User:Caeciliusinhorto/moscgr

When writing articles dealing with Ancient Greece, you will often want to use Ancient Greek words and names. This essay summarises the relevant policies and style guides, as well as providing some suggestions on best practices. Where relevant, links lead to fuller treatments of the policies under discussion.

Currently, this is mostly intended for my own reference, and may not be useful to people who are not me and do not know what I mean... Caveat lector.

Use of Greek
"Foreign words should be used sparingly."

- Manual of Style

If you find yourself using a Greek word, stop and consider whether it needs to be there. Articles should be understandable to as many readers as possible. Excessive use of Greek, especially in less specialised articles, is off-putting to the general reader.

If the use of Greek is unavoidable, consider whether only using a romanised form would be sufficient. You must provide a romanised form. If there is a common English form (e.g. "Alexander") use that. Otherwise, use a transliterated form (e.g. moichos).

On the first use of Ancient Greek in the article, you should use the Template:Lang-grc or Template:Lang-grc-gre. On subsequent uses, use Template:Lang. The lang and lang-x templates are used for accessibility reasons.

The lang-grc template has fields for transliteration and translation, thus:

renders:

μοιχεια

Transliterated Greek should be rendered in italic type, except in the case of names, which should be in roman type. If the word is a part of everyday English, there is no need to render it in italic type (thus "kurios", but "eureka"). The template:lang-grc renders transliterations in italic automatically. Words in non-Latin scripts must not be in italic type.

Transliteration
Greek words can either be simply transliterated, or transliterated and then Latinised or Anglicised. Where there is a preference for one of these in reliable English-language sources, that is the usage which should be preferred. Otherwise, simple transliteration is to be preferred. Help with the transliteration of Ancient Greek and some common Latinisations can be found on the relevant policy page.

Article titles
Article titles must be written in "characters generally intelligible to literate speakers of English".

Orthography
Diacritics are permitted. When writing words of Greek origin, the digraphs ae and oe are preferred to the ligatures &aelig; and &oelig;. Words written in Greek should not be italicised.