The Greek alphabet has been used to write the
Greek language
Greek ( el, label= Modern Greek, Ελληνικά, Elliniká, ; grc, Ἑλληνική, Hellēnikḗ) is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus, southern Italy ( Calabria and Salento), souther ...
since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier
Phoenician alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet is an alphabet (more specifically, an abjad) known in modern times from the Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region. The name comes from the Phoenician civilization.
The Phoenician al ...
, and was the earliest known
alphabetic script to have distinct letters for
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 BCE, the
Euclidean alphabet, with 24 letters, ordered from
alpha to
omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used for Greek writing today.
The
uppercase and lowercase forms of the 24 letters are:
: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , /ς, , , , , , .
The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of the
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
and
Cyrillic script
The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking c ...
s. Like Latin and Cyrillic, Greek originally had only a single form of each letter; it developed the
letter case distinction between uppercase and lowercase in parallel with Latin during the
modern era. Sound values and conventional transcriptions for some of the letters differ between
Ancient and
Modern Greek
Modern Greek (, , or , ''Kiní Neoellinikí Glóssa''), generally referred to by speakers simply as Greek (, ), refers collectively to the dialects of the Greek language spoken in the modern era, including the official standardized form of the ...
usage because the pronunciation of Greek has changed significantly between the 5th century BCE and today. Modern and Ancient Greek also use different
diacritics, with modern Greek keeping only the
stress accent (
acute
Acute may refer to:
Science and technology
* Acute angle
** Acute triangle
** Acute, a leaf shape in the glossary of leaf morphology
* Acute (medicine), a disease that it is of short duration and of recent onset.
** Acute toxicity, the adverse ef ...
) 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
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:
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 respectively. The Modern Greek consonant combinations and stand for and (or and ) respectively; stands for and stands for . In addition, both in Ancient and Modern Greek, the letter , before another
velar consonant
Velars are consonants place of articulation, articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth (known also as the Soft palate, velum).
Since the velar region of the roof of ...
, stands for the
velar nasal ; thus and are pronounced like English . In analogy to and , is also used to stand for . There are also the combinations and .
Diacritics
In the
polytonic orthography traditionally used for ancient Greek, the stressed vowel of each word carries one of three accent marks: either the
acute accent (), the
grave accent (), or the
circumflex accent ( or ). These signs were originally designed to mark different forms of the phonological
pitch accent
A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch ( linguistic tone) rather than by loudness ...
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 (ρ), although not a vowel, also carries rough breathing in a word-initial position. If a rho was geminated within a word, the first always had the smooth breathing and the second the rough breathing (ῤῥ) leading to the transliteration rrh.
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, (i.e. ), which became monophthongized during antiquity.
Another diacritic used in Greek is the
diaeresis (), indicating a
hiatus
Hiatus may refer to:
* Hiatus (anatomy), a natural fissure in a structure
* Hiatus (stratigraphy), a discontinuity in the age of strata in stratigraphy
*''Hiatus'', a genus of picture-winged flies with sole member species '' Hiatus fulvipes''
* G ...
.
This system of diacritics was first developed by the scholar
Aristophanes of Byzantium ( 257 – 185/180 BC), who worked at the
Musaeum in Alexandria during the third 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 (also known in this context as ''tonos'', i.e. simply "accent"), 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 (''ó,ti'', "whatever") from (''óti'', "that").
[Nicolas, Nick.]
Greek Unicode Issues: Punctuation
". 2005. Accessed 7 Oct 2014.
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 (or ) respectively; and and are simplified to and respectively. 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 respectively. 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
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ) is an international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. Membership requirements are given in A ...
(as
ISO 843),
by the
United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names, by the
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The libra ...
, and others.
History
Origins
During the
Mycenaean period, from around the sixteenth century to the twelfth century BC,
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 thirteenth century BC. In the late ninth century BC or early eighth century BC, the Greek alphabet emerged. The period between the use of the two writing systems, during which no Greek texts are attested, is known as the
Greek Dark Ages. The Greeks adopted the alphabet from the earlier
Phoenician alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet is an alphabet (more specifically, an abjad) known in modern times from the Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region. The name comes from the Phoenician civilization.
The Phoenician al ...
