The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of several scripts, such as theLatin,Gothic,Coptic, andCyrillic scripts.[8] Throughout antiquity, Greek had only a singleuppercase form of each letter. It was written withoutdiacritics and with littlepunctuation.[9] By the 9th century,Byzantine scribes had begun to employ the lowercase form, which they derived from thecursive styles of the uppercase letters.[10] Sound values and conventional transcriptions for some of the letters differ betweenAncient andModern Greek usage because the pronunciation of Greek has changed significantly between the 5th century BC and the present. Additionally, Modern and Ancient Greek now usedifferent diacritics, with ancient Greek using thepolytonic orthography and modern Greek keeping only thestress accent (acute) and thediaeresis.
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 internationaltechnical symbols and labels in many domains ofmathematics,science, and other fields.
In both Ancient and Modern Greek, the letters of the Greek alphabet have fairly stable and consistent symbol-to-sound mappings, making pronunciation of words largely predictable. Ancient Greek spelling was generally near-phonemic. For a number of letters, sound values differ considerably between Ancient and Modern Greek, because their pronunciation has followed a set of systematic phonological shifts that affected the language in its post-classical stages.[11]
^By around 350 BC, zeta in the Attic dialect had shifted to become a single fricative,[z], as in modern Greek.[21]
^abcThe letterstheta⟨θ⟩,phi⟨φ⟩, andchi⟨χ⟩ are normally taught to English speakers with their modern Greek pronunciations of[θ],[f], and[x] ~[ç] respectively, because these sounds are easier for English speakers to distinguish from the sounds made by the letterstau ([t]),pi ([p]), andkappa ([k]) respectively.[23][20] These are not the sounds they made in classical Attic Greek.[23][20] In classical Attic Greek, these three letters were alwaysaspirated consonants, pronounced exactly like tau, pi, and kappa respectively, only with a blast of air following the actual consonant sound.[23][20]
^The letterΛ is almost universally known today aslambda (λάμβδα) except in Modern Greek and inUnicode, where it islamda (λάμδα), and the most common name for it during theGreek Classical Period (510–323 BC) appears to have beenlabda (λάβδα), without theμ.[15]
^The lettersigma⟨Σ⟩ has two different lowercase forms in its standard variant, with⟨ς⟩ being used in word-final position and⟨σ⟩ elsewhere.[20][24][25] In some 19th-century typesetting,⟨ς⟩ was also used word-medially at the end of acompound morpheme, e.g.δυςκατανοήτων, marking the morpheme boundary betweenδυς-κατανοήτων ('difficult to understand'); modern standard practice is to spellδυσκατανοήτων with a non-final sigma.[25]
^The letteromega⟨ω⟩ is normally taught to English speakers as[oʊ], the long o as in Englishgo, in order to more clearly distinguish it from omicron⟨ο⟩.[26][20] This is not the sound it actually made in classical Attic Greek.[26][20]
Among consonant letters, all letters that denoted voiced plosive consonants (/b,d,g/) and aspirated plosives (/pʰ,tʰ,kʰ/) in Ancient Greek stand for correspondingfricative sounds in Modern Greek. The correspondences are as follows:
Among the vowel symbols, Modern Greek sound values reflect the radical simplification of the vowel system of post-classical Greek, merging multiple formerly distinct vowel phonemes into a much smaller number. This leads to several groups of vowel letters denoting identical sounds today. Modern Greek orthography remains true to the historical spellings in most of these cases. As a consequence, the spellings of words in Modern Greek are often not predictable from the pronunciation alone, while the reverse mapping, from spelling to pronunciation, is usually regular and predictable.
The following vowel letters and digraphs are involved in the mergers:
Modern Greek speakers typically use the same, modern symbol–sound mappings in reading Greek of all historical stages. In other countries, students of Ancient Greek may use a variety ofconventional approximations of the historical sound system in pronouncing Ancient Greek.
