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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 ...
It is possible that qoppa had been assigned to the Ancient Greek /kʷʰ/, and when that sound shifted to /pʰ/, the letter qoppa continued as the letter phi. [ 13 ] Phoenician had three letters, sāmekh , ṣādē and šin , representing three or probably four voiceless sibilant sounds, whereas Greek only required one.
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 (Ξ) was used only in a subgroup of Greek alphabets, and with the common addition of Upsilon (Υ) for the vowel /u, ū/.
This is a list of letters of the Greek alphabet. The definition of a Greek letter for this list is a character encoded in the Unicode standard that a has script property of "Greek" and the general category of "Letter". An overview of the distribution of Greek letters is given in Greek script in Unicode.
The orthography of the Greek language ultimately has its roots in the adoption of the Greek alphabet in the 9th century BC. Some time prior to that, one early form of Greek, 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.
The name digamma was used in ancient Greek and is the most common name for the letter in its alphabetic function today. It literally means "double gamma " and is descriptive of the original letter's shape, which looked like a Γ (gamma) placed on top of another.
The Chi Rho (☧, English pronunciation / ˈ k aɪ ˈ r oʊ /; also known as chrismon [1]) is one of the earliest forms of the Christogram, formed by superimposing the first two (capital) letters—chi and rho (ΧΡ)—of the Greek ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ (rom: Christos) in such a way that the vertical stroke of the rho intersects the center of the chi.
Alpha / ˈ æ l f ə / [1] (uppercase Α, lowercase α) [a] is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph, which is the West Semitic word for "ox". [2] Letters that arose from alpha include the Latin letter A and the Cyrillic letter А.