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76-657: Unlike the other Greek letters , this letter did not take its name from the Phoenician letter from which it was derived; it was given a new name on the pattern of beta , eta and theta . The word zeta is the ancestor of zed , the name of the Latin letter Z in Commonwealth English. Swedish and many Romance languages (such as Italian and Spanish ) do not distinguish between the Greek and Roman forms of

152-543: A pitch accent . In Modern Greek, all vowels and consonants are short. Many vowels and diphthongs once pronounced distinctly are pronounced as /i/ ( iotacism ). Some of the stops and glides in diphthongs have become fricatives , and the pitch accent has changed to a stress accent . Many of the changes took place in the Koine Greek period. The writing system of Modern Greek, however, does not reflect all pronunciation changes. The examples below represent Attic Greek in

228-475: A Latin S ( [REDACTED] ). *Upsilon is also derived from waw ( [REDACTED] ). The classical twenty-four-letter alphabet that is now used to represent the Greek language was originally the local alphabet of Ionia . By the late fifth century BC, it was commonly used by many Athenians. In c. 403 BC, at the suggestion of the archon Eucleides , the Athenian Assembly formally abandoned

304-622: A colour-coded map in a seminal 19th-century work on the topic, Studien zur Geschichte des griechischen Alphabets by Adolf Kirchhoff (1867). The "green" (or southern) type is the most archaic and closest to the Phoenician. The "red" (or western) type is the one that was later transmitted to the West and became the ancestor of the Latin alphabet , and bears some crucial features characteristic of that later development. The "blue" (or eastern) type

380-610: A distinction between uppercase and lowercase. This distinction is an innovation of the modern era, drawing on different lines of development of the letter shapes in earlier handwriting. The oldest forms of the letters in antiquity are majuscule forms. Besides the upright, straight inscriptional forms (capitals) found in stone carvings or incised pottery, more fluent writing styles adapted for handwriting on soft materials were also developed during antiquity. Such handwriting has been preserved especially from papyrus manuscripts in Egypt since

456-597: A few years previously in Macedonia . By the end of the fourth century BC, it had displaced local alphabets across the Greek-speaking world to become the standard form of the Greek alphabet. When the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet, they took over not only the letter shapes and sound values but also the names by which the sequence of the alphabet could be recited and memorized. In Phoenician, each letter name

532-477: A lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek , but its relationship to the historical dialects and

608-419: A lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek , spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either a fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Regarding the speech of the ancient Macedonians diverse theories have been put forward, but the epigraphic activity and the archaeological discoveries in

684-498: A prefix /e-/, called the augment . This was probably originally a separate word, meaning something like "then", added because tenses in PIE had primarily aspectual meaning. The augment is added to the indicative of the aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, but not to any of the other forms of the aorist (no other forms of the imperfect and pluperfect exist). The two kinds of augment in Greek are syllabic and quantitative. The syllabic augment

760-608: A separate historical stage, though its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek , and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek . There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek; Attic Greek developed into Koine. Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language , divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic , Aeolic , Arcadocypriot , and Doric , many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature , while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms. Homeric Greek

836-1204: A set of systematic phonological shifts that affected the language in its post-classical stages. [ ʝ ] before [ e ] , [ i ] ; [ ŋ ] ~ [ ɲ ] Similar to y as in English y ellow; ng as in English lo ng; ñ as in Spanish a ñ o é as in French é t é Similar to ay as in English overl ay , but without pronouncing y. ai as in English f ai ry ê as in French t ê te [ c ] before [ e ] , [ i ] q as in French q ui ô as in French t ô t r as in Spanish ca r o [ ç ] before [ e ] , [ i ] h as in English h ue Among consonant letters, all letters that denoted voiced plosive consonants ( /b, d, g/ ) and aspirated plosives ( /pʰ, tʰ, kʰ/ ) in Ancient Greek stand for corresponding fricative sounds in Modern Greek. The correspondences are as follows: Among