Digraphs and letter combinations
Several letter combinations have special conventional sound values different from those of their single components. Among them are severaldigraphs of vowel letters that formerly representeddiphthongs but are now monophthongized. In addition to the four mentioned above (⟨ει, οι, υι⟩, pronounced/i/ and⟨αι⟩, pronounced/e/), there is also⟨ηι, ωι⟩, and⟨ου⟩, pronounced/u/. The Ancient Greek diphthongs⟨αυ⟩,⟨ευ⟩ and⟨ηυ⟩ are pronounced[av],[ev] and[iv] in Modern Greek. In some environments, they are devoiced to[af],[ef] and[if].[27] The Modern Greek consonant combinations⟨μπ⟩ and⟨ντ⟩ stand for[b] and[d] (or[mb] and[nd]);⟨τζ⟩ stands for[d͡z] and⟨τσ⟩ stands for[t͡s]. In addition, both in Ancient and Modern Greek, the letter⟨γ⟩, before anothervelar consonant, stands for thevelar nasal[ŋ]; thus⟨γγ⟩ and⟨γκ⟩ are pronounced like English⟨ng⟩ like in the word finger (not like in the word thing). In analogy to⟨μπ⟩ and⟨ντ⟩,⟨γκ⟩ is also used to stand for[g] before vowels[a],[o] and[u], and[ɟ] before[e] and[i]. There are also the combinations⟨γχ⟩ and⟨γξ⟩.
The acute accent inaulós[avˈlos] ('flute') distinguishes the word from itshomographáulos[ˈailos] ('immaterial'). The smooth breathing marks the absence of an initial /h/.
In thepolytonic orthography traditionally used for ancient Greek andkatharevousa, the stressed vowel of each word carries one of three accent marks: either theacute accent (ά), thegrave accent (ὰ), or thecircumflex accent (α̃ orα̑). These signs were originally designed to mark different forms of the phonologicalpitch accent in Ancient Greek. By the time their use became conventional and obligatory in Greek writing, in late antiquity, pitch accent was evolving into a singlestress accent, and thus the three signs have not corresponded to a phonological distinction in actual speech ever since. In addition to the accent marks, every word-initial vowel must carry either of two so-called "breathing marks": therough breathing (ἁ), marking an/h/ sound at the beginning of a word, or thesmooth breathing (ἀ), marking its absence. The letter rho (ρ), although not a vowel, also carries rough breathing in a word-initial position. If a rho was geminated within a word, the firstρ always had the smooth breathing and the second the rough breathing (ῤῥ) leading to the transliterationrrh.
The vowel letters⟨α, η, ω⟩ carry an additional diacritic in certain words, the so-callediota subscript, which has the shape of a small vertical stroke or a miniature⟨ι⟩ below the letter. This iota represents the former offglide of what were originally long diphthongs,⟨ᾱι, ηι, ωι⟩ (i.e./aːi,ɛːi,ɔːi/), which became monophthongized during antiquity.
Use of diaeresis in the wordáulos indicating avowel hiatus. The acute accent is absent in the upper case.
Another diacritic used in Greek is thediaeresis (¨), indicating ahiatus.
This system of diacritics was first developed by the scholarAristophanes of Byzantium (c. 257 – c. 185/180 BC), who worked at theMusaeum in Alexandria during the 3rd century BC.[28] Aristophanes of Byzantium also was the first to divide poems into lines, rather than writing them like prose, and also introduced a series of signs fortextual criticism.[29] In 1982, a new, simplified orthography, known as "monotonic", was adopted for official use in Modern Greek by the Greek state. It uses only a single accent mark, the acute (also known in this context astonos, i.e. simply 'accent'), marking the stressed syllable of polysyllabic words, and occasionally the diaeresis to distinguish diphthongal from digraph readings in pairs of vowel letters, making this monotonic system very similar to the accent mark system used inSpanish. The polytonic system is still conventionally used for writing Ancient Greek, while in some book printing and generally in the usage of conservative writers it can still also be found in use for Modern Greek.
