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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 consonants as well as vowels. [5]
There is also a 'Latin epsilon', ɛ or "open e", which looks similar to the Greek lowercase epsilon. It is encoded in Unicode as U+025B ɛ LATIN SMALL LETTER OPEN E and U+0190 Ɛ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER OPEN E and is used as an IPA phonetic symbol. This Latin uppercase epsilon, Ɛ, is not to be confused with the Greek uppercase Σ
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.
Greek: ἔβενος (ébenos) ebony, ebonize, ébéniste (from French) ec-[2] out: Greek: ἐκ (ek) eccentric, ecstasy, ecstatic ecclesi-assembly, congregation: Greek: ἐκκλησία (ekklēsía) from ἐκκαλέω (ekkaléō) "I summon" or "I call out" Ecclesiastes, ecclesiastical ech-sound: Greek
The distribution of vocalic Η and Ε differs further between dialects, because the Greek language had a system of three distinct e-like phonemes: the long open-mid /ɛː/ (classical spelling η), the long close-mid /eː/ (later merged with the diphthong /ei/, classical spelling ει), and the short vowel /e/ (classical spelling ε).
Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, [18] or possibly earlier. [19] The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, [20] making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language. [21]
Greek letters are used in mathematics, science, engineering, and other areas where mathematical notation is used as symbols for constants, special functions, and also conventionally for variables representing certain quantities. In these contexts, the capital letters and the small letters represent distinct and unrelated entities.
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.