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912-453: A seventh vowel letter for the long /ɔː/ (Ω, omega ) was introduced. Greek also introduced three new consonant letters for its aspirated plosive sounds and consonant clusters: Φ ( phi ) for /pʰ/ , Χ ( chi ) for /kʰ/ and Ψ ( psi ) for /ps/ . In western Greek variants, Χ was instead used for /ks/ and Ψ for /kʰ/ . The origin of these letters is a matter of some debate. Three of the original Phoenician letters dropped out of use before

988-630: A standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance . This article primarily contains information about the Epic and Classical periods of the language, which are the best-attested periods and considered most typical of Ancient Greek. From the Hellenistic period ( c.  300 BC ), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek , which is regarded as

1064-428: A time, a writing style with alternating right-to-left and left-to-right lines (called boustrophedon , literally "ox-turning", after the manner of an ox ploughing a field) was common, until in the classical period the left-to-right writing direction became the norm. Individual letter shapes were mirrored depending on the writing direction of the current line. There were initially numerous local (epichoric) variants of

1140-510: A vowel or /n s r/ ; final stops were lost, as in γάλα "milk", compared with γάλακτος "of milk" (genitive). Ancient Greek of the classical period also differed in both the inventory and distribution of original PIE phonemes due to numerous sound changes, notably the following: The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek . Ancient Greek had long and short vowels ; many diphthongs ; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; and

1216-570: Is a literary form of Archaic Greek (derived primarily from Ionic and Aeolic) used in the epic poems , the Iliad and the Odyssey , and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects. The origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of

1292-418: Is added to stems beginning with consonants, and simply prefixes e (stems beginning with r , however, add er ). The quantitative augment is added to stems beginning with vowels, and involves lengthening the vowel: Some verbs augment irregularly; the most common variation is e → ei . The irregularity can be explained diachronically by the loss of s between vowels, or that of the letter w , which affected

1368-653: Is also ⟨ ηι, ωι ⟩ , and ⟨ ου ⟩ , pronounced /u/ . The Ancient Greek diphthongs ⟨ αυ ⟩ , ⟨ ευ ⟩ and ⟨ ηυ ⟩ are pronounced [av] , [ev] and [iv] in Modern Greek. In some environments, they are devoiced to [af] , [ef] and [if] . The Modern Greek consonant combinations ⟨ μπ ⟩ and ⟨ ντ ⟩ stand for [b] and [d] (or [mb] and [nd] ); ⟨ τζ ⟩ stands for [d͡z] and ⟨ τσ ⟩ stands for [t͡s] . In addition, both in Ancient and Modern Greek,

1444-517: Is attested in early sources as λάβδα besides λάμβδα ; in Modern Greek the spelling is often λάμδα , reflecting pronunciation. Similarly, iota is sometimes spelled γιώτα in Modern Greek ( [ʝ] is conventionally transcribed ⟨γ{ι,η,υ,ει,οι}⟩ word-initially and intervocalically before back vowels and /a/ ). In the tables below, the Greek names of all letters are given in their traditional polytonic spelling; in modern practice, like with all other words, they are usually spelled in

1520-666: Is called 'East Greek'. Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian Greek had come under a strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, as exemplified in the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar who wrote in Doric with a small Aeolic admixture. Thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to

1596-481: Is commonly held to have originated some time in the late ninth or early eighth century BC, conventionally around the year 800 BC. The period between the use of the two writing systems, Linear B and the Greek alphabet, during which no Greek texts are attested, is known as the Greek Dark Ages . The Greeks adopted the alphabet from the earlier Phoenician alphabet , one of the closely related scripts used for

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1672-448: Is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek . Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian (see also Graeco-Armenian ) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ). Ancient Greek differs from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and other Indo-European languages in certain ways. In phonotactics , ancient Greek words could end only in

1748-470: Is still conventionally used for writing Ancient Greek, while in some book printing and generally in the usage of conservative writers it can still also be found in use for Modern Greek. Although it is not a diacritic, the comma has a similar function as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό,τι ( ó,ti , "whatever") from ότι ( óti , "that"). There are many different methods of rendering Greek text or Greek names in