Although it is not a diacritic, thecomma has a similar function as asilent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishingό,τι (ó,ti, 'whatever') fromότι (óti, 'that').[30]
There are many different methods of rendering Greek text or Greek names in the Latin script.[31] The form in which classical Greek names are conventionally rendered in English goes back to the way Greek loanwords were incorporated into Latin in antiquity.[32] In this system,⟨κ⟩ is replaced with⟨c⟩, the diphthongs⟨αι⟩ and⟨οι⟩ are rendered as⟨ae⟩ and⟨oe⟩ (or⟨æ,œ⟩); and⟨ει⟩ and⟨ου⟩ are simplified to⟨i⟩ and⟨u⟩.[33] Smooth breathing marks are usually ignored and rough breathing marks are usually rendered as the letter⟨h⟩.[34] In modern scholarly transliteration of Ancient Greek,⟨κ⟩ will usually be rendered as⟨k⟩, and the vowel combinations⟨αι, οι, ει, ου⟩ as⟨ai, oi, ei, ou⟩.[31] The letters⟨θ⟩ and⟨φ⟩ are generally rendered as⟨th⟩ and⟨ph⟩;⟨χ⟩ as either⟨ch⟩ or⟨kh⟩; and word-initial⟨ρ⟩ as⟨rh⟩.[35]
During theMycenaean period, between roughly the 16th and 12th centuries BC, a script calledLinear B was used to write the earliest attested form of the Greek language, known asMycenaean Greek. This writing system, unrelated to the Greek alphabet, last appeared in the 13th century BC.[7] Inscription written in the Greek alphabet begin to emerge from the 8th century BC onward. While early samples of the Greek alphabet date from at least 775 BC,[40] the oldest known substantial and comprehensible Greek inscriptions, such as those on theDipylon vase, thecup of Nestor andcup of Acesander, date fromc. 740/30 BC.[41] It is accepted that the introduction of the alphabet occurred some time prior to these inscriptions.[note 1] While earlier dates have been proposed,[42] the Greek alphabet is commonly held to have originated some time in the late 9th[43] or early 8th century BC,[44] conventionally around 800 BC.[1]
Surviving fragments of theNestor's cup inscription juxtaposed with the proposed restoration,c. 730 BC
The period between the use of the two writing systems, Linear B and the Greek alphabet, during which no Greek texts are attested, is known as theGreek Dark Ages.[45] The Greeks adopted the alphabet from the earlierPhoenician alphabet, one of the closely related scripts used for theWest Semitic languages, calling itΦοινικήια γράμματα 'Phoenician letters'.[46] However, the Phoenician alphabet was limited to consonants. When it was adopted for writing Greek, certain consonants were adapted in order to express vowels. The use of both vowels and consonants makes Greek the firstalphabet in the narrow sense,[47] as distinguished from theabjads used inSemitic languages, which have letters only for consonants.[48]
Greek initially took over all of the 22 letters of Phoenician. Five were reassigned to denote vowel sounds: the glide consonants/j/ (yodh) and/w/ (waw) were used for [i] (Ι,iota) and [u] (Υ,upsilon); theglottal stop consonant/ʔ/ (aleph) was used for [a] (Α,alpha); thepharyngeal/ʕ/ (ʿayin) was turned into [o] (Ο,omicron); and the letter for/h/ (he) was turned into [e] (Ε,epsilon). A doublet ofwaw was also borrowed as a consonant for [w] (Ϝ,digamma). In addition, the Phoenician letter for the emphatic glottal/ħ/ (heth) was borrowed in two different functions by different dialects of Greek: as a letter for /h/ (Η,heta) by those dialects that had such a sound, and as an additional vowel letter for the long/ɛː/ (Η,eta) by those dialects that lacked the consonant. Eventually, a seventh vowel letter for the long/ɔː/ (Ω,omega) was introduced. Greek also introduced three new consonant letters for its aspirated plosive sounds and consonant clusters: Φ (phi) for/pʰ/, Χ (chi) for/kʰ/ and Ψ (psi) for/ps/. In western Greek variants, Χ was instead used for/ks/ and Ψ for/kʰ/. The origin of these letters is a matter of some debate.
Three of the original Phoenician letters dropped out of use before the alphabet took its classical shape: the letter Ϻ (san), which had been in competition with Σ (sigma) denoting the same phoneme /s/; the letter Ϙ (qoppa), which was redundant with Κ (kappa) for /k/, and Ϝ (digamma), whose sound value /w/ dropped out of the spoken language before or during the classical period.
Greek was originally written predominantly from right to left, just like Phoenician, but scribes could freely alternate between directions. For a time, a writing style with alternating right-to-left and left-to-right lines (calledboustrophedon, literally 'ox-turning', after the manner of an ox ploughing a field) was common, until in the classical period the left-to-right writing direction became the norm. Individual letter shapes were mirrored depending on the writing direction of the current line.
