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Greek Alphabet: Letters
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The Greek alphabet is thought to be where all important European alphabets came from. Although the alphabet was borrowed from the Phoenicians around the 10th century BC, there were many changes made to make it fit the Greek language. The main change was that some of the Phoenician letters that were for sounds not used in Greek were turned into vowels. The Phoenicians had written their alphabet without any vowels, so this change made writing a lot easier to read. Another change is that some new letters were invented for sounds in Greek but not in Phoenician. At first, Greek was written from right to left, the same as Phoenician, but after the 6th century BC, it was written from left to right.
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Greek ... introduced three new consonants, appended to the end of the alphabet as they were developed. The consonants were to mainly to make up for the lack of aspirates in Phoenician. In west Greek, actually, chi was used for /ks/ and psi for /k_h/ - hence the value of our letter x, derived from chi. Over the middle ages these aspirates disappeared, so now theta, phi, and chi stand for /T/, /f/, and /x/. The origin of those letters is disputed: According to Miller (53), the Ψ-form kappa comes from the Proto-Canaanite. Kappa probably stood for /k/ as well as /k_h/ in early Greek orthography. Later on, the K-like kap was re-borrowed from Phoenician, in order to distinguish /k/ from /k_h/ graphemically (ibid.).
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The first step in learning Greek is to learn the alphabet. The way to do this is to write out the small letters in order until you can do it neatly and quickly. It makes sense to memorize the letters in order because you will want to look up words in a lexicon, which will be arranged alphabetically. Once you have the small letters, the capitals will be no problem. Just make sure to get them the right way round. It is easy to print the small letters like a medieval scribe, and helps in recognition.
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The standard Greek alphabet doesn't include a separate letter for the H sound, even though many dialects of Greek had the sound. Instead two small marks called "breathing marks" are used. One, the so-called "smooth breathing" means nothing and it's a bit silly, really. It looks like an apostrophe before a capital vowel or over a lower case vowel. The other, the so-called "rough breathing," which looks like a reverse apostrophe (the open side faces to the right), means that the word starts with an H sound and should be transliterated with an initial H. The classical Greeks themselves didn't use these marks because they grew up knowing which words started with H and which didn't. One strange thing: All words beginning with upsilon in Greek have the rough breathing.
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The most notable change in the Greek alphabet, as an adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet, is the introduction of written vowels, without which Greek — unlike Phoenician — would be unintelligible. In fact most alphabets that contain vowels are derived ultimately from Greek, although there are exceptions (Hangul, Orkhon script, Ge'ez alphabet, Indic alphabets, and Old Hungarian script). The first vowels were alpha, e (later epsilon), iota, o (later omicron), and u (later upsilon), modifications of Semitic glottal, aspirate, or glide consonants that were mostly superfluous in Greek: /'/ (aleph), /h/ (he), /j/ (yodh), /`/ (ayin), and /w/ (waw), respectively. In eastern Greek, which lacked breaths entirely, the letter eta (from the Semitic aspirate consonant
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The Greek alphabet is thought to be the ancestor of all major European alphabets today. Although the script was adapted from the Semites around the tenth or ninth century BCE, it included significant improvements which were directly responsible for its influence. Among the improvements were the transformation of certain Semitic letters into vowels, and the invention of new letters for sounds absent from Semitic languages. Originally, just like the Semitic scripts, Greek was written from right to left but following the sixth century BCE, it was already written from left to right and top to bottom.
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