1824-465: Is the one from which the later standard Greek alphabet emerged. Athens used a local form of the "light blue" alphabet type until the end of the fifth century BC, which lacked the letters Ξ and Ψ as well as the vowel symbols Η and Ω. In the Old Attic alphabet, ΧΣ stood for /ks/ and ΦΣ for /ps/ . Ε was used for all three sounds /e, eː, ɛː/ (correspondinɡ to classical Ε, ΕΙ, Η ), and Ο

1900-759: The Greek region of Macedonia during the last decades has brought to light documents, among which the first texts written in Macedonian , such as the Pella curse tablet , as Hatzopoulos and other scholars note. Based on the conclusions drawn by several studies and findings such as Pella curse tablet , Emilio Crespo and other scholars suggest that ancient Macedonian was a Northwest Doric dialect , which shares isoglosses with its neighboring Thessalian dialects spoken in northeastern Thessaly . Some have also suggested an Aeolic Greek classification. The Lesbian dialect

1976-567: The Hellenistic period . Ancient handwriting developed two distinct styles: uncial writing, with carefully drawn, rounded block letters of about equal size, used as a book hand for carefully produced literary and religious manuscripts, and cursive writing, used for everyday purposes. The cursive forms approached the style of lowercase letter forms, with ascenders and descenders, as well as many connecting lines and ligatures between letters. Ancient Greek Ancient Greek ( Ἑλληνῐκή , Hellēnikḗ ; [hellɛːnikɛ́ː] ) includes

2052-413: The Latin , Gothic , Coptic , and Cyrillic scripts. Throughout antiquity, Greek had only a single uppercase form of each letter. It was written without diacritics and with little punctuation . By the 9th century, Byzantine scribes had begun to employ the lowercase form, which they derived from the cursive styles of the uppercase letters. Sound values and conventional transcriptions for some of

2128-528: The Library of Congress , and others. During the Mycenaean period , from around the sixteenth century to the twelfth century BC, a script called Linear B was used to write the earliest attested form of the Greek language, known as Mycenaean Greek . This writing system, unrelated to the Greek alphabet, last appeared in the thirteenth century BC. Inscription written in the Greek alphabet begin to emerge from

2204-599: The West Semitic languages , calling it Greek : Φοινικήια γράμματα 'Phoenician letters'. However, the Phoenician alphabet was limited to consonants. When it was adopted for writing Greek, certain consonants were adapted in order to express vowels. The use of both vowels and consonants makes Greek the first alphabet in the narrow sense, as distinguished from the abjads used in Semitic languages , which have letters only for consonants. Greek initially took over all of

2280-501: The present , future , and imperfect are imperfective in aspect; the aorist , present perfect , pluperfect and future perfect are perfective in aspect. Most tenses display all four moods and three voices, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative. Also, there is no imperfect subjunctive, optative or imperative. The infinitives and participles correspond to the finite combinations of tense, aspect, and voice. The indicative of past tenses adds (conceptually, at least)

2356-494: The rough breathing ( ἁ ), marking an /h/ sound at the beginning of a word, or the smooth breathing ( ἀ ), marking its absence. The letter rho (ρ), although not a vowel, also carries rough breathing in a word-initial position. If a rho was geminated within a word, the first ρ always had the smooth breathing and the second the rough breathing (ῤῥ) leading to the transliteration rrh. The vowel letters ⟨ α, η, ω ⟩ carry an additional diacritic in certain words,

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2432-432: The 22 letters of Phoenician. Five were reassigned to denote vowel sounds: the glide consonants /j/ ( yodh ) and /w/ ( waw ) were used for [i] (Ι, iota ) and [u] (Υ, upsilon ); the glottal stop consonant /ʔ/ ( aleph ) was used for [a] (Α, alpha ); the pharyngeal /ʕ/ ( ʿayin ) was turned into [o] (Ο, omicron ); and the letter for /h/ ( he ) was turned into [e] (Ε, epsilon ). A doublet of waw

