On the Windows polytonic Greek keyboard, what is the difference between the accent on q and the accent on semicolon?

Question

Background

In the very helpful document ‘Typing ancient (polytonic) Greek in a Windows environment’, there is a noticable difference between the accent shown where the English keyboard Q key is, as compared to that of the semicolon.

The accent on the Q key (left of final sigma) looks like a proper accent, whilst that on semicolon (right of lambda) looks more vertical – a bit stumpy. When rendering these in EB Garamond, this is my result (red lines added):

Notice how the red lines are obviously not parallel. Q-key style accent is to the left, semicolon-style accent to the right.

Question

What is the difference between these two accents, apart from aesthetics? Some options that come to mind:

• It is purely aesthetic. (Though I doubt it; why then would it be shown in the keyboard layout.)
• The semicolon-key accent (the stubby one) belongs to modern Greek, whilst the Q-key accent (the one with a regular slant) belongs to Ancient Greek.

It would be great to know what the difference is, especially considering that typing Ancient Greek will be highly important to me in my future thesis work.

Note

For reference, here is a mirrored alpha with grave accent, superimposed by an alpha with the q-key-style acute accent; notice how the accents align with each other.

Answer 1

This page has some helpful info.

On an English keyboard, the accent found on the semicolon renders a tonos (modern); the accent found on the Q renders an oxia (ancient).

Basically, these two accents – tonos and oxia – exist in Unicode for historical reasons, but there is (or ought to be) no actual difference between them in meaning or usage; the oxia is now deprecated, and most fonts display the two accents identically, Garamond being a notable exception.

This shouldn’t cause any practical issues for most use cases. However, if you are writing code that processes Ancient Greek it is something to be aware of, because some online texts use the oxia and others the tonos, so trouble will ensue if your code only knows about one type of accent (I speak from bitter experience).

Answer 2

The third page and section of the documentation you linked to says:

Therefore this guess is correct:

The semicolon-key accent (the stubby one) belongs to modern Greek, whilst the Q-key accent (the one with a regular slant) belongs to Ancient Greek.