The fall of Greeklish!

I was searching around for a definition of Greeklish and, as usual, wikipedia came to the rescue.
According to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeklish article:

Greeklish, a portmanteau of the words Greek and English, also known as Grenglish, Latinoellinika/Λατινοελληνικά or ASCII Greek, is Greek language written with 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 is commonly used on the Internet when Greek people communicate by e-mail, IRC, instant messaging and occasionally on SMS.
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.


Here’s the thing about Greeklish…It’s annoying! Let’s face it, Greek wasn’t meant to be written with latin characters. Luckily, the folks over at Innoetics have provided a wonderful solution to this problem.
The following widget converts Greeklish into Greek. Think about this for a second. The word ήσυχα for example, which means “quiet” in English, can be written in Greeklish as either: isixa, ishcha, usuxa, etc. You get the point. There are many possible variations. The Greeklish-to-Greek converter is smart enough to figure out what you meant to type! That’s pretty cool. In the background, some sophisticated machine learning techniques are employed to accomplish this.
Now you can convert all your Greeklish into Greek with this free widget available on our website. Try it out here as well:

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2 Responses to “The fall of Greeklish!”

  1. Vasili Jun 16, 2010 at 4:01 pm #

    I love the new Greeklish tool on here.. it’s ridiculously accurate!

  2. Helene Jul 09, 2010 at 9:36 am #

    Thank you for rescuing us from Greeklish—especially those outside Greece with a limited
    knowledge of Greek spelling. Now I only write in Greek when sending messages to other Greeks. Congratulations on an outstanding internet tool!!!

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