Transliterate Latin to ancient Greek letters

Question

There is a simple way to transform Latin letters to Greek letters, using the stringi package for R which relies on ICU's transliterator here:

library(stringi)
stri_trans_general("abcd", "latin-greek")

Is there a similar simple way to convert Latin to ancient Greek (αβγδ) instead of Greek (ἀβκδ)?

Answer 1

I guess what you'd like to do (at least, as a part of your task), is to remove all accents.

Here's a way to do that with stringi.

library("stringi")
stri_flatten(
   stri_extract_all_charclass(
       stri_trans_nfkd(
          stri_trans_general("abcd", "latin-greek")
       ),
   "\\p{L}")[[1]]
)
## [1] "αβκδ"

First we transliterate a stringi to Greek script. Then we perform Unicode normalization NFKD -- this splits accented characters to characters and accents separately. Next its time to extract all the letters and concatenate the results. HTH