Greek alphabet

The Greek language is written in the Greek alphabet, developed in classical times (ca 9th century B.C.) and passed down to the present. It is the world's oldest alphabet in use today. In ancient Greece its letters were also used to represent numbers, called Greek numerals, analogous to Roman numerals. Besides writing modern Greek, today its letters are used as mathematical symbols, as names of stars and fraternities and sororities, and for other purposes, such as names of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean, should the given name list be used up (although as of October, 2005 this has never happened).

History

The most notable change, compared to its predecessor, 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, Ethiopic alphabet, Indic alphabets, and Old Hungarian script). The first vowels were alpha, epsilon, iota, omicron, and upsilon (copied from waw), modifications of either glides or breathing marks, which were mostly superfluous in Greek. In eastern Greek, which lacked breaths entirely, the letter eta was also used for a long e, and eventually the letter omega was introduced for a long o. Vowels were originally not used in Semitic alphabets, but even in the very old Ugaritic alphabet matres lectionis were used, i.e. consonant signs were used to denote vowels.

Related Topics:
Phoenician alphabet - Vowel - Hangul - Orkhon script - Ethiopic alphabet - Indic alphabets - Old Hungarian script - Matres lectionis

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Greek also introduced three new consonants, appended to the end of the alphabet as they were developed. The consonants were to mainly to make up for the lack of aspirates in Phoenician. In west Greek, actually, chi was used for /{{IPA|ks}}/ and psi for /{{IPA|kʰ}}/ — hence the value of our letter x, derived from chi. Over the middle ages these aspirates disappeared, so now theta, phi, and chi stand for /{{IPA|θ}}/, /{{IPA|f}}/, and /{{IPA|x}}/. The origin of those letters is disputed.

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The letter san was used at variance with sigma, and by classical times the latter won out, san disappearing from the alphabet. The letters waw (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 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).

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Originally there were several variants of the Greek alphabet, most importantly western (Chalcidian) and eastern (Ionic) Greek; the former gave rise to the Old Italic alphabet and thence to the Latin alphabet. Athens took the Ionic script to be its standard in 403 BC, 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.

Related Topics:
Old Italic alphabet - Latin alphabet - 403 BC - Boustrophedon

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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 hands came to dominate. The letter σ is even written ς at the ends of words, paralleling the use of the long and short s at the time. Aristophanes of Byzantium also introduced the process of accenting Greek letters for easier pronunciation.

Related Topics:
Middle ages - Minuscule - Long and short s - Aristophanes of Byzantium

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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 digraph called stigma ({{polytonic|Ϛ}}, {{polytonic|ϛ}}) instead of digamma or use στ if it is not available. For 90 they use modern z-shaped qoppa forms: {{polytonic|Ϟ}}, {{polytonic|ϟ}} (Note that some web browser/font combinations will show the other qoppa here).

Related Topics:
Minuscule - Digraph

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