The Greek language is written in the Greek alphabet, developed in classical times (around the 9th century BC) and passed down to the present. In ancient Greece, its letters were also used to represent numbers, called Greek numerals, in analogy with Roman numerals. Its letters are nowadays used for a variety of other purposes: as mathematical symbols, as names of stars, as names of fraternities and sororities, and so forth.

Overview

It is believed that the Greek alphabet was brought to Greece via Phoenician traders. Greek is derived from a Semitic script, but there is controversy as to which one, with both Proto-Canaanite and Phoenician as possibilities.

Because Greek minuscules arose at a (much) later date, no historic minuscule actually exists for san. Minuscule forms for the other letters were only used numerically. For number 6 modern Greeks use an old digraph called stigma (Ϛ, ϛ) instead of digamma or use στ if it is not available. For 90 they use modern z-shaped qoppa forms: Ϟ, ϟ.

Main table

The Greek letters and their derivations are as follows (pronunciations transcribed using the International Phonetic Alphabet):

(1): Letter removed from the alphabet in early times, before the period that is now called "classical".

Letter combinations and diphthongs

(2): Some scholars see agma as a phoneme in its own right.

Greek in Unicode

There are 2 main blocks of Greek characters in Unicode. The first is "Greek and Coptic" (U+0370 — U+03FF). This block is based on ISO 8859-7 and is sufficient to write Modern Greek. There are also some archaic letters and Greek-based technical symbols.

This block also supports Coptic language, most Coptic letters sharing codepoints with looking-alike Greek letters. For Unicode 4.1, it is planned to disunify Coptic from Greek since in many scholarly works, both of them occur, with quite different letter shapes.

To write polytonic Greek (Old Greek or Katharevousa), one may use combining diacritical marks. However, Unicode also includes a full set of precomposed characters in the "Greek Extended" block (U+1F00 — U+1FFF).

Greek and Coptic

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

A

B

C

D

E

F

370

Ͱ

ͱ

Ͳ

ͳ

ʹ

͵

Ͷ

ͷ

͸

͹

ͺ

ͻ

ͼ

ͽ

;

Ϳ

380

΀

΁

΂

΃

΄

΅

Ά

·

Έ

Ή

Ί

΋

Ό

΍

Ύ

Ώ

390

ΐ

Α

Β

Γ

Δ

Ε

Ζ

Η

Θ

Ι

Κ

Λ

Μ

Ν

Ξ

Ο

3A0

Π

Ρ

΢

Σ

Τ

Υ

Φ

Χ

Ψ

Ω

Ϊ

Ϋ

ά

έ

ή

ί

3B0

ΰ

α

β

γ

δ

ε

Results from FactBites:

Greek alphabet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (1136 words) Besides writing modern Greek, today its letters are used as mathematical symbols, as names of stars, in the names of fraternities and sororities, in the naming of supernumerary tropical cyclones, and for other purposes. The Greek alphabet originated as a modification of the Phoenician alphabet and in turn gave rise to the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, as well as others, as documented in History of the alphabet. During the Middle ages, the Greek scripts underwent changes paralleling those of the Roman alphabet: while the old forms were retained as a monumental script, uncial and eventually minuscule hands came to dominate. Greek alphabet - definition of Greek alphabet in Encyclopedia (1037 words) The Greek language is written in the Greek alphabet, developed in classical times (around the 9th century BC) and passed down to the present. Its letters are nowadays used for a variety of other purposes: as mathematical symbols, as names of stars, as names of fraternities and sororities, and so forth. Greek is derived from a Semitic script, but there is controversy as to which one, with both Proto-Canaanite and Phoenician as possibilities.

More results at FactBites »