79-401: Codrus ( / ˈ k ɒ d r ə s / ; or / ˈ k oʊ d r ə s / ; Greek : Κόδρος , Kódros ) was the last of the semi-mythical Kings of Athens (r. ca 1089 – 1068 BC ). He was an ancient exemplar of patriotism and self- sacrifice . He was succeeded by his son Medon , who it is claimed ruled not as king but as the first Archon of Athens . He was said to have traced his descent to
158-417: A digraph (as in μποϊκοτάρω /boj.koˈtar.o/ , "I boycott"). The distinction between two separate vowels and an unstressed diphthong is not always clear, although two separate vowels are far more common. The diaeresis can be combined with the acute, grave and circumflex but never with breathings, since the letter with the diaeresis cannot be the first vowel of the word. In Modern Greek, the combination of
237-515: 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
316-608: 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
395-462: A cultural link to the past. Some individuals, institutions, and publishers continue to prefer the polytonic system (with or without grave accent), though an official reintroduction of the polytonic system does not seem probable. The Greek Orthodox church, the daily newspaper Estia , as well as books written in Katharevousa continue to use the polytonic orthography. Though the polytonic system
474-606: 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
553-581: 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
632-453: A group of Dorian soldiers. He was put to death in the quarrel, and the Dorians, realizing Codrus had been slain, decided to retreat in fear of their prophesied defeat. In the aftermath of these events, it was claimed that no one thought himself worthy to succeed Codrus and so the title of king was abolished, and that of archon substituted for it. Aristotle (or possibly one of his students), in
711-545: A palatalized pronunciation. They are not encoded as precombined characters in Unicode, so they are typed by adding the U+030C ◌̌ COMBINING CARON to the Greek letter. Latin diacritics on Greek letters may not be supported by many fonts, and as a fall-back a caron may be replaced by an iota ⟨ι⟩ following the consonant. An example of a Greek letter with a combining caron and its pronunciation: τ̌ /c/ . A dot diacritic
790-1177: 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
869-453: 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
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#1732854873883948-428: 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
1027-700: A variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period . The more complex polytonic orthography ( Greek : πολυτονικό σύστημα γραφής , romanized : polytonikó sýstīma grafī́s ), which includes five diacritics, notates Ancient Greek phonology . The simpler monotonic orthography ( Greek : μονοτονικό σύστημα γραφής , romanized : monotonikó sýstīma grafī́s ), introduced in 1982, corresponds to Modern Greek phonology , and requires only two diacritics. Polytonic orthography (from Ancient Greek πολύς ( polýs ) 'much, many' and τόνος ( tónos ) 'accent')
1106-427: A voiceless glottal fricative ( /h/ ) before the vowel in Ancient Greek. In Greek grammar, this is known as aspiration. This is different from aspiration in phonetics , which applies to consonants, not vowels. The smooth breathing ( ψιλὸν πνεῦμα , psīlòn pneûma ; Latin spīritus lēnis )—' ἀ '—marked the absence of /h/ . A double rho in the middle of a word was originally written with smooth breathing on
1185-473: A word. The iota subscript ( ὑπογεγραμμένη , hypogegramménē , 'written under')—'ι'—is placed under the long vowels ᾱ , η , and ω to mark the ancient long diphthongs ᾱι , ηι , and ωι , in which the ι is no longer pronounced. Next to a capital, the iota subscript is usually written as a lower-case letter ( Αι ), in which case it is called iota adscript ( προσγεγραμμένη , prosgegramménē , 'written next to'). In Ancient Greek,
1264-648: 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,
1343-502: Is at U+03AC, while the polytonic "Greek small letter alpha with oxeîa " is at U+1F71. The monotonic and polytonic accent however have been de jure equivalent since 1986, and accordingly the oxeîa diacritic in Unicode decomposes canonically to the monotonic tónos —both are underlyingly treated as equivalent to the multiscript acute accent, U+0301, since letters with oxia decompose to letters with tonos , which decompose in turn to base letter plus multiscript acute accent. Thus: Where
1422-517: 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
1501-796: Is attested since the 8th century BC, and until 403 BC, variations of the Greek alphabet—which exclusively used what are now known as capitals —were used in different cities and areas. From 403 on, the Athenians decided to employ a version of the Ionian alphabet. With the spread of Koine Greek , a continuation of the Attic dialect, the Ionic alphabet superseded the other alphabets, known as epichoric , with varying degrees of speed. The Ionian alphabet, however, also consisted only of capitals. The rough and smooth breathings were introduced in classical times in order to represent
1580-474: 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
1659-470: 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
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#17328548738831738-460: 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
1817-456: Is the standard system for Ancient Greek and Medieval Greek and includes: Since in Modern Greek the pitch accent has been replaced by a dynamic accent (stress) , and /h/ was lost, most polytonic diacritics have no phonetic significance, and merely reveal the underlying Ancient Greek etymology . Monotonic orthography (from Ancient Greek μόνος ( mónos ) 'single' and τόνος ( tónos ) 'accent')
1896-553: Is the standard system for Modern Greek . It retains two diacritics: A tonos and a diaeresis can be combined on a single vowel to indicate a stressed vowel after a hiatus, as in the verb ταΐζω ( /taˈizo/ , "I feed"). Although it is not a diacritic, the hypodiastole ( comma ) has in a similar way the function of a sound-changing diacritic in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό,τι ( ó,ti , "whatever") from ότι ( óti , "that"). The original Greek alphabet did not have diacritics. The Greek alphabet
