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Ancient Greek phonology is the reconstructed phonology or pronunciation of Ancient Greek.This article mostly deals with the pronunciation of the standard Attic dialect of the fifth century BC, used by Plato and other Classical Greek writers, and touches on other dialects spoken at the same time or earlier.
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.
Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period.The more complex polytonic orthography (Greek: πολυτονικὸ σύστημα γραφῆς, romanized: polytonikò sýstīma grafī̂s), which includes five diacritics, notates Ancient Greek phonology.
One, however – θ – has only its Greek form, while for ꞵ ~ β and ꭓ ~ χ , both Greek and Latin forms are in common use. [16] The tone letters are not derived from an alphabet, but from a pitch trace on a musical scale. Beyond the letters themselves, there are a variety of secondary symbols which aid in transcription.
Ancient Greek in classical antiquity, before the development of the common Koine Greek of the Hellenistic period, was divided into several varieties.. Most of these varieties are known only from inscriptions, but a few of them, principally Aeolic, Doric, and Ionic, are also represented in the literary canon alongside the dominant Attic form of literary Greek.
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 ...
Mycenaean Greek is the most ancient attested form of the Greek language, on the Greek mainland and Crete in Mycenaean Greece (16th to 12th centuries BC). The language is preserved in inscriptions in Linear B , a script first attested on Crete before the 14th century BC.
The same changes affected the English pronunciation of Greek, which thus became further removed from both Ancient Greek and from the Greek that was pronounced in other western countries. A further peculiarity of the English pronunciation of Ancient Greek occurred as a result of the work of Isaac Vossius. He maintained in an anonymously ...