The list of shorthands in the Babel documentation (on page 14) says
Greek ~
In fact, the situation is a bit more complicated: the tilde shorthand is only required to override the default expansion of ~ to a no-break space and allow its use in the LGR Latin transliteration where it stands for a "perispomeni" accent.
By default (i.e. monotonic Greek), there is no shorthand defined because the "perispomeni" accent is not used un monotoniko. Also, the shorthand is not defined with Xe/LuaTeX and Unicode fonts (where the Latin transliteration does not work).
I propose to change the line into something like
Greek (ancient, polutoniko, only 8-bit TeX) ~
Also, babel-greek 1.13 introduced the language attribute keep-semicolon which makes the ; a shorthand to prevent its conversion into a middle dot by LGR. Again, this is ignored with Unicode fonts. Maybe the optional ;-shortcut does not need to appear on the list in babel.pdf
(as it is an opt-in feature).
The list of shorthands in the Babel documentation (on page 14) says
In fact, the situation is a bit more complicated: the tilde shorthand is only required to override the default expansion of ~ to a no-break space and allow its use in the LGR Latin transliteration where it stands for a "perispomeni" accent. By default (i.e. monotonic Greek), there is no shorthand defined because the "perispomeni" accent is not used un monotoniko. Also, the shorthand is not defined with Xe/LuaTeX and Unicode fonts (where the Latin transliteration does not work). I propose to change the line into something like
Also, babel-greek 1.13 introduced the language attribute
keep-semicolonwhich makes the ; a shorthand to prevent its conversion into a middle dot by LGR. Again, this is ignored with Unicode fonts. Maybe the optional ;-shortcut does not need to appear on the list in babel.pdf (as it is an opt-in feature).