A modern-Unicode scheme for transliterating Biblical Hebrew and Koine Greek, aimed at non-academic, English-speaking users
As well as providing our recommended transliteration tables in various forms, we will also aim to provide small software library packages with transliteration functions.
There are a large number of transliteration schemes for taking Hebrew and Greek words (which use two different alphabetic systems) and displaying them in English/Roman letters so they are more readable/pronounceable by those who are not readers of Hebrew or Greek themselves.
Many of those schemes pre-date modern Unicode characters and many are aimed at academic/university-level readers.
Here we aim to propose a modern Unicode scheme that may be more readable/intuitive for the average Bible reader who hasn't studied the original Biblical languages. For example, we propose using the vowels with macrons for the long vowels (e.g., ā for long a). We plan to repurpose letters with ligatures (rather than diacritics) to represent different consonants, etc., (e.g., using ᶄ rather than say ǩ or ḳ). We will also make other changes and simplifications such as switching from traditionally using ph to using f for the single Greek letter phi (ɸ).
Hebrew (and also Aramaic) is a right-to-left language, but transliterations will be left-to-right. There are twenty-two Hebrew consonants (English has twenty-one consonant letters) plus some special forms used for a few letters when in the final position in a word. Fluent Hebrew readers are quite used to reading text consisting of only these consonant letters, e.g., without (most) vowels even being marked. Of course, as a language that is many thousands of years old, Hebrew lettering and pronounciation have both changed over the millenia, including some consonants being repurposed to indicate vowels. Later again, small marks (pointing) were made above, below, and even inside the Hebrew consonant letters. Our transliteration scheme will include both consonants and vowels as we are used to in modern English spelling.
Hebrew does not have UPPERCASE or CAPITAL letters at the beginning of sentences or names (nor even for God or YHWH, by the way). Our transliteration scheme (aimed at English readers) will use the minimum of capital letters as we're used to, i.e., we will use them at the start of sentences and for proper names (but not necessarily for god -- this is nothing to do with respect or lack of it, simply trying to represent the original Hebrew as much as normal/non-religious English conventions will allow).
There's many more -- just use your search engine!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_alphabet https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/4069287/jewish/The-Hebrew-Alphabet.htm https://brill.com/fileasset/downloads_static/static_fonts_scholarlyhebrewtransliteration.pdf https://www.crivoice.org/terms/transliteration.html https://bible.org/netbible/index.htm?hebrewtl.htm
The Greek used to write the "New Testament" manuscripts was the every-day, household Greek of the day. The New Testament was written around two-thousand years ago, and has changed since then like all languages. It now contains seventeen consonants and seven vowels, plus (like Hebrew) some special forms used for a few letters when in the final position in a word. These days both UPPERCASE (CAPITAL) and lowercase letters are regularly used, although they weren't originally.
There's many more -- just use your search engine!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek https://greekforall.com/learn-biblical-greek-grammar/biblical-greek-alphabet/