Distribution of "green", "red" and "blue" alphabet types, after Kirchhoff
There were initially numerouslocal (epichoric) variants of the Greek alphabet, which differed in the use and non-use of the additional vowel and consonant symbols and several other features. Epichoric alphabets are commonly divided into four major types according to their different treatments of additional consonant letters for the aspirated consonants (/pʰ, kʰ/) and consonant clusters (/ks, ps/) of Greek.[49] These four types are often conventionally labelled as "green", "red", "light blue" and "dark blue" types, based on a colour-coded map in a seminal 19th-century work on the topic,Studien zur Geschichte des griechischen Alphabets byAdolf Kirchhoff (1867).[49]
The "green" (or southern) type is the most archaic and closest to the Phoenician.[50] The "red" (or western) type is the one that was later transmitted to the West and became the ancestor of theLatin alphabet, and bears some crucial features characteristic of that later development.[50] The "blue" (or eastern) type is the one from which the later standard Greek alphabet emerged.[50]Athens used a local form of the "light blue" alphabet type until the end of the 5th century BC, which lacked the letters Ξ and Ψ as well as the vowel symbols Η and Ω.[50][51] In the Old Attic alphabet,ΧΣ stood for/ks/ andΦΣ for/ps/.Ε was used for all three sounds/e,eː,ɛː/ (correspondinɡ to classicalΕ, ΕΙ, Η), andΟ was used for all of/o,oː,ɔː/ (corresponding to classicalΟ, ΟΥ, Ω).[51] The letterΗ (heta) was used for the consonant/h/.[51] Some variant local letter forms were also characteristic of Athenian writing, some of which were shared with the neighboring (but otherwise "red") alphabet ofEuboia: a form ofΛ that resembled a LatinL () and a form ofΣ that resembled a LatinS ().[51]
The classical twenty-four-letter alphabet that is now used to represent the Greek language was originally the local alphabet ofIonia.[52] By the late 5th century BC, it was commonly used by many Athenians.[52] Inc. 403 BC, at the suggestion of thearchonEucleides, the Athenian Assembly formally abandoned the Old Attic alphabet and adopted the Ionian alphabet as part of the democratic reforms after theoverthrow of theThirty Tyrants.[52][53] Because of Eucleides's role in suggesting the idea to adopt the Ionian alphabet, the standard twenty-four-letter Greek alphabet is sometimes known as the "Eucleidean alphabet".[52] Roughly thirty years later, the Eucleidean alphabet was adopted in Boeotia and it may have been adopted a few years previously inMacedonia.[54] By the end of the 4th century BC, it had displaced local alphabets across the Greek-speaking world to become the standard form of the Greek alphabet.[54]
Letter names
When the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet, they took over not only the letter shapes and sound values but also the names by which the sequence of the alphabet could be recited and memorized. In Phoenician, each letter name was a word that began with the sound represented by that letter; thusʾaleph, the word for "ox", was used as the name for the glottal stop/ʔ/,bet, or "house", for the/b/ sound, and so on. When the letters were adopted by the Greeks, most of the Phoenician names were maintained or modified slightly to fit Greek phonology; thus,ʾaleph, bet, gimel becamealpha, beta, gamma.
The Greek names of the following letters are more or less straightforward continuations of their Phoenician antecedents. Between Ancient and Modern Greek, they have remained largely unchanged, except that their pronunciation has followed regular sound changes along with other words (for instance, in the name ofbeta, ancient /b/ regularly changed to modern /v/, and ancient /ɛː/ to modern /i/, resulting in the modern pronunciationvita). The name of lambda is attested in early sources asλάβδα besidesλάμβδα;[55][15] in Modern Greek the spelling is oftenλάμδα, reflecting pronunciation.[15] Similarly, iota is sometimes spelledγιώτα in Modern Greek ([ʝ] is conventionally transcribed⟨γ{ι,η,υ,ει,οι}⟩ word-initially andintervocalically beforeback vowels and/a/). In the tables below, the Greek names of all letters are given in their traditional polytonic spelling; in modern practice, like with all other words, they are usually spelled in the simplified monotonic system.
In the cases of the three historical sibilant letters below, the correspondence between Phoenician and Ancient Greek is less clear, with apparent mismatches both in letter names and sound values. The early history of these letters (and the fourth sibilant letter, obsoletesan) has been a matter of some debate. Here too, the changes in the pronunciation of the letter names between Ancient and Modern Greek are regular.
In the following group of consonant letters, the older forms of the names in Ancient Greek were spelled with-εῖ, indicating an original pronunciation with-ē. In Modern Greek these names are spelled with-ι.
