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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.
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The most significant changes during the Koine Greek period concerned vowels: these were the loss of vowel length distinction, the shift of the Ancient Greek system of pitch accent to a stress accent system, and the monophthongization of diphthongs (except αυ and ευ).
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.
Other conventions are generally straightforward and can all be covered, simultaneously, by including the Latin or Greek orthography, or the Greek in Latin transcription. As long as Latin long vowels ā ē ī ō ū ȳ are indicated, readers will be able to pronounce the word according to the convention of their choice.
The period between the use of the two writing systems, Linear B and the Greek alphabet, during which no Greek texts are attested, is known as the Greek Dark Ages. [45] The Greeks adopted the alphabet from the earlier Phoenician alphabet , one of the closely related scripts used for the West Semitic languages , calling it Φοινικήια ...
In some word classes, stress position also preserves an older pattern inherited from Ancient Greek according to which a word could not be accented on the third-last syllable if the vowel in the last syllable was long, e.g. άνθρωπος ('man', nominative singular, last vowel short), but ανθρώπων ('of men', genitive plural, last ...