Ellinikó alfávito "Greek alphabet" in the modern Greek language
Script type
Alphabet
Time period
c. 800 BC – present[1][2]
Direction
Left-to-right
Official script
Greece
Cyprus
European Union
Languages
Greek
Related scripts
Parent systems
Egyptian hieroglyphs
Proto-Sinaitic alphabet
Phoenician alphabet
Greek alphabet
Child systems
Gothic
Glagolitic
Cyrillic
Coptic
Armenian
Old Italic and thus Latin and Runic
Georgian
Anatolian
ISO 15924
ISO 15924
Grek(200), Greek
Unicode
Unicode alias
Greek
Unicode range
U+0370–U+03FF Greek and Coptic
U+1F00–U+1FFF Greek Extended
Greek alphabet
Αα
Alpha
Νν
Nu
Ββ
Beta
Ξξ
Xi
Γγ
Gamma
Οο
Omicron
Δδ
Delta
Ππ
Pi
Εε
Epsilon
Ρρ
Rho
Ζζ
Zeta
Σσς
Sigma
Ηη
Eta
Ττ
Tau
Θθ
Theta
Υυ
Upsilon
Ιι
Iota
Φφ
Phi
Κκ
Kappa
Χχ
Chi
Λλ
Lambda
Ψψ
Psi
Μμ
Mu
Ωω
Omega
History
Archaic local variants
Ϝ
Ͱ
Ϻ
Ϙ
Ͳ
Ͷ
tsan
digamma
Diacritics
Ligatures
Numerals
ϛ (6)
ϟ (90)
ϡ (900)
Use in other languages
Bactrian
Coptic
Albanian
Related topics
Use as scientific symbols
Category
v
t
e
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC.[3][4] It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet,[5] and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BC, the Euclidean alphabet, with 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used for Greek writing today.
The uppercase and lowercase forms of the 24 letters are:
The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts.[6] Like Latin and Cyrillic, Greek originally had only a single form of each letter; it developed the letter case distinction between uppercase and lowercase in parallel with Latin during the modern era. Sound values and conventional transcriptions for some of the letters differ between Ancient and Modern Greek usage because the pronunciation of Greek has changed significantly between the 5th century BC and today. Modern and Ancient Greek also use different diacritics, with modern Greek keeping only the stress accent (acute) and the diaeresis.
Apart from its use in writing the Greek language, in both its ancient and its modern forms, the Greek alphabet today also serves as a source of international technical symbols and labels in many domains of mathematics, science, and other fields.
^Swiggers 1996.
^Johnston 2003, pp. 263–276.
^The date of the earliest inscribed objects; A.W. Johnston, "The alphabet", in N. Stampolidis and V. Karageorghis, eds, Sea Routes from Sidon to Huelva: Interconnections in the Mediterranean 2003:263–76, summarizes the present scholarship on the dating.
^Cook 1987, p. 9.
^The Development of the Greek Alphabet within the Chronology of the ANE (2009), Quote: "Naveh gives four major reasons why it is universally agreed that the Greek alphabet was developed from an early Phoenician alphabet. 1 According to Herodutous "the Phoenicians who came with Cadmus... brought into Hellas the alphabet, which had hitherto been unknown, as I think, to the Greeks." 2 The Greek Letters, alpha, beta, gimmel have no meaning in Greek but the meaning of most of their Semitic equivalents is known. For example, 'aleph' means 'ox', 'bet' means 'house' and 'gimmel' means 'throw stick'. 3 Early Greek letters are very similar and sometimes identical to the West Semitic letters. 4 The letter sequence between the Semitic and Greek alphabets is identical. (Naveh 1982)"
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