2508-1031: The 5th century BC. Ancient pronunciation cannot be reconstructed with certainty, but Greek from the period is well documented, and there is little disagreement among linguists as to the general nature of the sounds that the letters represent. /oː/ raised to [uː] , probably by the 4th century BC. Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages , is highly inflected. It is highly archaic in its preservation of Proto-Indo-European forms. In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases ( nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , and vocative ), three genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ), and three numbers (singular, dual , and plural ). Verbs have four moods ( indicative , imperative , subjunctive , and optative ) and three voices (active, middle, and passive ), as well as three persons (first, second, and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated through seven combinations of tenses and aspect (generally simply called "tenses"):

2584-495: The Archaic period of ancient Greek (see Homeric Greek for more details): Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί' Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε' ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ' ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο βουλή· ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. The beginning of Apology by Plato exemplifies Attic Greek from

2660-501: The Byzantine period, to distinguish between letters that had become confusable. Thus, the letters ⟨ο⟩ and ⟨ω⟩ , pronounced identically by this time, were called o mikron ("small o") and o mega ("big o"). The letter ⟨ε⟩ was called e psilon ("plain e") to distinguish it from the identically pronounced digraph ⟨αι⟩ , while, similarly, ⟨υ⟩ , which at this time

2736-479: The Greek alphabet existed in many local variants , but, by the end of the 4th century BC, the Ionic -based Euclidean alphabet , with 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega , had become standard throughout the Greek-speaking world and is the 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 several scripts, such as

2812-527: The Greek alphabet today also serves as a source of international technical symbols and labels in many domains of mathematics , science , and other fields. In both Ancient and Modern Greek, the letters of the Greek alphabet have fairly stable and consistent symbol-to-sound mappings, making pronunciation of words largely predictable. Ancient Greek spelling was generally near- phonemic . For a number of letters, sound values differ considerably between Ancient and Modern Greek, because their pronunciation has followed

2888-466: The Greek alphabet, which differed in the use and non-use of the additional vowel and consonant symbols and several other features. Epichoric alphabets are commonly divided into four major types according to their different treatments of additional consonant letters for the aspirated consonants (/pʰ, kʰ/) and consonant clusters (/ks, ps/) of Greek. These four types are often conventionally labelled as "green", "red", "light blue" and "dark blue" types, based on

2964-625: The Latin script. The form in which classical Greek names are conventionally rendered in English goes back to the way Greek loanwords were incorporated into Latin in antiquity. In this system, ⟨ κ ⟩ is replaced with ⟨c⟩ , the diphthongs ⟨ αι ⟩ and ⟨ οι ⟩ are rendered as ⟨ae⟩ and ⟨oe⟩ (or ⟨æ,œ⟩ ); and ⟨ ει ⟩ and ⟨ ου ⟩ are simplified to ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩ . Smooth breathing marks are usually ignored and rough breathing marks are usually rendered as

3040-649: The Old Attic alphabet and adopted the Ionian alphabet as part of the democratic reforms after the overthrow of the Thirty Tyrants . Because of Eucleides's role in suggesting the idea to adopt the Ionian alphabet, the standard twenty-four-letter Greek alphabet is sometimes known as the "Eucleidean alphabet". Roughly thirty years later, the Eucleidean alphabet was adopted in Boeotia and it may have been adopted

3116-479: The alphabet took its classical shape: the letter Ϻ ( san ), which had been in competition with Σ ( sigma ) denoting the same phoneme /s/; the letter Ϙ ( qoppa ), which was redundant with Κ ( kappa ) for /k/, and Ϝ ( digamma ), whose sound value /w/ dropped out of the spoken language before or during the classical period. Greek was originally written predominantly from right to left, just like Phoenician, but scribes could freely alternate between directions. For

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3192-550: The aorist. Following Homer 's practice, the augment is sometimes not made in poetry , especially epic poetry. The augment sometimes substitutes for reduplication; see below. Almost all forms of the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect reduplicate the initial syllable of the verb stem. (A few irregular forms of perfect do not reduplicate, whereas a handful of irregular aorists reduplicate.) The three types of reduplication are: Irregular duplication can be understood diachronically. For example, lambanō (root lab ) has