The following group of vowel letters were originally called simply by their sound values as long vowels: ē, ō, ū, andɔ. Their modern names contain adjectival qualifiers that were added during the Byzantine period, to distinguish between letters that had become confusable.[15] Thus, the letters⟨ο⟩ and⟨ω⟩, pronounced identically by this time, were calledo mikron ("small o") ando mega ("big o").[15] The letter⟨ε⟩ was callede psilon ("plain e") to distinguish it from the identically pronounced digraph⟨αι⟩, while, similarly,⟨υ⟩, which at this time was pronounced[y], was calledy psilon ("plain y") to distinguish it from the identically pronounced digraph⟨οι⟩.[15]
Some dialects of the Aegean andCypriot have retainedlong consonants and pronounce[ˈɣamːa] and[ˈkapʰa]; also,ήτα has come to be pronounced[ˈitʰa] in Cypriot.[56]
Letter shapes
A 16th-century edition of the New Testament (Gospel of John), printed in a renaissance typeface byClaude GaramondTheocritus Idyll 1, lines 12–14, in script with abbreviations and ligatures from a caption in an illustrated edition of Theocritus. Lodewijk Caspar Valckenaer:Carmina bucolica, Leiden 1779.
Like Latin and other alphabetic scripts, Greek originally had only a single form of each letter, without a distinction between uppercase and lowercase. This distinction is an innovation of the modern era, drawing on different lines of development of the letter shapes in earlier handwriting.
The oldest forms of the letters in antiquity aremajuscule forms. Besides the upright, straight inscriptional forms (capitals) found in stone carvings or incised pottery, more fluent writing styles adapted for handwriting on soft materials were also developed during antiquity. Such handwriting has been preserved especially frompapyrus manuscripts inEgypt since theHellenistic period. Ancient handwriting developed two distinct styles:uncial writing, with carefully drawn, rounded block letters of about equal size, used as abook hand for carefully produced literary and religious manuscripts, andcursive writing, used for everyday purposes.[57] The cursive forms approached the style of lowercase letter forms, withascenders and descenders, as well as many connecting lines and ligatures between letters.
In the 9th and 10th centuries, uncial book hands were replaced with a new, more compact writing style, with letter forms partly adapted from the earlier cursive.[57] Thisminuscule style remained the dominant form of handwritten Greek into the modern era. During theRenaissance, western printers adopted the minuscule letter forms as lowercase printed typefaces, while modeling uppercase letters on the ancient inscriptional forms. The orthographic practice of using the letter case distinction for marking proper names, titles, etc. developed in parallel to the practice in Latin and other western languages.
The earliest Etruscanabecedarium, from Marsiliana d'Albegna, still almost identical with contemporaneous archaic Greek alphabetsA page from theCodex Argenteus, a 6th-century Bible manuscript in Gothic
The Greek alphabet was the model for various others:[8]
Most of theIron Agealphabets of Asia Minor were adopted around the same time, as the early Greek alphabet was adopted from the Phoenician. The Lydian and Carian alphabets are generally believed to derive from the Greek alphabet, although it is not clear which variant is the direct ancestor. While some of these alphabets such asPhrygian had slight differences from the Greek counterpart, some likeCarian alphabet had mostly different values and several other characters inherited from pre-Greek local scripts. They were in usec. 800–300 BC until all theAnatolian languages were extinct due toHellenization.[58][59][60][61][62]
TheLatin alphabet, together with various otherancient scripts in Italy, adopted from an archaic form of the Greek alphabet brought to Italy by Greek colonists in the late 8th century BC, viaEtruscan;
TheGothic alphabet, devised in the 4th century to write theGothic language, based on a combination of Greek and Latin uncial models;[63]
TheCyrillic script, which replaced the Glagolitic alphabet shortly afterwards.
TheCoptic alphabet adds eight letters derived fromDemotic. It is still used today, mostly in Egypt, to writeCoptic, the liturgical language of Egyptian Christians. Letters usually retain anuncial form different from the forms used for Greek today. The alphabet ofOld Nubian is an adaptation of Coptic.
TheArmenian andGeorgian alphabets are almost certainly modeled on the Greek alphabet, but their graphic forms are quite different.[64]
Other uses
Use for other languages
Apart from the daughter alphabets listed above, which were adapted from Greek but developed into separate writing systems, the Greek alphabet has also been adopted at various times and in various places to write other languages.[65] For some of them, additional letters were introduced.
Antiquity
It was used in somePaleo-Balkan languages, includingThracian. For other neighboring languages or dialects, such asAncient Macedonian, isolated words are preserved in Greek texts, but no continuous texts are preserved.
