Greek Letter

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{{Infobox WS|name=Greek alphabet|type=Alphabet, with many modifications covering many languages|time=~[900 BC to the present]|fam2=Phoenician alphabet
[Glagolitic alphabet
Cyrillic alphabet
Coptic alphabet
Old Italic alphabet
Latin alphabet
] consisting of 24 letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BC. It was the first alphabet in the narrow sense, that is, a writing system using a separate symbol for each vowel and consonant. It is the oldest alphabetic script in continuous use today. The letters were also used to represent Greek numerals (numbers), beginning in the 2nd century BC.

In addition to being used for writing modern Greek language, its letters are today used as Greek letters used in mathematics, particle physics in physics, as Astronomical naming conventions#Names of stars, in the names of fraternities and sororities, in the Lists of tropical cyclone names, and for other purposes. The Greek alphabet is descended from the Phoenician alphabet and in turn gave rise to the Gothic alphabet, Glagolitic alphabet, Cyrillic alphabet, and Coptic alphabet, as well as the Latin alphabet. The Greek alphabet is also considered a possible ancestor of the Armenian alphabet. It is unrelated to Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary, earlier writing systems for Greek.

History The Greek alphabet emerged several centuries after the fall of Mycenaean Greece civilization and consequent extinction of its Linear B script, an early Greek language writing system. Linear B is descended from Linear A, which was developed by the Minoan civilization, whose language was probably unrelated to Greek; consequently the Minoan syllabary did not provide an ideal medium for the transliteration of Greek language sounds. The Greek alphabet we recognize today arose after the illiterate Greek Dark Ages — the period between the downfall of Mycenae (ca. 1200 BC) and the rise of Ancient Greece, which begins with the appearance of the epics of Homer, around 800 BC, and the institution of the Ancient Olympic Games in 776 BC.

The most notable change in the Greek alphabet, as an adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet, is the introduction of written vowels, without which Greek — unlike Phoenician — would be unintelligible. In fact, most alphabets that contain vowels are derived ultimately from Greek, although there are exceptions (Hangul, Orkhon script, Ge'ez alphabet, Indic alphabets, and Old Hungarian script). The first vowels were α alpha, e (later ε epsilon), ι iota, o (later ο omicron), and u (later υ upsilon), modifications of Semitic glottal, aspirate, or glide consonants that were mostly superfluous in Greek: (aleph (letter)), /h/ (he (letter)), /j/ (yodh), (ayin), and /w/ (waw (letter)), respectively. In eastern Greek, which lacked breaths entirely, the letter eta (from the Semitic aspirate consonant , heth (letter)) was also used for a long e, and eventually the letter omega was introduced for a long o. Vowel signs were originally not used in Semitic alphabets, although even in the very old Ugaritic alphabet matres lectionis were used, i.e. consonant signs were used to denote vowels. Matres lectionis were, however, never used systematically. Whereas in the earlier West Semitic family of writings (Phoencian, Hebrew, Moabite etc.) a sign always stood for a consonant in association with an unspecified vowel or no vowel, the Greek alphabet divided the signs into two categories, consonants ("things that sound along") and vowels, where the consonant signs always had to be accompanied by vowel signs to create a pronounceable unit.

Greek also introduced three new consonant signs, Φ, Χ and Ψ, appended to the end of the alphabet as they were developed. These consonants made up for the lack of comparable aspirates in Phoenician. In west Greek, Χ was used for // and Ψ for // — hence the value of the Latin letter x, derived from the western Greek alphabet. The origin of those letters is disputed.The letter san was used at variance with sigma, and by classical times the latter won out, san disappearing from the alphabet. The letters wau (later called digamma) and qoppa disappeared, too; the former only needed for the western dialects and the latter never really needed at all. These lived on in the Ionic numeral system, however, which consisted of writing a series of letters with precise numerical values. Sampi (apparently in a rare local glyph form from Ionia) was introduced at the end — to stand for 900. Thousands were written using a mark at the upper left ('A for 1000, etc).