3268-419: The augment when it was word-initial. In verbs with a preposition as a prefix, the augment is placed not at the start of the word, but between the preposition and the original verb. For example, προσ(-)βάλλω (I attack) goes to προσ έ βαλoν in the aorist. However compound verbs consisting of a prefix that is not a preposition retain the augment at the start of the word: αὐτο(-)μολῶ goes to ηὐ τομόλησα in

3344-438: The center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for the dialects is: West vs. non-West Greek is the strongest-marked and earliest division, with non-West in subsets of Ionic-Attic (or Attic-Ionic) and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Often non-West

3420-400: The combinations ⟨ γχ ⟩ and ⟨ γξ ⟩ . In the polytonic orthography traditionally used for ancient Greek and katharevousa , the stressed vowel of each word carries one of three accent marks: either the acute accent ( ά ), the grave accent ( ὰ ), or the circumflex accent ( α̃ or α̑ ). These signs were originally designed to mark different forms of

3496-524: The consonants, three are double: ζ ξ ψ. They are called double because each one of them is composed of two consonants, ζ of σ and δ ; ξ of κ and σ, ψ of π and σ. Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet , and is the earliest known alphabetic script to have developed distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants . In Archaic and early Classical times,

3572-567: The conventional letter correspondences of Ancient Greek-based transcription systems, and to what degree they attempt either an exact letter-by-letter transliteration or rather a phonetically based transcription. Standardized formal transcription systems have been defined by the International Organization for Standardization (as ISO 843 ), by the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names , by

3648-615: The dialect of Sparta ), and Northern Peloponnesus Doric (including Corinthian ). All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, and these colonies generally developed local characteristics, often under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects. After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed, largely based on Attic Greek , but with influence from other dialects. This dialect slowly replaced most of

3724-468: The eighth century BC onward. While early evidence of Greek letters may date no later than 770 BC, the oldest known substantial and legible Greek alphabet texts, such as the Dipylon inscription and Nestor's cup , date from c.  740 /30 BC. It is accepted that the introduction of the alphabet occurred some time prior to these inscriptions. While earlier dates have been proposed, the Greek alphabet

3800-410: The following group of consonant letters, the older forms of the names in Ancient Greek were spelled with -εῖ , indicating an original pronunciation with -ē . In Modern Greek these names are spelled with -ι . The following group of vowel letters were originally called simply by their sound values as long vowels: ē, ō, ū, and ɔ . Their modern names contain adjectival qualifiers that were added during

3876-444: The following letters are more or less straightforward continuations of their Phoenician antecedents. Between Ancient and Modern Greek, they have remained largely unchanged, except that their pronunciation has followed regular sound changes along with other words (for instance, in the name of beta , ancient /b/ regularly changed to modern /v/, and ancient /ɛː/ to modern /i/, resulting in the modern pronunciation vita ). The name of lambda

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3952-673: The forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek ( c.  1400–1200 BC ), Dark Ages ( c.  1200–800 BC ), the Archaic or Epic period ( c.  800–500 BC ), and the Classical period ( c.  500–300 BC ). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers . It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been

4028-561: The historical Dorians . The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with the Dorians. The Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people – Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cypriot, far from

4104-476: The historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not later than 1120 BC, at the time of the Dorian invasions —and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BC. The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to

4180-439: The historical sound system in pronouncing Ancient Greek. Several letter combinations have special conventional sound values different from those of their single components. Among them are several digraphs of vowel letters that formerly represented diphthongs but are now monophthongized. In addition to the four mentioned above ( ⟨ ει , οι, υι⟩ , pronounced /i/ and ⟨ αι ⟩ , pronounced /e/ ), there

4256-474: The letter ⟨ γ ⟩ , before another velar consonant , stands for the velar nasal [ŋ] ; thus ⟨ γγ ⟩ and ⟨ γκ ⟩ are pronounced like English ⟨ng⟩ like in the word finger (not like in the word thing). In analogy to ⟨ μπ ⟩ and ⟨ ντ ⟩ , ⟨ γκ ⟩ is also used to stand for [g] before vowels [a] , [o] and [u] , and [ɟ] before [e] and [i] . There are also

