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Uppercase forms of stigma as a numeral (Ϛ) are rare in practice; when they occur, they can often be confused with uppercase forms of another numeral symbol, koppa (Ϟϟ), which stands for 90. Stigma is encoded in Unicode as "Greek letter stigma" U+03DA (Ϛ) and "Greek small letter stigma" U+03DB (ϛ).
This requires 27 letters, so the 24-letter alphabet was extended by using three obsolete letters: digamma ϝ (also used are stigma ϛ or, in modern Greek, στ) for 6, qoppa ϙ for 90, and sampi ϡ for 900. This alphabetic system operates on the additive principle in which the numeric values of the letters are added together to form the total.
Greek numerals, also known as Ionic, Ionian, Milesian, or Alexandrian numerals, is a system of writing numbers using the letters of the Greek alphabet. In modern Greece , they are still used for ordinal numbers and in contexts similar to those in which Roman numerals are still used in the Western world .
The characters used for numeric digamma/stigma are distinguished in modern print from the character used to represent the ancient alphabetic digamma, the letter for the [w] sound. This is rendered in print by a Latin "F", or sometimes a variant of it specially designed to fit in typographically with Greek ( Ϝ ).
[1] [2] The local, so-called epichoric, alphabets differed in many ways: in the use of the consonant symbols Χ, Φ and Ψ; in the use of the innovative long vowel letters (Ω and Η), in the absence or presence of Η in its original consonant function (/h/); in the use or non-use of certain archaic letters (Ϝ = /w/, Ϙ = /k/, Ϻ = /s/); and ...
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]
It is possible that qoppa had been assigned to the Ancient Greek /kʷʰ/, and when that sound shifted to /pʰ/, the letter qoppa continued as the letter phi. [ 13 ] Phoenician had three letters, sāmekh , ṣādē and šin , representing three or probably four voiceless sibilant sounds, whereas Greek only required one.
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.