, one of the closely related scripts used for the
West Semitic languages, calling it Φοινικήια γράμματα 'Phoenician letters'. However, the Phoenician alphabet is limited to consonants. When it was adopted for writing Greek, certain consonants were adapted to express vowels. The use of both vowels and consonants makes Greek the first
alphabet
An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...
in the narrow sense, as distinguished from the
abjad
An abjad (, ar, أبجد; also abgad) is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with other alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vow ...
s 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 (''
yodh'') and (''
waw'') were used for
(Ι, ''
iota'') and
(Υ, ''
upsilon
Upsilon (, ; uppercase Υ, lowercase υ; el, ''ýpsilon'' ) or ypsilon is the 20th letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, grc, Υʹ, label=none has a value of 400. It is derived from the Phoenician waw .
E ...
'') respectively; the
glottal stop consonant (''
aleph'') was used for
(Α, ''
alpha''); the
pharyngeal (''
ʿayin'') was turned into
(Ο, ''
omicron
Omicron (; uppercase Ο, lowercase ο, ell, όμικρον) is the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet. This letter is derived from the Phoenician letter ayin: . In classical Greek, omicron represented the close-mid back rounded vowel in contr ...
''); and the letter for (''
he'') was turned into
(Ε, ''
epsilon''). A doublet of waw was also borrowed as a consonant for
(Ϝ,
digamma
Digamma or wau (uppercase: Ϝ, lowercase: ϝ, numeral: ϛ) is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It originally stood for the sound but it has remained in use principally as a Greek numeral for 6. Whereas it was originally called ''wa ...
). In addition, the Phoenician letter for the emphatic glottal (''
heth'') was borrowed in two different functions by different dialects of Greek: as a letter for /h/ (Η,
heta) by those dialects that had such a sound, and as an additional vowel letter for the long (Η,
eta
Eta (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἦτα ''ē̂ta'' or ell, ήτα ''ita'' ) is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the close front unrounded vowel . Originally denoting the voiceless glottal fricative in most dialects, ...
) by those dialects that lacked the consonant. Eventually, a seventh vowel letter for the long (Ω,
omega) was introduced.
Greek also introduced three new consonant letters for its aspirated plosive sounds and consonant clusters: Φ (''
phi'') for , Χ (''
chi'') for and Ψ (''
psi'') 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 (''
san''), which had been in competition with Σ (''
sigma'') denoting the same phoneme /s/; the letter Ϙ (''
qoppa''), which was redundant with Κ (''
kappa'') for /k/, and Ϝ (''
digamma
Digamma or wau (uppercase: Ϝ, lowercase: ϝ, numeral: ϛ) is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It originally stood for the sound but it has remained in use principally as a Greek numeral for 6. Whereas it was originally called ''wa ...
''), 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 (called ''
boustrophedon
Boustrophedon is a style of writing in which alternate lines of writing are reversed, with letters also written in reverse, mirror-style. This is in contrast to modern European languages, where lines always begin on the same side, usually the le ...
'', literally "ox-turning", after the manner of an ox ploughing a field) 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.
Archaic variants
There were initially numerous
local (epichoric) variants of the Greek alphabet, which differed in the use and non-use of the additional vowel and consonant symbols and several other features. Epichoric alphabets are commonly divided into four major types according to their different treatments of additional consonant letters for the aspirated consonants (/pʰ, kʰ/) and consonant clusters (/ks, ps/) of Greek. These four types are often conventionally labelled as "green", "red", "light blue" and "dark blue" types, based on a colour-coded map in a seminal 19th-century work on the topic, ''Studien zur Geschichte des griechischen Alphabets'' by
Adolf Kirchhoff (1867).
The "green" (or southern) type is the most archaic and closest to the Phoenician. The "red" (or western) type is the one that was later transmitted to the West and became the ancestor of the
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...
, and bears some crucial features characteristic of that later development. The "blue" (or eastern) type is the one from which the later standard Greek alphabet emerged.
