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The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. [2] [3] It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, [4] and is the earliest known alphabetic script to have developed distinct letters for consonants as well as vowels. [5]
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.
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 sub-group of Greek alphabets, and with the common addition of Upsilon (Υ) for the vowel /u, ū/.
As Greece was occupied by the Ottoman Empire until the nineteenth century, early printers of (mostly ancient) Greek were mostly based in western Europe; few were Greek. This led to the adoption of writing conventions for Greek such as letter case influenced by printing and developments in the Latin alphabet.
It is believed that either the Dipylon inscription or the Nestor's Cup is the oldest known alphabetic Greek inscription. The Nestor Cup, which also bears a verse inscription, was found in an excavation at the ancient Greek colony of Pithekoussai, on the island of Ischia, in Italy. It is thought to be of equal age with the Dipylon inscription or ...
The cursive form ϑ was retained by Unicode as U+03D1 ϑ GREEK THETA SYMBOL, separate from U+03B8 θ GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA. (There is also U+03F4 ϴ GREEK CAPITAL THETA SYMBOL .) For the purpose of writing Greek text, the two can be font variants of a single character, but θ and ϑ are also used as distinct symbols in technical and ...
The phrase originates from the way deity figures appeared in ancient Greek theaters, held high up by a machine, to solve a problem in the plot. "Ἀπὸ τοῦ ἡλίου μετάστηθι" — Diogenes the Cynic — in a 1763 painting by Jacques Gamelin Ἀπὸ τοῦ ἡλίου μετάστηθι. Apò toû hēlíou metástēthi.
Koppa or qoppa (Ϙ, ϙ; as a modern numeral sign: ϟ) is a letter that was used in early forms of the Greek alphabet, derived from Phoenician qoph (𐤒).It was originally used to denote the /k/ sound, but dropped out of use as an alphabetic character and replaced by Kappa (Κ).