Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The Fayum alphabet, originating on Cyprus, seems to be older than the fragmentary Greek inscriptions: it is dated to c. 800 BC and appears to preserve the earliest known form of the Greek alphabet.
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. [3] [4] It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, [5] and is the earliest known alphabetic script to have developed distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. [6]
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.
In addition, the red alphabet also introduced letters for the aspirates, Φ = /pʰ/ and Ψ = /kʰ/. Note that the use of Χ in the "red" set corresponds to the letter "X" in Latin, while it differs from the later standard Greek alphabet, where Χ stands for /kʰ/, and Ψ stands for /ps/. Only Φ for /pʰ/ is common to all non-green alphabets.
The Coptic alphabet is mostly based on the mature Greek alphabet of the Hellenistic period, with a few additional letters for sounds not in Greek at the time. Those additional letters are based on the Demotic script. The Cyrillic script was derived from the late (medieval) Greek alphabet. Some Cyrillic letters (generally for sounds not in ...
The letters of the Greek alphabet are the same as those of the Phoenician alphabet, and both alphabets are arranged in the same order. [18] However, whereas separate letters for vowels would have actually hindered the legibility of Egyptian, Phoenician, or Hebrew, their absence was problematic for Greek, where vowels played a much more ...
The history of the Greek alphabet began as early as the 8th century BCE, when the Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet for their own use. [54] The letters of the Greek alphabet generally visually correspond to those of the Phoenician alphabet, and both came to be arranged using the same alphabetical order. [54]
The orthography of the Greek language ultimately has its roots in the adoption of the Greek alphabet in the 9th century BC. Some time prior to that, one early form of Greek, Mycenaean, was written in Linear B, although there was a lapse of several centuries (the Greek Dark Ages) between the time Mycenaean stopped being written and the time when the Greek alphabet came into use.