Athens
Athens ( ; el, Αθήνα, Athína ; grc, Ἀθῆναι, Athênai (pl.) ) is both the capital and largest city of Greece. With a population close to four million, it is also the seventh largest city in the European Union. Athens dominates a ...
used a local form of the "light blue" alphabet type until the end of the fifth century BC, which lacked the letters Ξ and Ψ as well as the vowel symbols Η and Ω. In the Old Attic alphabet, stood for and for . was used for all three sounds (correspondinɡ to classical respectively), and was used for all of (corresponding to classical respectively). The letter (heta) was used for the consonant . Some variant local letter forms were also characteristic of Athenian writing, some of which were shared with the neighboring (but otherwise "red") alphabet of
Euboia: a form of that resembled a Latin ''L'' () and a form of that resembled a Latin ''S'' ().
*Upsilon is also derived from
waw (
).
The classical twenty-four-letter alphabet that is now used to represent the Greek language was originally the local alphabet of
Ionia. By the late fifth century BC, it was commonly used by many Athenians. In 403 BC, at the suggestion of the
archon Eucleides, the Athenian Assembly formally abandoned the Old Attic alphabet and adopted the Ionian alphabet as part of the democratic reforms after the
overthrow of the
Thirty Tyrants. Because of Eucleides's role in suggesting the idea to adopt the Ionian alphabet, the standard twenty-four-letter Greek alphabet is sometimes known as the "Eucleidean alphabet". Roughly thirty years later, the Eucleidean alphabet was adopted in Boeotia and it may have been adopted a few years previously in
Macedonia. By the end of the fourth century BC, it had displaced local alphabets across the Greek-speaking world to become the standard form of the Greek alphabet.
Letter names
When the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet, they took over not only the letter shapes and sound values but also the names by which the sequence of the alphabet could be recited and memorized. In Phoenician, each letter name was a word that began with the sound represented by that letter; thus ''
ʾaleph'', the word for "ox", was used as the name for the glottal stop , ''
bet
Black Entertainment Television (acronym BET) is an American basic cable channel targeting African-American audiences. It is owned by the CBS Entertainment Group unit of Paramount Global via BET Networks and has offices in New York City, Los ...
'', or "house", for the sound, and so on. When the letters were adopted by the Greeks, most of the Phoenician names were maintained or modified slightly to fit Greek phonology; thus, ''ʾaleph, bet, gimel'' became ''alpha, beta, gamma''.
The Greek names of the following letters are more or less straightforward continuations of their Phoenician antecedents. Between Ancient and Modern Greek, they have remained largely unchanged, except that their pronunciation has followed regular sound changes along with other words (for instance, in the name of ''beta'', ancient /b/ regularly changed to modern /v/, and ancient /ɛː/ to modern /i/, resulting in the modern pronunciation ''vita''). The name of lambda is attested in early sources as besides ;
in Modern Greek the spelling is often , reflecting pronunciation.
Similarly, iota is sometimes spelled in Modern Greek ( is conventionally transcribed word-initially and
intervocalically before
back vowels and ). In the tables below, the Greek names of all letters are given in their traditional polytonic spelling; in modern practice, like with all other words, they are usually spelled in the simplified monotonic system.
In the cases of the three historical sibilant letters below, the correspondence between Phoenician and Ancient Greek is less clear, with apparent mismatches both in letter names and sound values. The early history of these letters (and the fourth sibilant letter, obsolete
san) has been a matter of some debate. Here too, the changes in the pronunciation of the letter names between Ancient and Modern Greek are regular.
In the following group of consonant letters, the older forms of the names in Ancient Greek were spelled with , indicating an original pronunciation with ''-ē''. In Modern Greek these names are spelled with .
The following group of vowel letters were originally called simply by their sound values as long vowels: ē, ō, ū, and . Their modern names contain adjectival qualifiers that were added during the Byzantine period, to distinguish between letters that had become confusable.
Thus, the letters and , pronounced identically by this time, were called ''o mikron'' ("small o") and ''o mega'' ("big o") respectively.
The letter was called ''e psilon'' ("plain e") to distinguish it from the identically pronounced digraph , while, similarly, , which at this time was pronounced , was called ''y psilon'' ("plain y") to distinguish it from the identically pronounced digraph .
Some dialects of the Aegean and
Cypriot have retained
long consonants and pronounce and ; also, has come to be pronounced in Cypriot.
Letter shapes
Like Latin and other alphabetic scripts, Greek originally had only a single form of each letter, without a distinction between uppercase and lowercase. This distinction is an innovation of the modern era, drawing on different lines of development of the letter shapes in earlier handwriting.
