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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]
The only Greek rhotic /r/ is prototypically an alveolar tap , often retracted ([ɾ̠]). It may be an alveolar approximant intervocalically, and is usually a trill in clusters, with two or three short cycles. [8] Greek has palatals [c, ɟ, ç, ʝ] which are allophones of the velar consonants /k, ɡ, x, ɣ/ before the front vowels /e, i/.
[1] [2] The local, so-called epichoric, alphabets differed in many ways: in the use of the consonant symbols Χ, Φ and Ψ; in the use of the innovative long vowel letters (Ω and Η), in the absence or presence of Η in its original consonant function (/h/); in the use or non-use of certain archaic letters (Ϝ = /w/, Ϙ = /k/, Ϻ = /s/); and ...
Ancient Greek had long and short vowels; many diphthongs; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops; and a pitch accent. In Modern Greek, all vowels and consonants are short. Many vowels and diphthongs once pronounced distinctly are pronounced as /i/ .
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.
When alphabetic writing began, with the early Greek alphabet, the letter forms were similar but not identical to Phoenician, and vowels were added to the consonant-only Phoenician letters. There were also distinct variants of the writing system in different parts of Greece, primarily in how those Phoenician characters that did not have an exact ...
Xi (/ z aɪ / ZY or /(k) s aɪ / (K)SY; [1] [2] uppercase Ξ, lowercase ξ; Greek: ξι) is the fourteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the voiceless consonant cluster. Its name is pronounced in Modern Greek. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 60. Xi was derived from the Phoenician letter samekh.
However, Greek had an aspiration distinction that Phoenician lacked, and used ṭēth for the aspirated [tʰ]. The Phoenician consonants kaph and qōph represented sounds that were not distinctive in Greek—at most, they may have been identified with allophones determined by the following vowel.