, "two dots"), press the shift key together with the accent key, then press the iota key (US/UK "I" key). To produce an iota with both the (tonos) accent and the diaresis, simply press the accent key, then the shift key together with the accent key, then the iota key. From long experience of websites for Greek learners, the accented vowels do seem to be a blind spot in many people's typing - but do persevere, experiment with the accent key (with or without the shift key!) and the vowels, and it'll soon make sense.

Et voila, a quick lesson in how to type in Greek!

Acknowledgements - the image of the Greek keyboard layout is distributed under the GNU Free Documentation Licence (FDL), and was originally found on Wikipedia.