The oldest forms of the letters in antiquity are
majuscule forms. Besides the upright, straight inscriptional forms (capitals) found in stone carvings or incised pottery, more fluent writing styles adapted for handwriting on soft materials were also developed during antiquity. Such handwriting has been preserved especially from
papyrus
Papyrus ( ) is a material similar to thick paper that was used in ancient times as a writing surface. It was made from the pith of the papyrus plant, '' Cyperus papyrus'', a wetland sedge. ''Papyrus'' (plural: ''papyri'') can also refer to ...
manuscripts in
Egypt
Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning the North Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via a land bridg ...
since the
Hellenistic period
In Classical antiquity, the Hellenistic period covers the time in Mediterranean history after Classical Greece, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the emergence of the Roman Empire, as signified by the Battle of Actium in ...
. Ancient handwriting developed two distinct styles:
uncial writing, with carefully drawn, rounded block letters of about equal size, used as a
book hand for carefully produced literary and religious manuscripts, and
cursive writing, used for everyday purposes.
The cursive forms approached the style of lowercase letter forms, with
ascenders and descenders, as well as many connecting lines and ligatures between letters.
In the ninth and tenth century, uncial book hands were replaced with a new, more compact writing style, with letter forms partly adapted from the earlier cursive.
This
minuscule style remained the dominant form of handwritten Greek into the modern era. During the
Renaissance
The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass ide ...
, western printers adopted the minuscule letter forms as lowercase printed typefaces, while modeling uppercase letters on the ancient inscriptional forms. The orthographic practice of using the letter case distinction for marking proper names, titles, etc. developed in parallel to the practice in Latin and other western languages.
Derived alphabets
The Greek alphabet was the model for various others:
* The
Etruscan alphabet
The Etruscan alphabet was the alphabet used by the Etruscans, an ancient civilization of central and northern Italy, to write their language, from about 700 BC to sometime around 100 AD.
The Etruscan alphabet derives from the Euboean alphab ...
;
* The
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...
, together with various other
ancient scripts in Italy, adopted from an archaic form of the Greek alphabet brought to Italy by Greek colonists in the late 8th century BC, via
Etruscan;
* The
Gothic alphabet, devised in the 4th century AD to write the
Gothic language
Gothic is an extinct East Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. It is known primarily from the '' Codex Argenteus'', a 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizeable te ...
, based on a combination of Greek and Latin uncial models;
* The
Glagolitic alphabet, devised in the 9th century AD for writing
Old Church Slavonic;
* The
Cyrillic script
The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking c ...
, which replaced the Glagolitic alphabet shortly afterwards.
* The
Coptic Alphabet used for writing the
Coptic language.
The
Armenian and
Georgian alphabets are almost certainly modeled on the Greek alphabet, but their graphic forms are quite different.
Other uses
Use for other languages
Apart from the daughter alphabets listed above, which were adapted from Greek but developed into separate writing systems, the Greek alphabet has also been adopted at various times and in various places to write other languages. For some of them, additional letters were introduced.
Antiquity
* Most of the
Iron Age
The Iron Age is the final epoch of the three-age division of the prehistory and protohistory of humanity. It was preceded by the Stone Age ( Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic) and the Bronze Age ( Chalcolithic). The concept has been mostly ...
alphabets of Asia Minor were also adopted around the same time, as the early Greek alphabet was adopted from the
Phoenician Alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet is an alphabet (more specifically, an abjad) known in modern times from the Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region. The name comes from the Phoenician civilization.
The Phoenician al ...
. The Lydian and Carian alphabets are generally believed to derive from the Greek alphabet, although it is not clear which variant is the direct ancestor. While some of these alphabets such as
Phrygian had slight differences from the Greek counterpart, some like
Carian alphabet had mostly different values and several other characters inherited from pre-Greek local scripts. They were in use c. 800–300 BC until all the
Anatolian languages were extinct due to
Hellenization.
* The original
Old Italic alphabets was the early Greek alphabet with only slight modifications.
* It was used in some
Paleo-Balkan languages, including
Thracian. For other neighboring languages or dialects, such as
Ancient Macedonian, isolated words are preserved in Greek texts, but no continuous texts are preserved.
* The
Greco-Iberian alphabet was used for writing the ancient
Iberian language in parts of modern Spain.
