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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.
Later in Attic Greek, they were always pronounced together. In Greek synaeresis, two vowels merge to form a long version of one of the two vowels (e.g. e + a → ā), a diphthong with a different main vowel (e.g. a + ei → āi), or a new vowel intermediate between the originals (e.g. a + o → ō).
The use of both vowels and consonants makes Greek the first alphabet in the narrow sense, [47] as distinguished from the abjads used in Semitic languages, which have letters only for consonants. [48] Early Greek alphabet on pottery in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Greek initially took over all of the 22 letters of Phoenician.
Eta (/ ˈ iː t ə, ˈ eɪ t ə / EE-tə, AY-tə; [1] uppercase Η, lowercase η; Ancient Greek: ἦτα ē̂ta or Greek: ήτα ita) is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the close front unrounded vowel, .
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 loss of vowel length and the spread of Greek under Alexander the Great led to a reorganization of the vowels in the phonology of Koine Greek. Vowel length distinctions appear to have been lost first in Egypt and then in Anatolia by the 2nd century BC, with Greek inscriptions beginning to display short/long vowel confusions from the 1st ...
For example, ʾāleph, which designated a glottal stop in Phoenician, was repurposed to represent the vowel /a/; he became /e/, ḥet became /eː/ (a long vowel), ʿayin became /o/ (because the pharyngeality altered the following vowel), while the two semi-consonants wau and yod became the corresponding high vowels, /u/ and /i/.
The distribution of vocalic Η and Ε differs further between dialects, because the Greek language had a system of three distinct e-like phonemes: the long open-mid /ɛː/ (classical spelling η), the long close-mid /eː/ (later merged with the diphthong /ei/, classical spelling ει), and the short vowel /e/ (classical spelling ε).