Typing Greek in Latin transliteration (Perseus-style)

NB. There are disadvantages to using Latin transliteration to input Greek -- especially in searching corpora that mix Latin and Greek texts, where Diogenes may not be able to guess which language you mean. Unicode input is preferred.

The transliteration adopted by the Perseus Project may be used to search for Greek text without regard to accents. In this scheme, you should not indicate accents or upper-case letters in the words you are searching for; consonants are rendered by their phonetic equivalent; and eta and omega are distinguished from epsilon and omicron by the use of a circumflex accent (ê, ô) if your keyboard can manage them, or by placing a caret after the vowel (e^, o^). Rough and smooth breathings are distinguished; put "h" in front of a word to indicate a rough breathing. This transliteration scheme cannot distinguish between the presence of a smooth breathing and the absence of a breathing mark.

You may use a limited subset of Perl regular expressions in your input; see further info.

Thus a search for the hero Herakles would be performed by entering the word " he^rakle^s " for the nominative case only, or " he^rakl" to add the oblique cases (note the leading and trailing spaces to indicate the start and end of a word).

Character maps

Here are the full details of the Perseus and Beta transliteration schemes:

Transliteration guide