*
Gaulish inscriptions (in modern France) used the Greek alphabet until the Roman conquest
* The
Hebrew and
Aramaic
The Aramaic languages, short Aramaic ( syc, ܐܪܡܝܐ, Arāmāyā; oar, 𐤀𐤓𐤌𐤉𐤀; arc, 𐡀𐡓𐡌𐡉𐡀; tmr, אֲרָמִית), are a language family containing many varieties (languages and dialects) that originated i ...
text of the
Bible
The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity
Christianity is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus ...
was written in Greek letters in
Origen's
Hexapla.
* The
Bactrian language, an
Iranian language
The Iranian languages or Iranic languages are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family that are spoken natively by the Iranian peoples, predominantly in the Iranian Plateau.
The Iranian languages are groupe ...
spoken in what is now
Afghanistan
Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,; prs, امارت اسلامی افغانستان is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. Referred to as the Heart of Asia, it is borde ...
, was written in the Greek alphabet during the
Kushan Empire (65–250 AD). It adds an extra letter for the ''sh'' sound .
* The
Coptic alphabet adds eight letters derived from
Demotic. It is still used today, mostly in Egypt, to write
Coptic, the liturgical language of Egyptian Christians. Letters usually retain an
uncial form different from the forms used for Greek today. The alphabet of
Old Nubian is an adaptation of Coptic.
Middle Ages
* An 8th-century
Arabic
Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...
fragment preserves a text in the Greek alphabet, as does a 9th or 10th century psalm translation fragment.
* An
Old Ossetic
The Scythian languages are a group of Eastern Iranian languages of the classical and late antique period (the Middle Iranian period), spoken in a vast region of Eurasia by the populations belonging to the Scythian cultures and their descendan ...
inscription of the 10th–12th centuries found in
Arxyz, the oldest known attestation of an Ossetic language.
* The
Old Nubian language of
Makuria (modern Sudan) adds three Coptic letters, two letters derived from
Meroitic script, and a digraph of two Greek gammas used for the
velar nasal sound.
* Various
South Slavic dialects, similar to the modern
Bulgarian and
Macedonian language
Macedonian (; , , ) is an Eastern South Slavic language. It is part of the Indo-European language family, and is one of the Slavic languages, which are part of a larger Balto-Slavic branch. Spoken as a first language by around two million ...
s, have been written in Greek script. The modern South Slavic languages now use modified
Cyrillic alphabets
Numerous Cyrillic alphabets are based on the Cyrillic script. The early Cyrillic alphabet was developed in the 9th century AD and replaced the earlier Glagolitic script developed by the Byzantine theologians Cyril and Methodius. It is the b ...
.
Early modern
*
Turkish spoken by
Orthodox Christians (''
Karamanlides
The Karamanlides ( el, Καραμανλήδες; tr, Karamanlılar), also known as Karamanli Greeks or simply Karamanlis, are a traditionally Turkish-speaking Greek Orthodox people native to the Karaman and Cappadocia regions of Anatolia.
Th ...
'') was often written in Greek script, and called ''
Karamanlidika''.
*
Tosk Albanian was often written using the Greek alphabet, starting in about 1500. The printing press at
Moschopolis published several Albanian texts in Greek script during the 18th century. It was only in 1908 that the
Monastir conference standardized a
Latin orthography
Latin phonology continually evolved over the centuries, making it difficult for speakers in one era to know how Latin was spoken before then. A given phoneme may be represented by different letters in different periods. This article deals primar ...
for both Tosk and
Gheg. Greek spelling is still occasionally used for the local Albanian dialects (
Arvanitika) in Greece.
*
Gagauz, a
Turkic language of the northeast Balkans spoken by Orthodox Christians, was apparently written in Greek characters in the late 19th century. In 1957, it was standardized on Cyrillic, and in 1996, a
Gagauz alphabet based on Latin characters was adopted (derived from the
Turkish alphabet
The Turkish alphabet ( tr, ) is a Latin-script alphabet used for writing the Turkish language, consisting of 29 letters, seven of which ( Ç, Ğ, I, İ, Ö, Ş and Ü) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requir ...
).
*
Surguch, a
Turkic language, was spoken by a small group of
Orthodox Christians in northern Greece. It is now written in Latin or Cyrillic characters.
