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The Attic numerals are a symbolic number notation used by the ancient Greeks. They were also known as Herodianic numerals because they were first described in a 2nd-century manuscript by Herodian; or as acrophonic numerals (from acrophony) because the basic symbols derive from the first letters of the (ancient) Greek words that the symbols ...
Greek numerals, also known as Ionic, Ionian, Milesian, or Alexandrian numerals, is a system of writing numbers using the letters of the Greek alphabet. In modern Greece , they are still used for ordinal numbers and in contexts similar to those in which Roman numerals are still used in the Western world .
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. [2] [3] It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, [4] and is the earliest known alphabetic script to have developed distinct letters for consonants as well as vowels. [5]
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/.
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 Greek-language inscriptions and epigraphy are a major source for understanding of the society, language and history of ancient Greece and other Greek-speaking or Greek-controlled areas. [1] [2] Greek inscriptions may occur on stone slabs, pottery ostraca, ornaments, and range from simple names to full texts. [3] [4]
Koppa or qoppa (Ϙ, ϙ; as a modern numeral sign: ϟ) is a letter that was used in early forms of the Greek alphabet, derived from Phoenician qoph (𐤒).It was originally used to denote the /k/ sound, but dropped out of use as an alphabetic character and replaced by Kappa (Κ).
It is possible that qoppa had been assigned to the Ancient Greek /kʷʰ/, and when that sound shifted to /pʰ/, the letter qoppa continued as the letter phi. [ 13 ] Phoenician had three letters, sāmekh , ṣādē and šin , representing three or probably four voiceless sibilant sounds, whereas Greek only required one.