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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 was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, [5] and is the earliest known alphabetic script to have developed distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. [6]
This is a list of letters of the Greek alphabet. The definition of a Greek letter for this list is a character encoded in the Unicode standard that a has script property of "Greek" and the general category of "Letter". An overview of the distribution of Greek letters is given in Greek script in Unicode.
The OpenType font format has the feature tag "mgrk" ("Mathematical Greek") to identify a glyph as representing a Greek letter to be used in mathematical (as opposed to Greek language) contexts. The table below shows a comparison of Greek letters rendered in TeX and HTML. The font used in the TeX rendering is an italic style.
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 sub-group of Greek alphabets, and with the common addition of Upsilon (Υ) for the vowel /u, ū/.
The following is a Unicode collation algorithm list of Greek characters and those Greek-derived characters that are sorted alongside them. [2] [3] [4] Most of the characters of the blocks listed above are included, except for the Ancient Greek Numbers, Ancient Symbols and Ancient Greek Musical Notation.
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.
These symbols are not given lower-case equivalents. [10] When used as numbers, the letters are used in combination with the upper keraia numeral sign ʹ to denote numbers from 1 to 900 and in combination with the lower keraia ͵ to denote multiples of 1000. (For a full table of the signs and their values, see Greek numerals.)
For other Ancient Greek dialects, such as Doric, Aeolic, or Koine Greek, please use |generic=yes. For a guide to adding IPA characters to Wikipedia articles, see Template:IPA and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation § Entering IPA characters. See Ancient Greek phonology and Modern Greek phonology for a more thorough look at their sounds.