*
Urum or Greek Tatar, spoken by Orthodox Christians, used the Greek alphabet.
*
Judaeo-Spanish or Ladino, a Jewish dialect of Spanish, has occasionally been published in Greek characters in Greece.
* The Italian humanist
Giovan Giorgio Trissino tried to add some Greek letters (Ɛ ε, Ꞷ ω) to
Italian orthography in 1524.
In mathematics and science
Greek symbols are used as symbols in
mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
,
physics
Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which ...
and other
science
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence ...
s. Many symbols have traditional uses, such as lower case epsilon (ε) for
an arbitrarily small positive number, lower case pi (π) for the
ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, capital sigma (Σ) for
summation, and lower case sigma (σ) for
standard deviation. Formerly, the Greek letters were used for
naming North Atlantic hurricanes if the normal list ran out. This happened only in the
2005 and
2020 hurricane seasons for a total of 15 storms, the last one being
Hurricane Iota. In May 2021 the
World Health Organisations announced that the
variants of SARS-CoV-2 of the virus would be named using letters of the Greek alphabet to avoid stigma and simplify communications for non-scientific audiences.
Astronomy
Greek letters are used to denote the brighter stars within each of the eighty-eight
constellations. In most constellations, the brightest star is designated Alpha and the next brightest Beta etc. For example, the brightest star in the constellation of
Centaurus is known as
Alpha Centauri. For historical reasons, the Greek designations of some constellations begin with a lower ranked letter.
International Phonetic Alphabet
Several Greek letters are used as phonetic symbols in the
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...
(IPA). Several of them denote fricative consonants; the rest stand for variants of vowel sounds. The glyph shapes used for these letters in specialized phonetic fonts is sometimes slightly different from the conventional shapes in Greek typography proper, with glyphs typically being more upright and using
serifs, to make them conform more with the typographical character of other, Latin-based letters in the phonetic alphabet. Nevertheless, in the Unicode encoding standard, the following three phonetic symbols are considered the same characters as the corresponding Greek letters proper:
[For chi and beta, separate codepoints for use in a Latin-script environment were added in Unicode versions 7.0 (2014) and 8.0 (2015) respectively: U+AB53 "Latin small letter chi" (ꭓ) and U+A7B5 "Latin small letter beta" (ꞵ). As of 2017, the International Phonetic Association still lists the original Greek codepoints as the standard representations of the IPA symbols in questio]
On the other hand, the following phonetic letters have Unicode representations separate from their Greek alphabetic use, either because their conventional typographic shape is too different from the original, or because they also have secondary uses as regular alphabetic characters in some Latin-based alphabets, including separate Latin uppercase letters distinct from the Greek ones.
The symbol in
Americanist phonetic notation for the
voiceless alveolar lateral fricative is the Greek letter lambda , but in the IPA. The IPA symbol for the
palatal lateral approximant is , which looks similar to lambda, but is actually an inverted lowercase ''y''.
Use as numerals
Greek letters were also used to write numbers. In the classical Ionian system, the first nine letters of the alphabet stood for the numbers from 1 to 9, the next nine letters stood for the multiples of 10, from 10 to 90, and the next nine letters stood for the multiples of 100, from 100 to 900. For this purpose, in addition to the 24 letters which by that time made up the standard alphabet, three otherwise obsolete letters were retained or revived:
digamma
Digamma or wau (uppercase: Ϝ, lowercase: ϝ, numeral: ϛ) is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It originally stood for the sound but it has remained in use principally as a Greek numeral for 6. Whereas it was originally called ''wa ...
for 6,
koppa for 90, and a rare Ionian letter for
s today called
sampi , for 900. This system has remained in use in Greek up to the present day, although today it is only employed for limited purposes such as enumerating chapters in a book, similar to the way Roman numerals are used in English. The three extra symbols are today written as , and respectively. To mark a letter as a numeral sign, a small stroke called ''
keraia'' is added to the right of it.
Use by student fraternities and sororities
In North America, many college
fraternities and sororities
Fraternities and sororities are social organizations at colleges and universities in North America.
