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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]
The letter Y when introduced was probably called "hy" /hyː/ as in Greek, the name upsilon not being in use yet, but this was changed to i Graeca ("Greek i") as Latin speakers had difficulty distinguishing its foreign sound /y/ from /i/. Z was given its Greek name, zeta. This scheme has continued to be used by most modern European languages ...
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.
This page was last edited on 12 September 2022, at 21:53 (UTC).; Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License; additional terms may apply.
The letters K, Y, and Z were later added to represent Greek letters kappa, upsilon, and zeta respectively, in Greek loanwords. [77] W was created in the 11th century from VV in some areas and UU in others. It represented /w/ in Germanic languages, not Latin, which still uses V for the purpose.
The lists and tables below summarize and compare the letter inventories of some of the Latin-script alphabets.In this article, the scope of the word "alphabet" is broadened to include letters with tone marks, and other diacritics used to represent a wide range of orthographic traditions, without regard to whether or how they are sequenced in their alphabet or the table.
[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 ...
Around the second and first centuries B.C., the Greek letter zeta Ζ was adopted to represent /z/ and /zz/. [11] However, the Vulgar Latin spellings z or zi for earlier di and d before e , and the spellings di and dz for earlier z , suggest the pronunciation /dz/ , as for example ziomedis for diomedis , and diaeta for zeta .