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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]
Gamma (/ ˈ ɡ æ m ə /; [1] uppercase Γ, lowercase γ; Greek: γάμμα, romanized: gámma) is the third letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 3. In Ancient Greek, the letter gamma represented a voiced velar stop IPA:.
The only Greek rhotic /r/ is prototypically an alveolar tap , often retracted ([ɾ̠]). It may be an alveolar approximant intervocalically, and is usually a trill in clusters, with two or three short cycles. [8] Greek has palatals [c, ɟ, ç, ʝ] which are allophones of the velar consonants /k, ɡ, x, ɣ/ before the front vowels /e, i/.
According to W.S. Allen, zeta ζ in Attic Greek likely represented the consonant cluster /sd/, phonetically [zd]. For metrical purposes it was treated as a double consonant, thus forming a heavy syllable. In Archaic Greek, when the letter was adopted from Phoenician zayin, the sound was probably an affricate .
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.
All Phoenician letters had been acrophonic, and they remained so in Greek. Since the names of the letters ʼāleph and hē were pronounced [alepʰ] and [e] by the Greeks, with initial vowels due to the silent gutturals (the disambiguation e psilon "narrow e" came later), the acrophonic principle was retained for vowels as well as consonants by ...
The sound denoted by this letter was a reflex of the proto-Greek consonant clusters *[kj], *[kʰj], *[tj], *[tʰj], or *[tw], and was probably an intermediate sound during the phonetic change from the earlier plosive clusters towards the later /s/ sound, possibly an affricate similar to /ts/. [20]
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 characters. See Ancient Greek phonology and Modern Greek phonology for a more thorough look at their sounds.