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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.

Contents 1 History 2 Orthographic and phonetic Greeklish 3 Books written in Greeklish 4 Computer usage of Greeklish 5 Commercial use 5.1 Use in advertisements 5.2 Use in business communication 6 Current trends 6.1 Cypriot variant 7 Examples 7.1 "Καλημέρα, πώς είστε;" 7.2 "Θήτα" 8 Greeklish-to-Greek conversion 9 See also 10 References 11 External links

  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 an older 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 Chios.

  Orthographic and phonetic Greeklish

Greeklish may be orthographic 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.

  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 Teller. 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 Unicode. 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 Providers in Greece use both Greek and Greeklish in their emails. 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.

  Commercial use

  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 Hut, Forthnet and Vodafone.^{[citation needed]}

  Use in business communication

Use of Greeklish for business purposes or business communication is considered as a lack of business ability or respect.^{[citation needed]}

  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 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:

Greeklish	Explanation
Tsagia	"Good bye", being a word meaning teas, but jokingly used as ciao 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 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"

  Examples

  "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?

  "Θήτα"

• Greeklish : thita

  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 Processing

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.

  See also

• Volapuk encoding

  References

Jannis Androutsopoulos (Γιάννης Ανδρουτσόπουλος), a linguist at King's College London, conducted extensive research on the history and sociolinguistics of Greeklish in 1998-2001; his publications, as well as publications in the media about the phenomenon, are available on a dedicated site.

  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.

Internet slang 3arabizi Alay (Indonesia) Brain-disabled characters (Chinese) Denglisch Fingilish (Persian) Greeklish Gyaru-moji Jejemon (Philippines) Leet ("1337") Lolspeak / LOLspeak / Kitteh Martian language (Chinese) Miguxês (Brazilian Portuguese) Padonkaffsky jargon (Russian) Translit Volapuk See also English internet slang (at Wiktionary) SMS language

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