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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 Greek spelling alphabet is a spelling alphabet (or "phonetic alphabet") for Greek, i.e. an accepted set of easily differentiated names given to the letters of the alphabet for the purpose of spelling out words. It is used mostly on radio voice channels by the Greek army, the navy and the police. The names for some Greek letters are easily ...
The names presented are in Classical Greek spelling, specifically of the Attic dialect, scientific transliteration of Classical Greek, standard Modern Greek, the United Nations transliteration for Modern Greek, and the Modern Greek pronunciation in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
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.
Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, [18] or possibly earlier. [19] The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, [20] making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language. [21]
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.
However, Greek dialects progressively lost the sound /h/ from their phonological systems. In the Ionic dialects, where this loss of /h/ happened early, the name of the letter naturally changed to Ēta , and the letter was subsequently turned from a consonant to a new use as a vowel, denoting the long half-open /ɛː/ sound.
This page was last edited on 12 September 2022, at 21:53 (UTC).; Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License; additional terms may apply.