Generally, membership in a fraternity or sorority is obtained as an undergraduate student, but continues thereafter for life. Some accept grad ...
are named with combinations of Greek letters, and are hence also known as "Greek letter organizations". This naming tradition was initiated by the foundation of the
Phi Beta Kappa Society at the
College of William and Mary
The College of William & Mary (officially The College of William and Mary in Virginia, abbreviated as William & Mary, W&M) is a public research university in Williamsburg, Virginia. Founded in 1693 by letters patent issued by King William ...
in 1776. The name of this fraternal organization is an acronym for the ancient Greek phrase Φιλοσοφία Βίου Κυβερνήτης (''Philosophia Biou Kybernētēs''), which means "Love of wisdom, the guide of life" and serves as the organization's motto. Sometimes early fraternal organizations were known by their Greek letter names because the mottos that these names stood for were secret and revealed only to members of the fraternity.
Different chapters within the same fraternity are almost always (with a handful of exceptions) designated using Greek letters as serial numbers. The founding chapter of each respective organization is its A chapter. As an organization expands, it establishes a B chapter, a Γ chapter, and so on and so forth. In an organization that expands to more than 24 chapters, the chapter after Ω chapter is AA chapter, followed by AB chapter, etc. Each of these is still a "chapter Letter", albeit a double-digit letter just as 10 through 99 are double-digit numbers. The
Roman alphabet has a similar extended form with such double-digit letters when necessary, but it is used for columns in a table or chart rather than chapters of an organization.
Glyph variants
Some letters can occur in variant shapes, mostly inherited from medieval
minuscule handwriting. While their use in normal typography of Greek is purely a matter of font styles, some such variants have been given separate encodings in
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...
.
* The symbol ("curled beta") is a cursive variant form of
beta (β). In the French tradition of Ancient Greek typography, β is used word-initially, and is used word-internally.
* The letter
delta has a form resembling a cursive capital letter D; while not encoded as its own form, this form is included as part of the symbol for the
drachma (a Δρ digraph) in the
Currency Symbols block, at U+20AF (₯).
* The letter
epsilon can occur in two equally frequent stylistic variants, either shaped
('lunate epsilon', like a semicircle with a stroke) or
(similar to a reversed number 3). The symbol ϵ (U+03F5) is designated specifically for the lunate form, used as a technical symbol.
* The symbol ("script theta") is a cursive form of
theta
Theta (, ; uppercase: Θ or ; lowercase: θ or ; grc, ''thē̂ta'' ; Modern: ''thī́ta'' ) is the eighth letter of the Greek alphabet, derived from the Phoenician letter Teth . In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 9.
G ...
(θ), frequent in handwriting, and used with a specialized meaning as a technical symbol.
* The symbol ("kappa symbol") is a cursive form of
kappa (κ), used as a technical symbol.
* The symbol ("variant pi") is an archaic script form of
pi (π), also used as a technical symbol.
* The letter
rho
Rho (uppercase Ρ, lowercase ρ or ; el, ρο or el, ρω, label=none) is the 17th letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 100. It is derived from Phoenician letter res . Its uppercase form uses the sa ...
(ρ) can occur in different stylistic variants, with the descending tail either going straight down or curled to the right. The symbol (U+03F1) is designated specifically for the curled form, used as a technical symbol.
* The letter
sigma, in standard orthography, has two variants: ς, used only at the ends of words, and σ, used elsewhere. The form ("
lunate sigma", resembling a Latin ''
c'') is a medieval stylistic variant that can be used in both environments without the final/non-final distinction.
* The capital letter
upsilon
Upsilon (, ; uppercase Υ, lowercase υ; el, ''ýpsilon'' ) or ypsilon is the 20th letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, grc, Υʹ, label=none has a value of 400. It is derived from the Phoenician waw .
E ...
(Υ) can occur in different stylistic variants, with the upper strokes either straight like a Latin ''Y'', or slightly curled. The symbol ϒ (U+03D2) is designated specifically for the curled form (
), used as a technical symbol, e.g. in physics.
* The letter
phi can occur in two equally frequent stylistic variants, either shaped as
(a circle with a vertical stroke through it) or as
(a curled shape open at the top). The symbol (U+03D5) is designated specifically for the closed form, used as a technical symbol.
