Greek alphabet
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and is the earliest known alphabetic script to systematically write vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BC, the Ionic-based Euclidean alphabet, with 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard throughout the Greek-speaking world and is the version that is still used for Greek writing today.
The uppercase and lowercase forms of the 24 letters are:
The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of several scripts, such as the Latin, Gothic, Coptic, and Cyrillic scripts. Throughout antiquity, Greek had only a single uppercase form of each letter. It was written without diacritics and with little punctuation. By the 9th century, Byzantine scribes had begun to employ the lowercase form, which they derived from the cursive styles of the uppercase letters. Sound values and conventional transcriptions for some of the letters differ between Ancient and Modern Greek usage because the pronunciation of Greek has changed significantly between the 5th century BC and the present. Additionally, Modern and Ancient Greek now use different diacritics, with ancient Greek using the polytonic orthography and modern Greek keeping only the stress accent and the diaeresis.
Apart from its use in writing the Greek language, in both its ancient and its modern forms, the Greek alphabet today also serves as a source of international technical symbols and labels in many domains of mathematics, science, and other fields.
Letters
Sound values
In both Ancient and Modern Greek, the letters of the Greek alphabet have fairly stable and consistent symbol-to-sound mappings, making pronunciation of words largely predictable. Ancient Greek spelling was generally near-phonemic. For a number of letters, sound values differ considerably between Ancient and Modern Greek, because their pronunciation has followed a set of systematic phonological shifts that affected the language in its post-classical stages.;Examples
;Notes
Among consonant letters, all letters that denoted voiced plosive consonants and aspirated plosives in Ancient Greek stand for corresponding fricative sounds in Modern Greek. The correspondences are as follows:
Among the vowel symbols, Modern Greek sound values reflect the radical simplification of the vowel system of post-classical Greek, merging multiple formerly distinct vowel phonemes into a much smaller number. This leads to several groups of vowel letters denoting identical sounds today. Modern Greek orthography remains true to the historical spellings in most of these cases. As a consequence, the spellings of words in Modern Greek are often not predictable from the pronunciation alone, while the reverse mapping, from spelling to pronunciation, is usually regular and predictable.
The following vowel letters and digraphs are involved in the mergers:
| Letter | Ancient | Modern |
| Η η | > | |
| Ι ι | > | |
| ΕΙ ει | > | |
| Υ υ | > | > |
| ΟΙ οι | > | > |
| ΥΙ υι | > | > |
| Ω ω | > | |
| Ο ο | > | |
| Ε ε | > | |
| ΑΙ αι | > |
Modern Greek speakers typically use the same, modern symbol–sound mappings in reading Greek of all historical stages. In other countries, students of Ancient Greek may use a variety of conventional approximations of the historical sound system in pronouncing Ancient Greek.
Digraphs and letter combinations
Several letter combinations have special conventional sound values different from those of their single components. Among them are several digraphs of vowel letters that formerly represented diphthongs but are now monophthongized. In addition to the four mentioned above, there is also, and, pronounced. The Ancient Greek diphthongs, and are pronounced, and in Modern Greek. In some environments, they are devoiced to, and. The Modern Greek consonant combinations and stand for and ; stands for and stands for. In addition, both in Ancient and Modern Greek, the letter, before another velar consonant, stands for the velar nasal ; thus and are pronounced like English like in the word finger. In analogy to and, is also used to stand for before vowels, and, and before and. There are also the combinations and.| Combination | Pronunciation | Devoiced pronunciation |
| – | ||
| or | – | |
| or | – | |
| and | , or , | – |
| – | ||
| – | ||
| in and | – |
Diacritics
In the polytonic orthography traditionally used for ancient Greek and katharevousa, the stressed vowel of each word carries one of three accent marks: either the acute accent, the grave accent, or the circumflex accent. These signs were originally designed to mark different forms of the phonological pitch accent in Ancient Greek. By the time their use became conventional and obligatory in Greek writing, in late antiquity, pitch accent was evolving into a single stress accent, and thus the three signs have not corresponded to a phonological distinction in actual speech ever since. In addition to the accent marks, every word-initial vowel must carry either of two so-called "breathing marks": the rough breathing, marking an sound at the beginning of a word, or the smooth breathing, marking its absence. The letter rho, although not a vowel, also carries rough breathing in a word-initial position. If a rho was geminated within a word, the first ρ always had the smooth breathing and the second the rough breathing leading to the transliteration.The vowel letters carry an additional diacritic in certain words, the so-called iota subscript, which has the shape of a small vertical stroke or a miniature below the letter. This iota represents the former offglide of what were originally long diphthongs, , which became monophthongized during antiquity.
Another diacritic used in Greek is the diaeresis, indicating a hiatus.
