Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 vowels as well as consonants. [5]
Greek letters are used in mathematics, science, engineering, and other areas where mathematical notation is used as symbols for constants, special functions, and also conventionally for variables representing certain quantities. In these contexts, the capital letters and the small letters represent distinct and unrelated entities.
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.
Many of the letters familiar from the classical Greek alphabet displayed additional variation in shapes, with some of the variant forms being characteristic of specific local alphabets. The form of Ζ generally had a straight stem in all local alphabets in the archaic period. Θ was mostly crossed (or ).
Greek theta variant in cursive form. The cursive form ϑ was retained by Unicode as U+03D1 ϑ GREEK THETA SYMBOL, separate from U+03B8 θ GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA. (There is also U+03F4 ϴ GREEK CAPITAL THETA SYMBOL.) For the purpose of writing Greek text, the two can be font variants of a single character, but θ and ϑ are also used as ...
Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols is a Unicode block comprising styled forms of Latin and Greek letters and decimal digits that enable mathematicians to denote different notions with different letter styles. The letters in various fonts often have specific, fixed meanings in particular areas of mathematics.
The history includes Hindu–Arabic numerals, letters from the Roman, Greek, Hebrew, and German alphabets, and a variety of symbols invented by mathematicians over the past several centuries. The historical development of mathematical notation can be divided into three stages: [4] [5]
All Phoenician letters had been acrophonic, and they remained so in Greek. Since the names of the letters ʼāleph and hē were pronounced [alepʰ] and [e] by the Greeks, with initial vowels due to the silent gutturals (the disambiguation e psilon "narrow e" came later), the acrophonic principle was retained for vowels as well as consonants by ...