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Acute Accent
The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Latin, Cyrillic script, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabet, Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed characters are available. Uses History An early precursor of the acute accent was the Apex (diacritic), apex, used in Latin language, Latin inscriptions to mark vowel length, long vowels. The acute accent was first used in French in 1530 by Geoffroy Tory, the royal printer. Pitch Ancient Greek The acute accent was first used in the Greek diacritics, polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, where it indicated a syllable with a high pitch accent, pitch. In Modern Greek, a stress (linguistics), stress accent has replaced the pitch accent, and the acute marks the stressed syllable of a word. The Greek name of the accented syllable was and is (''oxeîa'', Modern Greek ''oxía'') "sharp" or "h ...
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Modern Greek
Modern Greek (, or , ), 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 language sometimes referred to as Varieties of Modern Greek#Standard Modern Greek, Standard Modern Greek. The end of the Medieval Greek period and the beginning of Modern Greek is often symbolically assigned to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, even though that date marks no clear linguistic boundary and many characteristic features of the modern language arose centuries earlier, having begun around the fourth century AD. During most of the Modern Greek period, the language existed in a situation of diglossia, with regional spoken dialects existing side by side with learned, more archaic written forms, as with the vernacular and learned varieties (''Dimotiki'' and ''Katharevousa'') that co-existed in Greece throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Variet ...
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Greek Orthography
The orthography of the Modern Greek, modern Greek language was standardised in 1976 and simplified the diacritics in 1982. There are relatively few differences between the orthography of Ancient Greek and Modern Greek. Some time prior to that, one early form of Greek, Mycenaean language, 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. Early Greek writing in the Greek alphabet was Phonemic orthography, phonemic, different in each Ancient Greek dialects, dialect. Since the adoption of the Ionic Greek, Ionic variant for Attic Greek, Attic in 403 BC, however, Greek orthography has been largely conservative and historical. Given the History of Greek, phonetic development of Greek, especially in the Koine Greek, Hellenistic period, certain modern vowel phonemes have multiple orthographic realizations: * can be spelled η, ι, υ ...
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Diphthong
A diphthong ( ), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech apparatus) moves during the pronunciation of the vowel. In most varieties of English, the phrase "no highway cowboys" ( ) has five distinct diphthongs, one in every syllable. Diphthongs contrast with monophthongs, where the tongue or other speech organs do not move and the syllable contains only a single vowel sound. For instance, in English, the word ''ah'' is spoken as a monophthong (), while the word ''ow'' is spoken as a diphthong in most varieties (). Where two adjacent vowel sounds occur in different syllables (e.g. in the English word ''re-elect'') the result is described as hiatus, not as a diphthong. Diphthongs often form when separate vowels are run together in rapid speech during a conversation. However, there ...
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Rough Breathing
In the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, the rough breathing ( or ; ) character is a diacritical mark used to indicate the presence of an sound before a vowel, diphthong, or after rho. It remained in the polytonic orthography even after the Hellenistic period, when the sound disappeared from the Greek language. In the monotonic orthography of Modern Greek phonology, in use since 1982, it is not used at all. The absence of an sound is marked by the smooth breathing. The character, or those with similar shape such as , have also been used for a similar sound by Thomas Wade (and others) in the Wade–Giles system of romanization for Mandarin Chinese. Herbert Giles and others have used a left (opening) curved single quotation mark for the same purpose; the apostrophe, backtick, and visually similar characters are often seen as well. History The rough breathing comes from the left-hand half of the letter H. In some archaic Greek alphabets, the letter was used ...
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Attic Greek
Attic Greek is the Greek language, Greek dialect of the regions of ancient Greece, ancient region of Attica, including the ''polis'' of classical Athens, Athens. Often called Classical Greek, it was the prestige (sociolinguistics), prestige dialect of the Hellenistic period, Greek world for centuries and remains the standard form of the language that is taught to students of Ancient Greek. As the basis of the Hellenistic Koine Greek, Koine, it is the most similar of the ancient Greek dialects, ancient dialects to later Greek. Attic is traditionally classified as a member or sister dialect of the Ionic Greek, Ionic branch. Origin and range Greek language, Greek is the primary member of the Hellenic languages, Hellenic branch of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family. In ancient times, Greek had already come to exist in several dialects, one of which was Attic. The earliest Attested language, attestations of Greek, dating from the 16th to 11th centuries BC, are ...
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Koine Greek
Koine Greek (, ), also variously known as Hellenistic Greek, common Attic, the Alexandrian dialect, Biblical Greek, Septuagint Greek or New Testament Greek, was the koiné language, common supra-regional form of Greek language, Greek spoken and written during the Hellenistic period, the Roman Empire and the early Byzantine Empire. It evolved from the spread of Greek following the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, and served as the lingua franca of much of the Mediterranean region and the Middle East during the following centuries . It was based mainly on Attic Greek, Attic and related Ionic Greek, Ionic speech forms, with various admixtures brought about through dialect levelling with other varieties. Koine Greek included styles ranging from conservative literary forms to the spoken vernaculars of the time. As the dominant language of the Byzantine Empire, it developed further into Medieval Greek, which then turned into Modern Greek. Literary Koine was ...
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Ionic Greek
Ionic or Ionian Greek () was a subdialect of the Eastern or Attic–Ionic dialect group of Ancient Greek. The Ionic group traditionally comprises three dialectal varieties that were spoken in Euboea (West Ionic), the northern Cyclades (Central Ionic), and from BC onward in Asiatic Ionia (East Ionic), where Ionian colonists from Athens founded their cities. Ionic was the base of several literary language forms of the Archaic and Classical periods, both in poetry and prose. The works of Homer and Hesiod are among the most popular poetic works that were written in a literary form of the Ionic dialect, known as Epic or Homeric Greek. The oldest Greek prose, including that of Heraclitus, Herodotus, Democritus, and Hippocrates, was also written in Ionic. By the end of the 5th century BC, Ionic was supplanted by Attic, which had become the dominant dialect of the Greek world. History The Ionic dialect appears to have originally spread from the Greek mainland across the A ...
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Letter Case
Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (more formally '' minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing systems that distinguish between the upper- and lowercase have two parallel sets of letters: each in the majuscule set has a counterpart in the minuscule set. Some counterpart letters have the same shape, and differ only in size (e.g. ), but for others the shapes are different (e.g., ). The two case variants are alternative representations of the same letter: they have the same name and pronunciation and are typically treated identically when sorting in alphabetical order. Letter case is generally applied in a mixed-case fashion, with both upper and lowercase letters appearing in a given piece of text for legibility. The choice of case is often denoted by the grammar of a language or by the conventions of a particular discipline. In ortho ...
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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 Greece, Archaic and early Classical Greece, Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in Archaic Greek alphabets, many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BC, the Ionia, 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 letter case, uppercase and lowercase forms of the 24 letters are: : , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of several scripts, such as the Latin script, Latin, Gothic alphabet, Gothic, Coptic script, Coptic, and Cyrillic scripts. Throughout antiquity, Greek had only a single uppercas ...
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