Cumae 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 Phoenician alphabet, with the exception of the letter Samekh, whose Greek counterpart Xi () was used only in a subgroup of Greek alphabets, and with the common addition of Upsilon () for the vowel . The local, so-called ''epichoric'', alphabets differed in many ways: in the use of the consonant symbols , and ; in the use of the innovative long vowel letters ( and ), in the absence or presence of Η in its original consonant function (); in the use or non-use of certain archaic letters ( = , = , = ); and in many details of the individual shapes of each letter. The system now familiar as the standard 24-letter Greek alphabet was originally the regional variant of the Ionian cities in Anatolia. It was officially adopted in Athens in 403 BC and in most of the rest of the Greek world by the middle of the 4th century BC.

Aspirate and consonant cluster symbols

A basic division into four major types of epichoric alphabets is commonly made according to their different treatment of additional consonant letters for the aspirated consonants () and consonant clusters () 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, ' 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, 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.

The "green" (southern) type uses no additional letters beyond the Phoenician set, and typically also goes without (). Thus, the aspirated plosives , are spelled either simply as and respectively, without a distinction from unaspirated , , or as digraphs , . (However, for the analogous there is already a dedicated letter, , taken from Phoenician.) Likewise, the clusters , are simply spelled , . This is the system found in Crete and in some other islands in the southern Aegean, notably Thera (Santorini), Melos and Anaphe.

The "red" (western) type also lacks Phoenician-derived for , but instead introduces a supplementary sign for that sound combination at the end of the alphabet, . In addition, the red alphabet also introduced letters for the aspirates, = and = . Note that the use of in the "red" set corresponds to the letter "X" in Latin, while it differs from the later standard Greek alphabet, where stands for , and stands for . Only for is common to all non-green alphabets. The red type is found in most parts of central mainland Greece (Thessaly, Boeotia and most of the Peloponnese), as well as the island of Euboea, and in colonies associated with these places, including most colonies in Italy.

*Upsilon is also derived from waw ().

The "light blue" type still lacks (), and adds only letters for () and (). Both of these correspond to the modern standard alphabet. The light blue system thus still has no separate letters for the clusters , . In this system, these are typically spelled and , respectively. This is the system found in Athens (before 403 BC) and several Aegean islands.

The "dark blue" type, finally, is the one that has all the consonant symbols of the modern standard alphabet: in addition to and (shared with the light blue type), it also adds (at the end of the alphabet), and (in the alphabetic position of Phoenician Samekh). This system is found in the cities of the Ionian dodecapolis, Knidos in Asia Minor, and in Corinth and Argos on the northeastern Peloponnese.

Eta and

The letter eta (, , originally called '' hēta'') had two different functions, both derived from the name of its Phoenician model, ''hēth'': the majority of Greek dialects continued to use it for the consonant , similar to its Phoenician value (). However, the consonant was progressively lost from the spoken language (a process known as psilosis), and in those dialects where this had already happened early on in the archaic period, was instead used to denote the long vowel , which occurred next in its name and was thus, in the -less dialects, its natural acrophonic value. Early psilotic dialects include eastern Ionic Greek, the Aeolic Greek of Lesbos, as well as the Doric Greek of Crete and Elis.

The distribution of vocalic and differs further between dialects, because the Greek language had a system of three distinct ''e''-like phonemes: the long open-mid (classical spelling ), the long close-mid (classical spelling ), and the short vowel (classical spelling ). In the psilotic dialects of Anatolia and adjacent eastern Aegean islands, as well as Crete, vocalic was used only for . In a number of Aegean islands, notably Rhodes, Milos, Santorini and Paros, it was used both for and for without distinction. In Knidos, a variant letter was invented to distinguish the two functions: was used for , and for . In south Italian colonies, especially Taranto, after c. 400 BC, a similar distinction was made between for , and for . This latter symbol was later turned into the diacritic sign for rough breathing by the Alexandrine grammarians.

In Naxos the system was slightly different: here, too, the same letter was used for and for a long vowel, but only in those cases where a long e-like sound had arisen through raising from older , not – as other users of vocalic eta did – also for the older inherited from proto-Greek. This probably means that while in the dialects of other eta users the old and new long ''e'' had already merged in a single phoneme, the raising sound in Naxos was still distinct both from and , hence probably an -like sound.

Yet another distinction was found in a group of cities in the north-east of the Peloponnese, most notably Corinth: here, it was not the open-mid that was distinguished among the three ''e''-sounds, but the closed-mid . The normal letter epsilon () was used exclusively for the latter, while a new special symbol (or, in Sicyon, ) stood both for short and for . Yet another variation of the system is found in neighbouring Tiryns: it uses the letter forms of the Corinthian system, versus E, but with the functional values of the classic eta versus epsilon system.

Archaic letters

Digamma (Wau)

The letter Digamma () for the sound /w/ was generally used only in those local scripts where the sound was still in use in the spoken dialect. During the archaic period, this includes most of mainland Greece (except Attica), as well as Euboea and Crete. In Athens and in Naxos it was apparently used only in the register of poetry. Elsewhere, i.e. in most of the Aegean islands and the East, the sound /w/ was already absent from the language.

The shape of the letter varies locally and over time. The most common early form is . Over time it developed in analogy with Epsilon (which changed from to "E"), becoming either the classical "F" or . Early Crete had an archaic form (which resembled its original model, the Y-shaped Phoenician waw ), or a variant with the stem bent sideways ().

San

Some local scripts used the M-shaped letter San instead of standard Sigma to denote the sound /s/. It is unclear whether the distinction between the two letters originally corresponded to different phonetic realizations of the /s/ phoneme in different dialects. Epigrapher Lilian Hamilton Jeffery (1915–1986) conjectured that San originally stood for a voiced sound, and that those Doric dialects that kept San instead of Sigma may have had such a pronunciation of /s/. Roger Woodard, professor of classics at the University at Buffalo, hypothesizes that San may originally have stood for s In any case, each dialect tended to use either San or Sigma to the exclusion of the other, and while the earliest abecedaria listed both letter shapes separately in their separate alphabetic positions, later specimens from the sixth century onwards tend to list only one of them. San was used in Argos until the end of the 6th century, in Sicyon until c. 500, in Corinth until the first half of the 5th century, and in Crete for some time longer. Sicyon kept the sign as a local emblem on its coins.

Koppa

The archaic letter Koppa or Qoppa (), used for the back allophone of /k/ before back vowels , u was originally common to most epichoric alphabets. It began to drop out of use from the middle of the 6th century BC. Some of the Doric regions, notably Corinth, Argos, Crete and Rhodes, kept it until the 5th century BC.

Innovative letters

A few letters have arisen from innovative letter distinctions, most of them for local alphabets.

Omega

The new letter Omega () to denote the long half-open sound was invented first in the East, in the Ionian cities of Asia Minor, at some time before 600 BC. It was created by breaking up the closed circle of the Omicron (), initially near the side. The letter was subsequently turned upright and the edges curled outwards (, , , ).

The Dorian city of Knidos as well as a few Aegean islands, namely Paros, Thasos and Melos, chose the exact opposite innovation, using a broken-up circle for the short and a closed circle for the long .

Sampi

Some Ionian cities used a special letter , alphabetically ordered behind , for a sibilant sound in positions where other dialects had either or (e.g. 'four', cf. normal spelling Ionic vs. Attic ). This symbol later dropped out of alphabetic use, but survived in the form of the numeral symbol sampi (modern ). As an alphabetic character, it has been attested in the cities of Miletus, Ephesos, Halikarnassos

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