4332-654: The letter ⟨h⟩ . In modern scholarly transliteration of Ancient Greek, ⟨ κ ⟩ will usually be rendered as ⟨k⟩ , and the vowel combinations ⟨ αι , οι, ει, ου⟩ as ⟨ai, oi, ei, ou⟩ . The letters ⟨ θ ⟩ and ⟨ φ ⟩ are generally rendered as ⟨th⟩ and ⟨ph⟩ ; ⟨ χ ⟩ as either ⟨ch⟩ or ⟨kh⟩ ; and word-initial ⟨ ρ ⟩ as ⟨rh⟩ . Transcription conventions for Modern Greek differ widely, depending on their purpose, on how close they stay to

4408-576: The letter; " zeta " is used to refer to the Roman letter Z as well as the Greek letter. The letter ζ represents the voiced alveolar fricative IPA: [z] in Modern Greek . The sound represented by zeta in Greek before 400 BC is disputed. See Ancient Greek phonology and Pronunciation of Ancient Greek in teaching . Most handbooks agree on attributing to it the pronunciation /zd/ (like Mazda ), but some scholars believe that it

4484-459: The letters differ between Ancient and Modern Greek usage because the pronunciation of Greek has changed significantly between the 5th century BC and today. Additionally, Modern and Ancient Greek now use different diacritics , with ancient Greek using the polytonic orthography and 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,

4560-508: The older dialects, although the Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language , which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek . By about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosed into Medieval Greek . Phrygian is an extinct Indo-European language of West and Central Anatolia , which

4636-487: The perfect stem eilēpha (not * lelēpha ) because it was originally slambanō , with perfect seslēpha , becoming eilēpha through compensatory lengthening. Reduplication is also visible in the present tense stems of certain verbs. These stems add a syllable consisting of the root's initial consonant followed by i . A nasal stop appears after the reduplication in some verbs. The earliest extant examples of ancient Greek writing ( c.  1450 BC ) are in

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4712-418: The phonological pitch accent in Ancient Greek. By the time their use became conventional and obligatory in Greek writing, in late antiquity, pitch accent was evolving into a single stress accent , and thus the three signs have not corresponded to a phonological distinction in actual speech ever since. In addition to the accent marks, every word-initial vowel must carry either of two so-called "breathing marks":

4788-411: The pronunciation alone, while the reverse mapping, from spelling to pronunciation, is usually regular and predictable. The following vowel letters and digraphs are involved in the mergers: Modern Greek speakers typically use the same, modern symbol–sound mappings in reading Greek of all historical stages. In other countries, students of Ancient Greek may use a variety of conventional approximations of

4864-462: The simplified monotonic system. In the cases of the three historical sibilant letters below, the correspondence between Phoenician and Ancient Greek is less clear, with apparent mismatches both in letter names and sound values. The early history of these letters (and the fourth sibilant letter, obsolete san ) has been a matter of some debate. Here too, the changes in the pronunciation of the letter names between Ancient and Modern Greek are regular. In

4940-623: The sixth position in the alphabet. The uppercase zeta is not used, because it is normally identical to Latin Z . The lower case letter can be used to represent: ZETA (fusion reactor) (all uppercase) was an early fusion experiment. These characters are used only as mathematical symbols. Stylized Greek text should be encoded using the normal Greek letters, with markup and formatting to indicate text style: Ἔτι δὲ τῶν συμφώνων διπλᾶ μέν ἐστι τρία· ζ ξ ψ. διπλᾶ δὲ εἴρηται, ὅτι ἓν ἕκαστον αὐτῶν ἐκ δύο συμφώνων σύγκειται, τὸ μὲν ζ ἐκ τοῦ σ καὶ δ , τὸ δὲ ξ ἐκ τοῦ κ καὶ σ, τὸ δὲ ψ ἐκ τοῦ π καὶ σ. Of

