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The orthography of the Greek language ultimately has its roots in the adoption of the Greek alphabet in the 9th century BC. Some time prior to that, one early form of Greek, Mycenaean, was written in Linear B, although there was a lapse of several centuries (the Greek Dark Ages) between the time Mycenaean stopped being written and the time when the Greek alphabet came into use.
The only Greek rhotic /r/ is prototypically an alveolar tap , often retracted ([ɾ̠]). It may be an alveolar approximant intervocalically, and is usually a trill in clusters, with two or three short cycles. [8] Greek has palatals [c, ɟ, ç, ʝ] which are allophones of the velar consonants /k, ɡ, x, ɣ/ before the front vowels /e, i/.
The uppercase letters of modern orthography are derived from the uncial script, while the lowercase letters are derived from minuscules. The invention of printing saw the codification of a more fixed set of letter structures. Greek handwriting made extensive use of ligatures with
f f [f] or possibly [p] [3] 500 Greek Phi Φ This letter was not needed for Slavic but used to transcribe Greek Φ and Latin ph and f. [3] It was probably, but not certainly, pronounced as [f] rather than [p]; however, in some cases it has been found as a transcription of Greek π. [3] Х х: хѣръ: xěrо̆ ch/x kh [x] 600 Greek Chi Χ
All forms of the Greek alphabet were originally based on the shared inventory of the 22 symbols of the Phoenician alphabet, with the exception of the letter Samekh, whose Greek counterpart Xi (Ξ) was used only in a subgroup of Greek alphabets, and with the common addition of Upsilon (Υ) for the vowel /u, ū/.
Pronunciation of Ancient Greek in French secondary schools is based on Erasmian pronunciation, but it is modified to match the phonetics and even, in the case of αυ and ευ, the orthography of French. Vowel length distinction, geminate consonants and pitch accent are discarded completely, which matches the current phonology of Standard French.
Since in Modern Greek the pitch accent has been replaced by a dynamic accent (stress), and /h/ was lost, most polytonic diacritics have no phonetic significance, and merely reveal the underlying Ancient Greek etymology. Monotonic orthography (from Ancient Greek μόνος (mónos) 'single' and τόνος (tónos) 'accent') is the standard ...
Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, [18] or possibly earlier. [19] The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, [20] making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language. [21]