The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late ninth or early eighth century BC. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the first alphabetic script in history to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In both Ancient and Modern Greek, the letters of the Greek alphabet have fairly stable and consistent symbol-to-sound mappings.
About Greek alphabet in brief
Official script in: The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late ninth or early eighth century BC. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the first alphabetic script in history to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In both Ancient and Modern Greek, the letters of the Greek alphabet have fairly stable and consistent symbol-to-sound mappings. Sound values and conventional transcriptions for some of the letters differ because the pronunciation of Greek has changed significantly between the fifth century BC and today. Modern and Ancient Greek also use different diacritics. In Ancient Greek, all letters that denoted voiced plosive consonants and aspirated plosives in Ancient Greek stand for corresponding fricative sounds in Modern Greek. 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. In other countries, students of Ancient Greek may use a variety of conventional approximations of the historical sound system in pronouncing Ancient Greek. 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 ⟨ηι, ωι⟩, and ⟳ ω, pronounced u. In some environments, they are devoiced, and and respectively. The Ancient Greek diphTHongs are pronounced “α”, “Ν, and “ ”. The Modern Greek consonant combinations , ’, and ”” are pronounced u, and , and respectively. In the ancient and modern forms of the alphabet, the letter “γ” is also used to stand for the velar consonant, thus thus the nasal velar. There are also the letter ⟓, which stands for the nasal nasal. In analogy to English, the word “k’” stands for “ke” and is used for the k-shaped consonant. The letter ‘k” also stands for k-ke, which is used to mean “one” or “the same” in both Ancient Greek and modern Greek. The letters “m” stand for ‘m’ or ‘n’ and ‘t’ in both ancient andmodern forms of Greek, and are also used in the modern form of Greek. It also serves as a source of technical symbols and labels in many domains of mathematics, science and other fields. It was the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. It developed the letter case distinction between uppercase and lowercase in parallel with Latin during the modern era.
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This page is based on the article Greek alphabet published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 19, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
