iOS 6 Language Features Announced at WWDC 6/11

Siri languages expanded to include English, Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin, German, Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean.

New Chinese Features: "With precision text input, a comprehensive up-to-date Chinese dictionary, and handwriting recognition support for over 30,000 Chinese characters, iOS 6 gives Chinese speakers more features than ever. You can mix full and abbreviated Pinyin and even type English words in a Pinyin sentence without switching keyboards. And when you add words to your personal dictionary, iCloud makes them available on all your devices. Baidu is a built-in option in Safari, and you can share videos directly to Youku and Tudou. You can also post to Sina Weibo from Camera, Photos, Maps, Safari, and Game Center.."

(iOS 6 to be released 9/19/2012)

OS X 10.8 Language Features Announced at WWDC 6/11

New Dictionary.app modules for German, Spanish, and Simplified Chinese

Dictation in English (U.S., UK, and Australia), French, German, and Japanese

Lots of things for Chinese, including improved input methods and 8 new fonts.  For details see

Chinese Features

(OS X 10.8 to be released in July)

Diacritic Variations in Polytonic Greek

A poster in the Apple forums recently asked how he could get a particular form of the circumflex/perispomoni accent to appear in his ancient Greek text.  There are namely two common variations, one looks like a tilde and one like an inverted breve, and he needed the latter.

It turns out that the form of this diacritic for Greek depends on the font.  Of those which cover this range that come with OS X 10.7, Arial Unicode, Geneva, Helvetica, and Times have the inverted breve form, while the rest (Arial, Courier New, Helvetica Neue, Lucida Grande, Menlo, Microsoft Sans, Palatino, Tahoma, Times New Roman) use the tilde.

For some more info, see Section 1.2 of

http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/gkdiacritics.html