Gaulish inscriptions (in modern France) used the Greek alphabet until the Roman conquest
Derived fromIndo-Greek coinage, the coins ofNahapana andChastana of theWestern Satraps featured anIndo-Aryan language legend written in Greek or pseudo-Greek letters. The subsequent rulers' coins had the Greek script degrade to a mere ornament that no longer represented any legible legend.[67]
Middle Ages
Coins from the 4th-8th centuries known asmordovkas were used as currency in Eastern Europe byUralic peoples and were written inMoksha using Greek uncial script.[68]
An 8th-centuryArabic fragment preserves a text in the Greek alphabet,[69] as does a 9th- or 10th-century psalm translation fragment.[70]
AnOld Ossetic inscription of the 10th–12th centuries found inArxyz, the oldest known attestation of an Ossetic language.
ToskAlbanian was often written using the Greek alphabet, starting in about 1500.[75] The printing press atMoschopolis published several Albanian texts in Greek script during the 18th century. It was only in 1908 that theMonastir conference standardized aLatin orthography for both Tosk andGheg. Greek spelling is still occasionally used for the local Albanian dialects (Arvanitika) in Greece.
Gagauz, aTurkic language of the northeast Balkans spoken by Orthodox Christians, was apparently written in Greek characters in the late 19th century. In 1957, it was standardized on Cyrillic, and in 1996, aGagauz alphabet based on Latin characters was adopted (derived from theTurkish alphabet).
Greek letters are used to denote the brighter stars within each of the eighty-eightconstellations. In most constellations, the brightest star is designated Alpha and the next brightest Beta etc. For example, the brightest star in the constellation ofCentaurus is known asAlpha Centauri. For historical reasons, the Greek designations of some constellations begin with a lower ranked letter.
International Phonetic Alphabet
Several Greek letters are used as phonetic symbols in theInternational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).[82] Several of them denote fricative consonants; the rest stand for variants of vowel sounds. The glyph shapes used for these letters in specialized phonetic fonts is sometimes slightly different from the conventional shapes in Greek typography proper, with glyphs typically being more upright and usingserifs, to make them conform more with the typographical character of other, Latin-based letters in the phonetic alphabet. Nevertheless, in the Unicode encoding standard, the following three phonetic symbols are considered the same characters as the corresponding Greek letters proper:[83]
On the other hand, the following phonetic letters have Unicode representations separate from their Greek alphabetic use, either because their conventional typographic shape is too different from the original, or because they also have secondary uses as regular alphabetic characters in some Latin-based alphabets, including separate Latin uppercase letters distinct from the Greek ones.
Greek letters were also used to write numbers. In the classical Ionian system, the first nine letters of the alphabet stood for the numbers from 1 to 9, the next nine letters stood for the multiples of 10, from 10 to 90, and the next nine letters stood for the multiples of 100, from 100 to 900. For this purpose, in addition to the 24 letters which by that time made up the standard alphabet, three otherwise obsolete letters were retained or revived:digamma⟨Ϝ⟩ for 6,koppa⟨Ϙ⟩ for 90, and a rare Ionian letter for [ss], today calledsampi⟨Ͳ⟩, for 900. This system has remained in use in Greek up to the present day, although today it is only employed for limited purposes such as enumerating chapters in a book, similar to the way Roman numerals are used in English. The three extra symbols are today written as⟨ϛ⟩,⟨ϟ⟩ and⟨ϡ⟩. To mark a letter as a numeral sign, a small stroke calledkeraia is added to the right of it.
In North America, many collegefraternities and sororities are named with combinations of Greek letters, and are hence also known as "Greek letter organizations".[84] This naming tradition was initiated by the foundation of thePhi Beta Kappa society at theCollege of William and Mary in 1776.[84] The name of this fraternal organization is an acronym for the ancient Greek phraseΦιλοσοφία Βίου Κυβερνήτης (Philosophia Biou Kybernētēs), which means "Love of wisdom, the guide of life" and serves as the organization's motto.[84] Sometimes early fraternal organizations were known by their Greek letter names because the mottos that these names stood for were secret and revealed only to members of the fraternity.[84]
Different chapters within the same fraternity are almost always (with a handful of exceptions) designated using Greek letters as serial numbers. The founding chapter of each organization is its A chapter. As an organization expands, it establishes a B chapter, a Γ chapter, and so on and so forth. In an organization that expands to more than 24 chapters, the chapter after Ω chapter is AA chapter, followed by AB chapter, etc. Each of these is still a "chapter Letter", albeit a double-digit letter just as 10 through 99 are double-digit numbers. TheRoman alphabet has a similar extended form with such double-digit letters when necessary, but it is used forcolumns in a table or chart rather than chapters of an organization.[85]
Glyph variants
Some letters can occur in variant shapes, mostly inherited from medievalminuscule handwriting. While their use in normal typography of Greek is purely a matter of font styles, some such variants have been given separate encodings inUnicode.
