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The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. [3] [4] It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, [5] and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants.
Eta with acute and smooth breathing. Archaic letter denoting the absence of /h/ prior to the vowel, with a high pitch on a short vowel or rising pitch on a long vowel. Ἢἢ. Eta with grave and smooth breathing. Archaic letter denoting the absence of /h/ prior to the vowel, with a normal or low pitch. Ἦἦ.
Greek has a system of five vowels /i, u, e, o, a/. The first two are close to the cardinal vowels [i, u]; the mid vowels /e, o/ are true-mid [e̞, o̞]; and the open /a/ is near-open central . [15] There is no phonemic length distinction, but vowels in stressed syllables are pronounced somewhat longer [iˑ, uˑ, eˑ, oˑ, aˑ] than in ...
A mora is a unit of vowel length; in Ancient Greek, short vowels have one mora and long vowels and diphthongs have two morae. Thus, a one-mora vowel could have accent on its one mora, and a two-mora vowel could have accent on either of its two morae. The position of accent was free, with certain limitations.
The accents (Ancient Greek: τόνοι, romanized: tónoi, singular: τόνος, tónos) are placed on an accented vowel or on the last of the two vowels of a diphthong (ά, but αί) and indicated pitch patterns in Ancient Greek. The precise nature of the patterns is not certain, but the general nature of each is known.
The history of the Greek alphabet starts with the adoption of Phoenician letter forms in the 9th–8th centuries BC during early Archaic Greece and continues to the present day. The Greek alphabet was developed during the Iron Age, centuries after the loss of Linear B, the syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek until the Late ...
The orthography of Greek includes several digraphs, including various pairs of vowel letters that used to be pronounced as diphthongs but have been shortened to monophthongs in pronunciation. Many of these are characteristic developments of modern Greek, but some were already present in Classical Greek. None of them is regarded as a letter of ...
A series of radical sound changes starting in Koine Greek has led to a phonological system in Modern Greek that is significantly different from that of Ancient Greek. Instead of the complex vowel system of Ancient Greek, with its four vowel-height levels, length distinction, and multiple diphthongs, Modern Greek has a simple system of five vowels.