This system of diacritics was first developed by the scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium, who worked at the Musaeum in Alexandria during the 3rd century BC. Aristophanes of Byzantium also was the first to divide poems into lines, rather than writing them like prose, and also introduced a series of signs for textual criticism. In 1982, a new, simplified orthography, known as "monotonic", was adopted for official use in Modern Greek by the Greek state. It uses only a single accent mark, the acute, marking the stressed syllable of polysyllabic words, and occasionally the diaeresis to distinguish diphthongal from digraph readings in pairs of vowel letters, making this monotonic system very similar to the accent mark system used in Spanish. The polytonic system is still conventionally used for writing Ancient Greek, while in some book printing and generally in the usage of conservative writers it can still also be found in use for Modern Greek.
Although it is not a diacritic, the comma has a similar function as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing from .
Romanization
There are many different methods of rendering Greek text or Greek names in the Latin script. The form in which classical Greek names are conventionally rendered in English goes back to the way Greek loanwords were incorporated into Latin in antiquity. In this system, is replaced with, the diphthongs and are rendered as and ; and and are simplified to and. Smooth breathing marks are usually ignored and rough breathing marks are usually rendered as the letter. In modern scholarly transliteration of Ancient Greek, will usually be rendered as, and the vowel combinations as. The letters and are generally rendered as and ; as either or ; and word-initial as.Transcription conventions for Modern Greek differ widely, depending on their purpose, on how close they stay to the conventional letter correspondences of Ancient Greek-based transcription systems, and to what degree they attempt either an exact letter-by-letter transliteration or rather a phonetically based transcription. Standardized formal transcription systems have been defined by the International Organization for Standardization, by the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names, by the Library of Congress, and others.
| Letter | Traditional Latin transliteration |
| Α α | A a |
| Β β | B b |
| Γ γ | G g |
| Δ δ | D d |
| Ε ε | E e |
| Ζ ζ | Z z |
| Η η | Ē ē |
| Θ θ | Th th |
| Ι ι | I i |
| Κ κ | C c, K k |
| Λ λ | L l |
| Μ μ | M m |
| Ν ν | N n |
| Ξ ξ | X x |
| Ο ο | O o |
| Π π | P p |
| Ρ ρ | R r, Rh rh |
| Σ σ/ς | S s |
| Τ τ | T t |
| Υ υ | Y y, U u |
| Φ φ | Ph ph |
| Χ χ | Ch ch, Kh kh |
| Ψ ψ | Ps ps |
| Ω ω | Ō ō |
History
Origins
During the Mycenaean period, between roughly the 16th and 12th centuries BC, a script called Linear B was used to write the earliest attested form of the Greek language, known as Mycenaean Greek. This writing system, unrelated to the Greek alphabet, last appeared in the 13th century BC. Inscription written in the Greek alphabet begin to emerge from the 8th century BC onward. While early samples of the Greek alphabet date from at least 775 BC, the oldest known substantial and comprehensible inscriptions, such as those on the Dipylon vase, the cup of Nestor, and cup of Acesander, date from /30 BC. It is accepted that the introduction of the alphabet occurred some time prior to these inscriptions. While earlier dates have been proposed, the Greek alphabet is commonly held to have originated some time in the late 9th or early 8th century BC, conventionally around 800 BC.The period between the use of the two writing systems, Linear B and the Greek alphabet, during which no Greek texts are attested, is known as the Greek Dark Ages. The Greeks adopted the alphabet from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, one of the closely related scripts used for the West Semitic languages, calling it Φοινικήια γράμματα 'Phoenician letters'. However, the Phoenician alphabet was limited to consonants. When it was adopted for writing Greek, certain consonants were adapted in order to express vowels. The use of both vowels and consonants makes Greek the first alphabet in the narrow sense, as distinguished from the abjads used in Semitic languages, which have letters only for consonants.
Greek initially took over all of the 22 letters of Phoenician. Five were reassigned to denote vowel sounds: the glide consonants and were used for and ; the glottal stop consonant was used for ; the pharyngeal was turned into ; and the letter for was turned into . A doublet of waw was also borrowed as a consonant for . In addition, the Phoenician letter for the emphatic glottal was borrowed in two different functions by different dialects of Greek: as a letter for /h/ by those dialects that had such a sound, and as an additional vowel letter for the long by those dialects that lacked the consonant. Eventually, a seventh vowel letter for the long was introduced. Greek also introduced three new consonant letters for its aspirated plosive sounds and consonant clusters: Φ for, Χ for and Ψ for. In western Greek variants, Χ was instead used for and Ψ for. The origin of these letters is a matter of some debate.
Three of the original Phoenician letters dropped out of use before the alphabet took its classical shape: the letter Ϻ, which had been in competition with Σ denoting the same phoneme /s/; the letter Ϙ, which was redundant with Κ for /k/, and Ϝ, whose sound value /w/ dropped out of the spoken language before or during the classical period.
Greek was originally written predominantly from right to left, just like Phoenician, but scribes could freely alternate between directions. For a time, a writing style with alternating right-to-left and left-to-right lines was common, until in the classical period the left-to-right writing direction became the norm. Individual letter shapes were mirrored depending on the writing direction of the current line.