1975-625: The Constitution of the Athenians , states that it was indeed the house of Codrus that abolished the title of king in favor of Archon, eventually followed by 11 more. 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,
2054-548: The diaeresis (Greek: διαίρεσις or διαλυτικά , dialytiká , 'distinguishing') – ϊ – appears on the letters ι and υ to show that a pair of vowel letters is pronounced separately, rather than as a diphthong or as a digraph for a simple vowel. In Modern Greek, the diaeresis usually indicates that two successive vowels are pronounced separately (as in κοροϊδεύω /ko.ro.iˈðe.vo/ , "I trick, mock"), but occasionally, it marks vowels that are pronounced together as an unstressed diphthong rather than as
2133-406: The /h/ sound became silent. At the beginning of the 20th century (official since the 1960s), the grave was replaced by the acute, and the iota subscript and the breathings on the rho were abolished, except in printed texts. Greek typewriters from that era did not have keys for the grave accent or the iota subscript, and these diacritics were also not taught in primary schools where instruction
2212-512: 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. Greek diacritics Greek orthography has used
2291-413: 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
2370-518: 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
2449-588: 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
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2528-553: The minuscule polytonic supplanted it. By the Byzantine period , the modern rule that turns an acute accent ( oxeia ) on the last syllable into a grave accent ( bareia )—except before a punctuation sign or an enclitic —had been firmly established. Certain authors have argued that the grave originally denoted the absence of accent; the modern rule is, in their view, a purely orthographic convention. Originally, certain proclitic words lost their accent before another word and received
2607-494: 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,
2686-432: 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
2765-496: 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
2844-475: 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
2923-527: 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
3002-466: 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
3081-673: 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
3160-627: 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
3239-464: The accents, of which the use started to spread, to become standard in the Middle Ages. It was not until the 2nd century AD that accents and breathings appeared sporadically in papyri . The need for the diacritics arose from the gradual divergence between spelling and pronunciation. The majuscule , i.e., a system where text is written entirely in capital letters , was used until the 8th century, when
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3318-431: The acute and diaeresis indicates a stressed vowel after a hiatus. In textbooks and dictionaries of Ancient Greek, the macron —' ᾱ '—and breve —' ᾰ '—are often used over α , ι , and υ to indicate that it is long or short, respectively. In some modern non-standard orthographies of Greek dialects, such as Cypriot Greek , Griko , and Tsakonian , a caron (ˇ) may be used on some consonants to show
3397-426: The acute at the end of a word if another accented word follows immediately without punctuation . The circumflex ( περισπωμένη , perispōménē , 'twisted around') – ' ᾶ ' – marked high and falling pitch within one syllable. In distinction to the angled Latin circumflex, the Greek circumflex is printed in the form of either a tilde ( ◌̃ ) or an inverted breve ( ◌̑ ). It
3476-400: The advent of Unicode and appropriate fonts . The IETF language tags have registered subtag codes for the different orthographies: While the tónos of monotonic orthography looks similar to the oxeîa of polytonic orthography in most typefaces, Unicode has historically separate symbols for letters with these diacritics. For example, the monotonic "Greek small letter alpha with tónos "
3555-479: 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
3634-400: 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
3713-547: 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
3792-466: The death of an Athenian king would ensure the safety of Athens , quickly found its way to the ears of the king. Knowing Athens would fall to the foreign war tribe otherwise, after conquering most of Greece up to this point; for the love of his people, King Codrus sacrificed himself to save them. Disguised as a peasant, he made it to the vicinity of the Dorian encampment across the river, where he provoked
3871-463: 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
3950-423: The first of two (or occasionally three) successive vowels in Modern Greek to indicate that they are pronounced together as a stressed diphthong. The grave accent ( βαρεῖα , bareîa , 'heavy' or "low", modern varia ) – ' ὰ ' – marked normal or low pitch. The grave was originally written on all unaccented syllables. By the Byzantine period it was only used to replace
4029-428: The first rho and rough breathing on the second one ( διάῤῥοια ). In Latin, this was transcribed as rrh ( diarrhoea or diarrhea ). The coronis ( κορωνίς , korōnís , 'curved') marks a vowel contracted by crasis . It was formerly an apostrophe placed after the contracted vowel, but is now placed over the vowel and is identical to the smooth breathing. Unlike the smooth breathing, it often occurs inside
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#17328548738834108-410: 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
4187-444: 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
4266-424: The grave, and later this was generalized to all words in the orthography. Others—drawing on, for instance, evidence from ancient Greek music —consider that the grave was "linguistically real" and expressed a word-final modification of the acute pitch. In the later development of the language, the ancient pitch accent was replaced by an intensity or stress accent, making the three types of accent identical, and
4345-439: 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
