Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In both Ancient and Modern Greek, the letters of the Greek alphabet have fairly stable and consistent symbol-to-sound mappings, making pronunciation of words largely predictable. Ancient Greek spelling was generally near-phonemic. For a number of letters, sound values differ considerably between Ancient and Modern Greek, because their ...
The conventions for writing and romanizing Ancient Greek and Modern Greek differ markedly. The sound of the English letter B was written as β in ancient Greek but is now written as the digraph μπ, while the modern β sounds like the English letter V instead.
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 Bronze Age collapse and Greek Dark Age. This article concentrates on the development of the alphabet before the modern codification of the standard Greek alphabet.
Many local variants of the Greek alphabet were employed in ancient Greece during the archaic and early classical periods, until around 400 BC, when they were replaced by the classical 24-letter alphabet that is the standard today.
The Greek letters φ , β , θ , and δ are pronounced /f/, /v/, /θ/, and /ð/ respectively. The letters γ and χ are pronounced /ɣ/ and /x/, respectively. All those letters represent fricatives in Modern Greek, but they were used for occlusives with the same (or with a similar) articulation point in Ancient Greek.
The letters of the Greek alphabet are the same as those of the Phoenician alphabet, and both alphabets are arranged in the same order. [18] However, whereas separate letters for vowels would have actually hindered the legibility of Egyptian, Phoenician, or Hebrew, their absence was problematic for Greek, where vowels played a much more ...
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 charts below show how the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents the Ancient Greek (AG) and Modern Greek (MG) pronunciations in Wikipedia articles. The Ancient Greek pronunciation shown here is a reconstruction of the Attic dialect in the 5th century BC.