5016-434: The so-called iota subscript , which has the shape of a small vertical stroke or a miniature ⟨ ι ⟩ below the letter. This iota represents the former offglide of what were originally long diphthongs, ⟨ ᾱι, ηι, ωι ⟩ (i.e. /aːi, ɛːi, ɔːi/ ), which became monophthongized during antiquity. Another diacritic used in Greek is the diaeresis ( ¨ ), indicating a hiatus . This system of diacritics

5092-517: The syllabic script Linear B . Beginning in the 8th century BC, however, the Greek alphabet became standard, albeit with some variation among dialects. Early texts are written in boustrophedon style, but left-to-right became standard during the classic period. Modern editions of ancient Greek texts are usually written with accents and breathing marks , interword spacing , modern punctuation , and sometimes mixed case , but these were all introduced later. The beginning of Homer 's Iliad exemplifies

5168-459: The vowel symbols, Modern Greek sound values reflect the radical simplification of the vowel system of post-classical Greek, merging multiple formerly distinct vowel phonemes into a much smaller number. This leads to several groups of vowel letters denoting identical sounds today. Modern Greek orthography remains true to the historical spellings in most of these cases. As a consequence, the spellings of words in Modern Greek are often not predictable from

5244-480: Was Aeolic. For example, fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos are in Aeolian. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric (including Cretan Doric ), Southern Peloponnesus Doric (including Laconian ,

5320-414: Was a word that began with the sound represented by that letter; thus ʾaleph , the word for "ox", was used as the name for the glottal stop /ʔ/ , bet , or "house", for the /b/ sound, and so on. When the letters were adopted by the Greeks, most of the Phoenician names were maintained or modified slightly to fit Greek phonology; thus, ʾaleph, bet, gimel became alpha, beta, gamma . The Greek names of

5396-494: Was adopted for official use in Modern Greek by the Greek state. It uses only a single accent mark, the acute (also known in this context as tonos , i.e. simply "accent"), marking the stressed syllable of polysyllabic words, and occasionally the diaeresis to distinguish diphthongal from digraph readings in pairs of vowel letters, making this monotonic system very similar to the accent mark system used in Spanish . The polytonic system

5472-400: Was also borrowed as a consonant for [w] (Ϝ, digamma ). In addition, the Phoenician letter for the emphatic glottal /ħ/ ( heth ) was borrowed in two different functions by different dialects of Greek: as a letter for /h/ (Η, heta ) by those dialects that had such a sound, and as an additional vowel letter for the long /ɛː/ (Η, eta ) by those dialects that lacked the consonant. Eventually,

5548-588: Was an affricate / dz / (like adze). The modern pronunciation was, in all likelihood, established in the Hellenistic age and may have already been a common practice in Classical Attic ; for example, it could count as one or two consonants metrically in Attic drama. Zeta has the numerical value 7 rather than 6 because the letter digamma (ϝ, also called ' stigma ' as a Greek numeral ) was originally in

5624-517: Was first developed by the scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium ( c.  257 – c.  185/180 BC), who worked at the Musaeum in Alexandria during the third century BC. Aristophanes of Byzantium also was the first to divide poems into lines, rather than writing them like prose, and also introduced a series of signs for textual criticism . In 1982, a new, simplified orthography, known as "monotonic",

5700-540: Was pronounced [ y ] , was called y psilon ("plain y") to distinguish it from the identically pronounced digraph ⟨οι⟩ . Some dialects of the Aegean and Cypriot have retained long consonants and pronounce [ˈɣamːa] and [ˈkapʰa] ; also, ήτα has come to be pronounced [ˈitʰa] in Cypriot. Like Latin and other alphabetic scripts, Greek originally had only a single form of each letter, without

5776-399: Was used for all of /o, oː, ɔː/ (corresponding to classical Ο, ΟΥ, Ω ). The letter Η (heta) was used for the consonant /h/ . Some variant local letter forms were also characteristic of Athenian writing, some of which were shared with the neighboring (but otherwise "red") alphabet of Euboia : a form of Λ that resembled a Latin L ( [REDACTED] ) and a form of Σ that resembled

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