The symbol ϐ ("curled beta") is a cursive variant form ofbeta (β). In the French tradition of Ancient Greek typography, β is used word-initially, and ϐ is used word-internally.
The letterdelta has a form resembling a cursive capital letter D; while not encoded as its own form, this form is included as part of the symbol for thedrachma (a Δρ digraph) in theCurrency Symbols block, at U+20AF (₯).
The letterepsilon can occur in two equally frequent stylistic variants, either shaped ('lunate epsilon', like a semicircle with a stroke) or (similar to a reversed number 3). The symbol ϵ (U+03F5) is designated specifically for the lunate form, used as a technical symbol.
The symbol ϑ ("script theta") is a cursive form oftheta (θ), frequent in handwriting, and used with a specialized meaning as a technical symbol.
The symbol ϰ ("kappa symbol") is a cursive form ofkappa (κ), used as a technical symbol.
The symbol ("variant pi") is an archaic script form ofpi (π), also used as a technical symbol.
The letterrho (ρ) can occur in different stylistic variants, with the descending tail either going straight down or curled to the right. The symbol ϱ (U+03F1) is designated specifically for the curled form, used as a technical symbol.
The lettersigma, in standard orthography, has two variants: ς, used only at the ends of words, and σ, used elsewhere. The form ϲ ("lunate sigma", resembling a Latinc) is a medieval stylistic variant that can be used in both environments without the final/non-final distinction.
The capital letterupsilon (Υ) can occur in different stylistic variants, with the upper strokes either straight like a LatinY, or slightly curled. The symbol ϒ (U+03D2) is designated specifically for the curled form (), used as a technical symbol, e.g. in physics.
The letterphi can occur in two equally frequent stylistic variants, either shaped as (a circle with a vertical stroke through it) or as (a curled shape open at the top). The symbol ϕ (U+03D5) is designated specifically for the closed form, used as a technical symbol.
The letteromega has at least three stylistic variants of its capital form. The standard is the "open omega" (Ω), resembling an open partial circle with the opening downward and the ends curled outward. The two other stylistic variants are seen more often in modern typography, resembling a raised and underscored circle (roughlyo̲), where the underscore may or may not be touching the circle on a tangent (in the former case it resembles a superscript omicron similar to that found in thenumero sign or masculineordinal indicator; in the latter, it closely resembles some forms of the Latin letter Q). The open omega is always used in symbolic settings and is encoded inLetterlike Symbols (U+2126) as a separate code point for backward compatibility.
Computer encodings
For computer usage, a variety of encodings have been used for Greek online, many of them documented inRFC1947.
The two principal ones still used today areISO/IEC 8859-7 andUnicode. ISO 8859-7 supports only the monotonic orthography; Unicode supports both the monotonic and polytonic orthographies.
Unicode supportspolytonic orthography well enough for ordinary continuous text in modern and ancient Greek, and even many archaic forms forepigraphy. With the use ofcombining characters, Unicode also supports Greekphilology anddialectology and various other specialized requirements. Most current text rendering engines do not render diacritics well, so, though alpha withmacron andacute can berepresented as U+03B1 U+0304 U+0301, this rarely renders well:ᾱ́.[86]
There are two main blocks of Greek characters inUnicode. The first is "Greek and Coptic" (U+0370 to U+03FF). This block is based onISO 8859-7 and is sufficient to write Modern Greek. There are also some archaic letters and Greek-based technical symbols.
This block also supports theCoptic alphabet. Formerly, most Coptic letters shared codepoints with similar-looking Greek letters; but in many scholarly works, both scripts occur, with quite different letter shapes, so as of Unicode 4.1, Coptic and Greek were disunified. Those Coptic letters with no Greek equivalents still remain in this block (U+03E2 to U+03EF).
To write polytonic Greek, one may usecombining diacritical marks or the precomposed characters in the "Greek Extended" block (U+1F00 to U+1FFF).
