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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]
Greek alphabet. Many local variants of the Greek alphabet were employed in ancient Greece during the archaic and early classical periods, until around 400 BC, when they were replaced by the classical 24-letter alphabet that is the standard today. All forms of the Greek alphabet were originally based on the shared inventory of the 22 symbols of ...
The history of the Greek alphabet starts with the adoption of Phoenician letter forms in the 9th–8th centuries BC during early Archaic Greece and continues to the present day. 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 ...
Eta with acute and smooth breathing. Archaic letter denoting the absence of /h/ prior to the vowel, with a high pitch on a short vowel or rising pitch on a long vowel. Ἢἢ. Eta with grave and smooth breathing. Archaic letter denoting the absence of /h/ prior to the vowel, with a normal or low pitch. Ἦἦ.
Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language, divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic, Aeolic, Arcadocypriot, and Doric, many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature, while others are attested only in inscriptions.
Greek alphabet on an ancient black figure vessel. There is a digamma but no ksi or omega. The letter phi upright in the photograph is missing a stroke and looks like the omicron Ο, but on the other side of the bottom it is a full Φ. Etruscan writing, the beginning of the writing with the Latin alphabet.
In ancient times, some local forms of the Greek alphabet used the chi instead of xi to represent the /ks/ sound. This was borrowed into the early Latin language, which led to the use of the letter X for the same sound in Latin, and many modern languages that use the Latin alphabet.
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.