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Greek alphabet

Greek alphabet
Ellinikó alfávito
"Greek alphabet" in the modern Greek language
Script type
Time period
c. 800 BC present[1]
DirectionLeft-to-right Edit this on Wikidata
Official script
LanguagesGreek
Related scripts
Parent systems
Child systems
ISO 15924
ISO 15924Grek (200), ​Greek
Unicode
Unicode alias
Greek

The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC.[2][3] It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet,[4] and is the earliest known alphabetic script to have developed distinct letters for consonants as well as vowels.[5] In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BC, the Ionic-based Euclidean alphabet, with 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard throughout the Greek-speaking world[6] and is the version that is still used for Greek writing today.[7]

The uppercase and lowercase forms of the 24 letters are:

Α α, Β β, Γ γ, Δ δ, Ε ε, Ζ ζ, Η η, Θ θ, Ι ι, Κ κ, Λ λ, Μ μ, Ν ν, Ξ ξ, Ο ο, Π π, Ρ ρ, Σ σ ς, Τ τ, Υ υ, Φ φ, Χ χ, Ψ ψ, Ω ω.

The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of several scripts, such as the Latin, Gothic, Coptic, and Cyrillic scripts.[8] Throughout antiquity, Greek had only a single uppercase form of each letter. It was written without diacritics and with little punctuation.[9] By the 9th century, Byzantine scribes had begun to employ the lowercase form, which they derived from the cursive styles of the uppercase letters.[10] Sound values and conventional transcriptions for some of the letters differ between Ancient and Modern Greek usage because the pronunciation of Greek has changed significantly between the 5th century BC and today. Additionally, Modern and Ancient Greek now use different diacritics, with ancient Greek using the polytonic orthography and modern Greek keeping only the stress accent (acute) and the diaeresis.

Apart from its use in writing the Greek language, in both its ancient and its modern forms, the Greek alphabet today also serves as a source of international technical symbols and labels in many domains of mathematics, science, and other fields.

  1. ^ Lopez-Ruiz 2022, p. 231; Parker & Steele 2021, p. 2; Powell 2012, p. 240
  2. ^ The date of the earliest inscribed objects; Johnston 2003, pp. 263–276 summarizes the scholarship on the dating.
  3. ^ See also: Lopez-Ruiz 2022, pp. 230–231; Parker & Steele 2021, pp. 2–3; Woodard & Scott 2014, p. 3; Horrocks 2014, p. xviii; Howatson 2013, p. 35; Swiggers 1996, p. 268; Cook 1987, p. 9
  4. ^ The Development of the Greek Alphabet within the Chronology of the ANE Archived 2015-04-12 at the Wayback Machine (2009), Quote: "Naveh gives four major reasons why it is universally agreed that the Greek alphabet was developed from an early Phoenician alphabet.
    1 According to Herodutous "the Phoenicians who came with Cadmus... brought into Hellas the alphabet, which had hitherto been unknown, as I think, to the Greeks."
    2 The Greek Letters, alpha, beta, gimmel have no meaning in Greek but the meaning of most of their Semitic equivalents is known. For example, 'aleph' means 'ox', 'bet' means 'house' and 'gimmel' means 'throw stick'.
    3 Early Greek letters are very similar and sometimes identical to the West Semitic letters.
    4 The letter sequence between the Semitic and Greek alphabets is identical. (Naveh 1982)"
  5. ^ Horrocks 2014, p. xviii: "By redeploying letters that that denoted consonant sounds irrelevant to Greek, the vowels could now be written systematically, thus producing the first 'true' alphabet"; Howatson 2013, p. 35; Swiggers 1996, p. 265
  6. ^ Howatson 2013, p. 35; Threatte 1996, p. 271
  7. ^ Horrocks 2014, p. xviii.
  8. ^ Coulmas 1996.
  9. ^ Threatte 1996, p. 272.
  10. ^ Colvin 2014, pp. 87–88; Threatte 1996, p. 272

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