^ The latest archaeological discoveries function as aterminus ante quem, with the proposed dates being placed some time earlier, seeAstoreca 2021, p. 8;Powell 2012, p. 240. It is also possible that the alphabet first circulated on perishable materials, before being written on materials that can be preserved, seeLopez-Ruiz 2022, p. 231;Cook 1987, p. 9
^abEpsilon⟨ε⟩ and omicron⟨ο⟩ originally could denote both short and long vowels in pre-classical archaic Greek spelling, just like other vowel letters. They were restricted to the function of short vowel signs in classical Greek, as the long vowels/eː/ and/oː/ came to be spelled instead with the digraphs⟨ει⟩ and⟨ου⟩, having phonologically merged with a corresponding pair of former diphthongs /ei/ and /ou/ respectively.
^The Development of the Greek Alphabet within the Chronology of the ANEArchived 2015-04-12 at theWayback 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)"
^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
^Understanding Relations Between Scripts IIArchived 2022-05-22 at theWayback Machine byPhilip J Boyes &Philippa M Steele.Published in the UK in 2020 by Oxbow Books: "The Carian alphabet resembles the Greek alphabet, though, as in the case of Phrygian, no single Greek variant can be identified as its ancestor", "It is generally assumed that the Lydian alphabet is derived from the Greek alphabet, but the exact relationship remains unclear (Melchert 2004)"
^Britannica – Lycian AlphabetArchived 2024-07-10 at theWayback Machine "The Lycian alphabet is clearly related to the Greek, but the exact nature of the relationship is uncertain. Several letters appear to be related to symbols of the Cretan and Cyprian writing systems."
^Scriptsource.org – CarianArchived 2023-10-29 at theWayback Machine"Visually, the letters bear a close resemblance to Greek letters. Decipherment was initially attempted on the assumption that those letters which looked like Greek represented the same sounds as their closest visual Greek equivalents. However it has since been established that the phonetic values of the two scripts are very different. For example the theta θ symbol represents 'th' in Greek but 'q' in Carian. Carian was generally written from left to right, although Egyptian writers wrote primarily from right to left. It was written without spaces between words."
^Omniglot.com – CarianArchived 2024-08-27 at theWayback Machine "The Carian alphabet appears in about 100 pieces of graffiti inscriptions left by Carian mercenaries who served in Egypt. A number of clay tablets, coins and monumental inscriptions have also been found. It was possibly derived from the Phoenician alphabet."
^Ancient Anatolian languages and cultures in contact: some methodological observationsArchived 2023-09-03 at theWayback Machine byPaola Cotticelli-Kurras &Federico Giusfredi(University of Verona, Italy) "During the Iron ages, with a brand new political balance and cultural scenario, the cultures and languages of Anatolia maintained their position of a bridge between the Aegean and the Syro-Mesopotamian worlds, while the North-West Semitic cultures of the Phoenicians and of the Aramaeans also entered the scene. Assuming the 4th century and thehellenization of Anatolia as theterminus ante quem, the correct perspective of a contact-oriented study of the Ancient Anatolian world needs to take as an object a large net of cultures that evolved and changed over almost 16 centuries of documentary history."
^J. Blau, "Middle and Old Arabic material for the history of stress in Arabic",Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies35:3:476–84 (October 1972)full textArchived 2024-10-07 at theWayback Machine
^Ahmad Al-Jallad,The Damascus Psalm Fragment: Middle Arabic and the Legacy of Old Ḥigāzī, in seriesLate Antique and Medieval Islamic Near East (LAMINE)2, Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2020;full textArchived 2021-07-11 at theWayback Machine; see alsoBible translations into Arabic
^Katja Šmid, "Los problemas del estudio de la lengua sefardí",Verba Hispanica10:1:113–24 (2002)full textArchived 2024-10-07 at theWayback Machine: "Es interesante el hecho que en Bulgaria se imprimieron unas pocas publicaciones en alfabeto cirílico búlgaro y en Grecia en alfabeto griego."
^Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. Cambridge: University Press. 1999. pp. 176–181.
^For chi and beta, separate codepoints for use in a Latin-script environment were added in Unicode versions 7.0 (2014) and 8.0 (2015) respectively: U+AB53 "Latin small letter chi" (ꭓ) and U+A7B5 "Latin small letter beta" (ꞵ). As of 2017, the International Phonetic Association still lists the original Greek codepoints as the standard representations of the IPA symbols in question[1]Archived 2019-10-14 at theWayback Machine.
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