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The Ancient Greek pronunciation shown here is a reconstruction of the Attic dialect in the 5th century BC. 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 ...
The letter lambda λ probably represented a lateral ("clear") as in Modern Greek and most European languages, rather than a velarized ("dark") as in English in coda position and Balto-Slavic languages. The letter rho ρ was pronounced as an alveolar trill [r], as in Italian or Modern Greek rather than as in standard varieties of English or French.
The river was known to the ancient Greeks as the Istros (Ἴστρος) [9] from a root possibly also encountered in the ancient name of the Dniester (Danaster in Latin, Tiras in Greek) and akin to Iranic turos 'swift' and Sanskrit iṣiras (इषिरस्) 'swift', from the PIE *isro-, *sreu 'to flow'. [10]
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 consonants as well as vowels. [5]
In Ancient Greek, the diaeresis (Greek: διαίρεσις or διαλυτικά, dialytiká, 'distinguishing') – ϊ – appears on the letters ι and υ to show that a pair of vowel letters is pronounced separately, rather than as a diphthong or as a digraph for a simple vowel.
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 last syllable was long, e.g. άνθρωπος ('man', nominative singular, last syllable short), but ανθρώπων ('of men', genitive plural, last syllable long).
The American Library Association and Library of Congress romanization scheme employs its "Ancient or Medieval Greek" system for all works and authors up to the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, [3] although Byzantine Greek was pronounced distinctly and some have considered "Modern" Greek to have begun as early as the 12th century.
A digraph is a pair of letters used to write one sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters in sequence. The orthography of Greek includes several digraphs, including various pairs of vowel letters that used to be pronounced as diphthongs but have been shortened to monophthongs in pronunciation.