Greek alphabet: Encyclopedia II - Greek alphabet - History

Greek alphabet - History

Middle Bronze Age 19-15th c. BC

• Proto-Canaanite 14th c. BC
  • Ugaritic 13th c. BC
  • Phoenician 11th c. BC
    • Samaritan 6th c. BC
    • Aramaic 9th c. BC
      • Brāhmī 6th c. BC
      • Hebrew 3rd c. BC
      • Syriac 2nd c. BC
      • Avestan 3th c.
      • Arabic 4th c.
    • Greek 8th c. BC
      • Old Italic 8th c. BC
        • Latin 7th c. BC
        • Runes 2nd c.
      • Gothic 4th c.
      • Armenian 405
      • Glagolitic 862
      • Cyrillic 10th c.
    • Iberian
      • Celtiberian
  • South Arabian 9th c. BC
    • Ge'ez 3rd-4th c.

Main article: History of the Greek alphabet.

According to legend, the inventor of the Greek alphabet was named Cadmus of Miletus, but this may be only a myth.

The most notable change in the Greek alphabet, compared to its predecessor, 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, epsilon, iota, omicron, and upsilon (copied from waw), modifications of either glides or breathing marks, which were mostly superfluous in Greek. In eastern Greek, which lacked breaths entirely, the letter eta was also used for a long e, and eventually the letter omega was introduced for a long o. Vowels were originally not used in Semitic alphabets, but even in the very old Ugaritic alphabet matres lectionis were used, i.e. consonant signs were used to denote vowels.

Greek also introduced three new consonants, appended to the end of the alphabet as they were developed. These consonants made up for the lack of aspirates in Phoenician. In west Greek, Χ was used for /ks/ and Ψ for /kʰ/ — hence the value of our letter x, derived from the western Greek alphabet. Over the middle ages these aspirates disappeared, so now theta, phi, and chi stand for /θ/, /f/, and /x/. The origin of those letters is disputed.

The letter san was used at variance with sigma, and by classical times the latter won out, san disappearing from the alphabet. The letters waw (later called digamma) and qoppa disappeared, too, the former only needed for the western dialects and the latter never really needed at all. These lived on in the Ionic numeral system, however, which consisted of writing a series letters with precise numerical values. Sampi (apparently in a rare local glyph form from Ionia) was introduced at the end - to stand for 900. Thousands were written using a mark at the upper left ('A for 1000, etc).

Originally there were several variants of the Greek alphabet, most importantly western (Chalcidian) and eastern (Ionic) Greek; the former gave rise to the Old Italic alphabet and thence to the Latin alphabet. Athens took the Ionic script to be its standard in 403 BC, and shortly thereafter the other versions disappeared. By then Greek was always written left to right, but originally it had been written right to left (with asymmetrical characters flipped), and in-between written either way - or, most likely, boustrophedon, so that the lines alternate direction.

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. The letter σ is even written ς at the ends of words, paralleling the use of the long and short s at the time. Aristophanes of Byzantium also introduced the process of accenting Greek letters for easier pronunciation.

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 (Note that some web browser/font combinations will show the other qoppa here).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki