Status: official language of Greece, an official.
Writing systems: Linear B, Cypriot syllabary, Greek alphabet.Spoken in: Greece, Albania, Cyprus, and a number of other countries.Language family: Indo-European, Hellenic.The result was the world's first fully phonemic alphabet which represented both consonant and vowel sounds. New letters were also devised: Φ (phi), Χ (chi) and Ψ (psi).
When the Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet to write their language they used five of the Phoenician consonants to represent vowel sounds: yodh (?) became Ι (iota), waw (?) became Υ (upsilon), 'aleph (?) became Α (alpha), 'ayin (?) became Ο (omicron), and he (?) became Ε (epsilon). For example, alpha comes for the Canaanite aleph (ox) and beta from beth (house). The original Canaanite meanings of the letter names was lost when the alphabet was adapted for Greek. It was developed from the Canaanite/Phoenician alphabet and the order and names of the letters are derived from Phoenician. The Greek alphabet has been in continuous use since about 750 BC. On Crete another script, known as the Cypriot syllabary, was used to write the local variety of Greek between about 1200 and 300 BC. This variety of Greek is known as Mycenaean. Greek was first written in Mycenae with a script known as Linear B, which was used between about 15 BC. There were about 238,000 Greek speakers in Australia in 2016, and in 1987 there were about 20,000 Greek speakers in Italy. In 2012 there were about 13.1 million speakers of Greek worldwide, including 10.7 million in Greece, 1.1 million in Cyprus, and 15,200 in Albania. It is an official language in Greece and Cyprus, and is recognised as a minority language Albania, Armenia, Hungary, Italy, Romania, Turkey and Ukraine. It is spoken mainly in Greece and Cyprus, and also in Australia, Albania, Italy, Ukraine, Turkey, Romania and Hungary. One can get an idea of how older Greek pronunciations sounded, by looking at the Latin and English spellings of Greek loanwords like "philosopher", "Chimera", "Cyprus", and "Thessalonica".Greek belongs to the Hellenic branch of the Indo-European language family. Some of the vowel sounds began to sound similar to one another, aspirated voiceless stops became voiceless fricatives, and voiced stops became voiced fricatives. 257–185 BC), a Greek scholar and grammarian, invented the three diacritics (accent marks): acute, grave, and circumflex, to mark the tone or pitch of Greek words.Īlthough the Greek letters accurately represented all the main sounds of the Greek language early on, the sounds of the Greek language changed over time. A little later, the rest of Greece did the same, and by 350 BC, during the life of Alexander the Great, almost all Greeks were using the same twenty-four letter Greek alphabet. But over time, all Greeks started to use the same alphabet, especially after the Ionic alphabet of Miletus was officially adopted in Athens in 403 BC.
There were some differences in the early Greek alphabet depending on what part of the Greek world it was used in. In general, Indo-European languages did not use consonant-based roots (where the word's central meaning is based on the consonants) like those in Semitic languages such as Phoenician, Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic.Īt first, Greek was written from right to left, same as Phoenician, but after the 6th century BC, it was written from left to right. The Greek change made reading easier for trading with other cultures. But the Greek addition of vowels was better for countries where it might be a second language.
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Obviously, their peoples knew how to say the words, so that worked well for them. The Phoenicians had written their abjad without any vowels, and this is the case with Hebrew and Arabic to the present day. Some of the Phoenician letters for sounds not used in Greek were turned into vowels. The alphabet was borrowed from the Phoenician alphabet around the 10th century BC, with many changes to make it fit the Greek language. The Greek alphabet is thought to be where most European alphabets came from. The twenty-four letters (each in uppercase and lowercase forms) are: Most letters in the Greek alphabet have an equivalent in the English language. The Greek alphabet is also frequently used in science and mathematics to represent various values or variables. The modern Greek alphabet has 24 letters. Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.