Because Greek minuscules arose at a (much) later date, no historic minuscule actually exists for san. Minuscule forms for the other letters were only used numerically. For number 6, modern Greeks use an old ligature (typography) called stigma (letter) (, ) instead of digamma or use στ if it is not available. For 90 they use modern z-shaped qoppa forms: , (Note that some web browser/font combinations will show the other qoppa here).

Originally there were several variants of the Greek alphabet, most importantly Western Greek alphabet (Chalcidian) and eastern (Ionic) Greek; the former gave rise to the Old Italic alphabet and thence to the Latin alphabet, while the latter is the basis of the present Greek alphabet. Athens originally used the Attic script for official documents such as laws and the text of Homer: this contained only the letters from alpha to upsilon, and used the letter H (eta) for the /h/ sound instead of for a long e. In 403 BC Athens adopted the Ionic script as its standard, and shortly thereafter the other versions disappeared. By then Greek was always written left to right, but originally it had been written right to left (with asymmetrical characters flipped), and in-between written either way — or, most likely, boustrophedon, so that the lines alternate direction. In the Hellenistic civilization, Aristophanes of Byzantium introduced the process of accenting Greek letters for easier pronunciation.During the Middle Ages, the Greek scripts underwent changes paralleling those of the Roman alphabet: while the old forms were retained as a monumental script, uncial and eventually minuscule letter hands came to dominate. The letter σ is even written ς at the ends of words, paralleling the use of the Long s at the time.

Letter names Each of the original Phoenician letter names was in fact a Phoenician word that began with the sound represented by that letter; thus aleph (letter), the word for “ox,” was adopted for the /’/ sound, and beth (letter), or “house,” for the /b/ sound, etc. When the letters were adopted by Greek speakers, most of the Phoenician names were maintained or modified slightly to fit Greek phonology; thus, 'aleph, beth, gimel became alpha, beta, gamma. In Greek, these borrowed names had no meaning except as labels for the letters. However, a few signs that were added or modified later by the Greeks do in fact have names with Greek meanings. For example, the names “omicron” and “omega” mean “small o” (“o” micron, or little) and “big o” (“o” mega, or big) in Greek. Similarly, “epsilon” and “upsilon” mean “bare (or simple) e” and “bare (or simple) u,” respectively.

Main alphabet Below is a table listing the modern Greek letters, as well as their forms when romanization. The table also provides the equivalent Phoenician alphabet from which each Greek letter is derived. Pronunciations transcribed using the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Also note that the classical pronunciation given below is the reconstructed pronunciation of Attic in the late 5th and early 4th century (BC). Some of the letters had different pronunciations in pre-classical times or in non-Attic dialects. For details, see History of the Greek alphabet and Ancient Greek phonology. For details on post-classical Ancient Greek pronunciation, see Koine Greek phonology.

{]
letter! colspan="2" style="background:#ccf;" | Transliteration of Greek to the Latin alphabet1 ! rowspan="2" style="background:#ccf;" | Greek numerals|-! style="background:#ccffff;" | Ancient
Greek! style="background:#ccffff;" | Medieval
Greek
(polytonic)! style="background:#ccffff;" | Modern
Greek! style="background:#ccffff;" | Latin! style="background:#ccffff;" | Classical
Ancient
Greek! style="background:#ccffff;" | Modern
Greek! style="background:#ccffff;" | Ancient
Greek! style="background:#ccffff;" | Modern
Greek|-|style="font-size:133%;"|Α α| colspan="2" | | άλφα| Alpha (letter)| | | Aleph (letter)| colspan="2" | a| 1|-|Β β
ϐ (alternate2)| colspan="2" | | βήτα| Beta (letter)| | | Beth (letter)| b| v| 2|-|style="font-size:133%;"|Γ γ| colspan="2" | | γάμμα
γάμα| Gamma (letter)| | ~" target="_blank">| Gimel (letter)| g| gh, g, y| 3|-|style="font-size:133%;"|Δ δ| colspan="2" | | δέλτα| Delta (letter)| | | Daleth| colspan="2" | | [He (letter)| colspan="2" | e| 5|-|style="font-size:133%;"|Ζ ζ| colspan="2" | | ζήτα| Zeta (letter)|
([Zeta (letter)#Pronunciation)
later | |

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