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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]
Alpha / ˈ æ l f ə / [1] (uppercase Α, lowercase α) [a] is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph, which is the West Semitic word for "ox". [2] Letters that arose from alpha include the Latin letter A and the Cyrillic letter А.
The OpenType font format has the feature tag "mgrk" ("Mathematical Greek") to identify a glyph as representing a Greek letter to be used in mathematical (as opposed to Greek language) contexts. The table below shows a comparison of Greek letters rendered in TeX and HTML. The font used in the TeX rendering is an italic style.
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]
The Euboean alphabet was used in the cities of Eretria and Chalcis and in related colonies in southern Italy, notably in Cumae, Pithecusae and Rhegion. It was through this variant that the Greek alphabet was transmitted to Italy, where it gave rise to the Old Italic alphabets, including Etruscan and ultimately the Latin alphabet. Some of the ...
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.
The word zeta is the ancestor of zed, the name of the Latin letter Z in Commonwealth English. Swedish and many Romance languages (such as Italian and Spanish) do not distinguish between the Greek and Roman forms of the letter; "zeta" is used to refer to the Roman letter Z as well as the Greek letter.
The Greek alphabet was developed during the Iron Age, centuries after the loss of Linear B, the syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek until the Late Bronze Age collapse and Greek Dark Age. This article concentrates on the development of the alphabet before the modern codification of the standard Greek alphabet.