* The letter
omega has at least three stylistic variants of its capital form. The standard is the "open omega" (Ω), resembling an open partial circle with the opening downward and the ends curled outward. The two other stylistic variants are seen more often in modern typography, resembling a raised and underscored circle (roughly
o̲), where the underscore may or may not be touching the circle on a tangent (in the former case it resembles a superscript omicron similar to that found in the
numero sign or masculine
ordinal indicator; in the latter, it closely resembles some forms of the Latin letter Q). The open omega is always used in symbolic settings and is encoded in
Letterlike Symbols (U+2126) as a separate code point for backward compatibility.
Computer encodings
For computer usage, a variety of encodings have been used for Greek online, many of them documented in .
The two principal ones still used today are
ISO/IEC 8859-7
ISO/IEC 8859-7:2003, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 7: Latin/Greek alphabet'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1987. I ...
and
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...
. ISO 8859-7 supports only the monotonic orthography; Unicode supports both the monotonic and polytonic orthographies.
ISO/IEC 8859-7
For the range A0–FF (hex), it follows the Unicode range 370–3CF (see below) except that some symbols, like ©, ½, § etc. are used where Unicode has unused locations. Like all ISO-8859 encodings, it is equal to ASCII for 00–7F (hex).
Greek in Unicode
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...
supports
polytonic orthography well enough for ordinary continuous text in modern and ancient Greek, and even many archaic forms for
epigraphy. With the use of
combining characters, Unicode also supports Greek
philology and
dialectology and various other specialized requirements. Most current text rendering engines do not render diacritics well, so, though alpha with
macron and
acute
Acute may refer to:
Science and technology
* Acute angle
** Acute triangle
** Acute, a leaf shape in the glossary of leaf morphology
* Acute (medicine), a disease that it is of short duration and of recent onset.
** Acute toxicity, the adverse ef ...
can be ''represented'' as U+03B1 U+0304 U+0301, this rarely renders well: .
There are two main blocks of Greek characters in
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...
. The first is "Greek and Coptic" (U+0370 to U+03FF). This block is based on
ISO 8859-7 and is sufficient to write Modern Greek. There are also some archaic letters and Greek-based technical symbols.
This block also supports the
Coptic alphabet. Formerly, most Coptic letters shared codepoints with similar-looking Greek letters; but in many scholarly works, both scripts occur, with quite different letter shapes, so as of Unicode 4.1, Coptic and Greek were disunified. Those Coptic letters with no Greek equivalents still remain in this block (U+03E2 to U+03EF).
To write polytonic Greek, one may use
combining diacritical marks or the precomposed characters in the "Greek Extended" block (U+1F00 to U+1FFF).
Combining and letter-free diacritics
Combining and spacing (letter-free)
diacritical marks pertaining to
Greek language
Greek ( el, label= Modern Greek, Ελληνικά, Elliniká, ; grc, Ἑλληνική, Hellēnikḗ) is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus, southern Italy ( Calabria and Salento), souther ...
:
Encodings with a subset of the Greek alphabet
IBM code pages
437
__NOTOC__
Year 437 ( CDXXXVII) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Aetius and Sigisvultus (or, less frequently, year 1190 ...
,
860,
861,
862
__NOTOC__
Year 862 ( DCCCLXII) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar.
Events
By place
Europe
* The Varangians (called Rus'), under the leadership of Rurik, a Viking chiefta ...
,
863, and
865
__NOTOC__
Year 865 ( DCCCLXV) was a common year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar.
Events
By place Europe
* King Louis the German divides the East Frankish Kingdom among his three sons. C ...
contain the letters ΓΘΣΦΩαδεπστφ (plus β as an alternative interpretation for
ß).
See also
*
Greek Font Society
*
Greek ligatures
Greek ligatures are graphic combinations of the letters of the Greek alphabet that were used in medieval handwritten Greek and in early printing. Ligatures were used in the cursive writing style and very extensively in later minuscule writing. ...
*
Palamedes
*Romanization of Greek
Notes
References
Bibliography
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
* [Greek translation of ''Greek: a history of the language and its speakers'', London 1997]
*
*
*
*
*
*
* – selections from the Gospels in Macedonian.
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
External links
Greek and Copticcharacter list in Unicode
Unicode collation charts��including Greek and Coptic letters, sorted by shape
Examples of Greek handwriting*
(Alan Wood)
a browser-based tool
* Collection of free fonts
{{Authority control
Greek alphabet,
Greek letters,