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The name of the letter was originally just "υ" (y; also called hy, hence "hyoid", meaning "shaped like the letter υ"), but the name changed to "υ ψιλόν" u psilon 'plain υ' to distinguish it from οι, which had come to have the same [y] pronunciation.
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 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 vowels as well as consonants. [5]
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/.
Shapes of horseshoe as designed for the African reference alphabet, clearly based on a serifed shape of the Latin capital U.. The letter Ʊ (minuscule: ʊ), called horseshoe or sometimes bucket, inverted omega or Latin upsilon, is a letter of the International Phonetic Alphabet used to transcribe a near-close near-back rounded vowel.
Like its model, Phoenician waw, it represented the voiced labial-velar approximant /w/ and stood in the 6th position in the alphabet between epsilon and zeta. It is the consonantal doublet of the vowel letter upsilon ( /u/ ), which was also derived from waw but was placed near the end of the Greek alphabet.
Epsilon (US: / ˈ ɛ p s ɪ l ɒ n /, [1] UK: / ɛ p ˈ s aɪ l ə n /; [2] uppercase Ε, lowercase ε or ϵ; Greek: έψιλον) is the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet, corresponding phonetically to a mid front unrounded vowel IPA: or IPA:. In the system of Greek numerals it also has the value five. It was derived from the Phoenician ...
Mu (/ ˈ m (j) uː /; [1] [2] uppercase Μ, lowercase μ; Ancient Greek μῦ, Greek: μι or μυ—both ) is the twelfth letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the voiced bilabial nasal IPA:. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 40. [ 3 ]