4424-406: The last of the two vowels of a diphthong (ά, but αί) and indicated pitch patterns in Ancient Greek. The precise nature of the patterns is not certain, but the general nature of each is known. The acute accent ( ὀξεῖα , oxeîa , 'sharp' or "high") – ' ά ' – marked high pitch on a short vowel or rising pitch on a long vowel. The acute is also used on
4503-1206: The left of the letter rather than above it. Unlike other diacritics, the dieresis is kept above letters also in uppercase. Different conventions exist for the handling of the iota subscript . Diacritics can be found above capital letters in medieval texts and in the French typographical tradition up to the 19th century. Πάτερ ἡμῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς· ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομά σου· ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου· γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου, ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ, καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς· τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον· καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν, ὡς καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀφίεμεν τοῖς ὀφειλέταις ἡμῶν· καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν, ἀλλὰ ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ. Ἀμήν. Πάτερ ημών ο εν τοις ουρανοίς· αγιασθήτω το όνομά σου· ελθέτω η βασιλεία σου· γενηθήτω το θέλημά σου, ως εν ουρανώ, και επί της γης· τον άρτον ημών τον επιούσιον δος ημίν σήμερον· και άφες ημίν τα οφειλήματα ημών, ως και ημείς αφίεμεν τοις οφειλέταις ημών· και μη εισενέγκης ημάς εις πειρασμόν, αλλά ρύσαι ημάς από του πονηρού. Αμήν. There have been problems in representing polytonic Greek on computers, and in displaying polytonic Greek on computer screens and printouts, but these have largely been overcome by
4582-474: 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
4661-654: 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
4740-459: 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,
4819-418: 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":
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#17328548738834898-597: The presence or absence of an /h/ in Attic Greek , which had adopted a form of the alphabet in which the letter ⟨Η⟩ ( eta ) was no longer available for this purpose as it was used to represent the long vowel /ɛː/ . During the Hellenistic period (3rd century BC), Aristophanes of Byzantium introduced the breathings—marks of aspiration (the aspiration however being already noted on certain inscriptions, not by means of diacritics but by regular letters or modified letters)—and
4977-411: 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
5056-563: The sea-God Poseidon through his father Melanthus . The earliest version of the story of Codrus comes from the 4th oration Against Leocrates by Lycurgus of Athens . During the time of the Dorian Invasion of Peloponnesus (c. 1068 BC ), the Dorians under Aletes, son of Hippotes , had consulted the Delphic Oracle , who prophesied that their invasion would succeed as long as the king was not harmed. The news of this prophecy, that only
5135-462: 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
5214-434: 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
5293-562: The three accents have disappeared, and only a stress accent remains. The iota subscript was a diacritic invented to mark an etymological vowel that was no longer pronounced, so it was dispensed with as well. The transliteration of Greek names follows Latin transliteration of Ancient Greek; modern transliteration is different, and does not distinguish many letters and digraphs that have merged by iotacism . The accents ( Ancient Greek : τόνοι , romanized : tónoi , singular: τόνος , tónos ) are placed on an accented vowel or on
5372-472: The time of Ancient Greek, each of these marked a significant distinction in pronunciation. Monotonic orthography for Modern Greek uses only two diacritics, the tonos and diaeresis (sometimes used in combination) that have significance in pronunciation, similar to vowels in Spanish . Initial /h/ is no longer pronounced, and so the rough and smooth breathings are no longer necessary. The unique pitch patterns of
5451-459: 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
5530-414: 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
5609-440: 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
5688-400: 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,
5767-426: Was also known as ὀξύβαρυς oxýbarys "high-low" or "acute-grave", and its original form ( ^ ) was from a combining of the acute and grave diacritics. Because of its compound nature, it only appeared on long vowels or diphthongs. The breathings were written over a vowel or ρ. The rough breathing (Ancient Greek: δασὺ πνεῦμα , romanized: dasù pneûma ; Latin spīritus asper )—' ἁ '—indicates
5846-506: 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",
5925-468: Was in Demotic Greek . Following the official adoption of the demotic form of the language, the monotonic orthography was imposed by law in 1982. The latter uses only the acute accent (or sometimes a vertical bar , intentionally distinct from any of the traditional accents) and diaeresis and omits the breathings. This simplification has been criticized on the grounds that polytonic orthography provides
6004-462: Was not used in Classical Greece, these critics argue that modern Greek, as a continuation of Byzantine and post-medieval Greek, should continue their writing conventions. Some textbooks of Ancient Greek for foreigners have retained the breathings, but dropped all the accents in order to simplify the task for the learner. Polytonic Greek uses many different diacritics in several categories. At
6083-531: 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
6162-581: Was used above some consonants and vowels in Karamanli Turkish , which was written with the Greek alphabet. Diacritics are written above lower-case letters and at the upper left of capital letters. In the case of a digraph , the second vowel takes the diacritics. A breathing diacritic is written to the left of an acute or grave accent but below a circumflex. Accents are written above a diaeresis or between its two dots. In uppercase (all-caps), accents and breathings are eliminated, in titlecase they appear to
6241-399: 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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