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Greek Alphabet
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic Greece, Archaic and early Classical Greece, Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in Archaic Greek alphabets, many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BCE, the Euclidean alphabet, with 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used for Greek writing today. The letter case, uppercase and lowercase forms of the 24 letters are: : , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , /ς, , , , , , . The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of the Latin script, Latin and Cyrillic scripts. Like Latin and Cyrillic, Greek originally had only a single form of each letter; it developed the letter case distinction between uppercase and lowercase in parallel with Latin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sampi
Sampi (modern: ϡ; ancient shapes: , ) is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It was used as an addition to the classical 24-letter alphabet in some eastern Ionic dialects of ancient Greek in the 6th and 5th centuries BC, to denote some type of a sibilant sound, probably or , and was abandoned when the sound disappeared from Greek. It later remained in use as a numeral symbol for 900 in the alphabetic (" Milesian") system of Greek numerals. Its modern shape, which resembles a π inclining to the right with a longish curved cross-stroke, developed during its use as a numeric symbol in minuscule handwriting of the Byzantine era. Its current name, ''sampi'', originally probably meant "''san pi''", i.e. "like a pi", and is also of medieval origin. The letter's original name in antiquity is not known. It has been proposed that sampi was a continuation of the archaic letter '' san'', which was originally shaped like an M and denoted the sound in some other dialects. Besides ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
O (Cyrillic)
O (О о; italics: ) is a letter of the Cyrillic script. O commonly represents the close-mid back rounded vowel , like the pronunciation of in Scottish English "go". History The Cyrillic letter O was derived from the Greek letter Omicron (Ο ο). Form Modern fonts In modern-style typefaces, the Cyrillic letter O looks exactly like the Latin letter O and the Greek letter Omicron . Church Slavonic printed fonts and Slavonic manuscripts Historical typefaces (like ''poluustav'' (semi-uncial), a standard font style for the Church Slavonic typography) and old manuscripts represent several additional glyph variants of Cyrillic O, both for decorative and orthographic (sometimes also "hieroglyphic") purposes, namely: * broad variant (Ѻ/ѻ), used mostly as a word initial letter (see Broad On for more details); * narrow variant, being used now in Synodal Church Slavonic editions as the first element of digraph Oy/oy (see Uk (Cyrillic) for more details), and in the edition ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Classical Greek
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic period (), and the Classical period (). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers. It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance. This article primarily contains information about the Epic and Classical periods of the language. From the Hellenistic period (), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek, which is regarded as a separate historical stage, although its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek. There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek, of which Attic Greek developed into Koine. Dia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ayin
''Ayin'' (also ''ayn'' or ''ain''; transliterated ) is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic scripts, including Phoenician , Hebrew , Aramaic , Syriac ܥ, and Arabic (where it is sixteenth in abjadi order only). The letter represents a voiced pharyngeal fricative () or a similarly articulated consonant. In some Semitic languages and dialects, the phonetic value of the letter has changed, or the phoneme has been lost altogether (thus, in the revived Modern Hebrew it is reduced to a glottal stop or is omitted entirely in part due to European influence). The Phoenician letter is the origin of the Greek, Latin and Cyrillic letter O, O and O. It is the origin of letter Ƹ. Origins The letter name is derived from Proto-Semitic "eye", and the Phoenician letter had the shape of a circle or oval, clearly representing an eye, perhaps ultimately (via Proto-Sinaitic) derived from the ''ı͗r'' hieroglyph ( Gardiner D4). The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Ο, La ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Greek Numerals
Greek numerals, also known as Ionic, Ionian, Milesian, or Alexandrian numerals, are a system of writing numbers using the letters of the Greek alphabet. In modern Greece, they are still used for ordinal numbers and in contexts similar to those in which Roman numerals are still used in the Western world. For ordinary cardinal numbers, however, modern Greece uses Arabic numerals. History The Minoan and Mycenaean civilization Mycenaean Greece (or the Mycenaean civilization) was the last phase of the Bronze Age in Ancient Greece, spanning the period from approximately 1750 to 1050 BC.. It represents the first advanced and distinctively Greek civilization in mainland ...s' Linear A and Linear B alphabets used a different system, called Aegean numerals, which included number-only symbols for powers of ten: = 1, = 10, = 100, = 1000, and = 10000. Attic numerals comprised another system that came into use perhaps in th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Omega
Omega (; capital: Ω, lowercase: ω; Ancient Greek ὦ, later ὦ μέγα, Modern Greek ωμέγα) is the twenty-fourth and final letter in the Greek alphabet. In the Greek numeric system/isopsephy (gematria), it has a value of 800. The word literally means "great O" (''ō mega'', mega meaning "great"), as opposed to omicron, which means "little O" (''o mikron'', micron meaning "little"). In phonetic terms, the Ancient Greek Ω represented a long open-mid back rounded vowel , comparable to the "aw" of the English word ''raw'' in dialects without the cot–caught merger, in contrast to omicron which represented the close-mid back rounded vowel , and the digraph ''ου'' which represented the long close-mid back rounded vowel . In Modern Greek, both omega and omicron represent the mid back rounded vowel or . The letter omega is transliterated into a Latin-script alphabet as ''ō'' or simply ''o''. As the final letter in the Greek alphabet, omega is often used t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Digamma
Digamma or wau (uppercase: Ϝ, lowercase: ϝ, numeral: ϛ) is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It originally stood for the sound but it has remained in use principally as a Greek numeral for 6. Whereas it was originally called ''waw'' or ''wau'', its most common appellation in classical Greek is ''digamma''; as a numeral, it was called ''episēmon'' during the Byzantine era and is now known as '' stigma'' after the Byzantine ligature combining σ-τ as ϛ. Digamma or wau was part of the original archaic Greek alphabet as initially adopted from Phoenician. Like its model, Phoenician waw, it represented the voiced labial-velar approximant and stood in the 6th position in the alphabet between epsilon and zeta. It is the consonantal doublet of the vowel letter upsilon (), which was also derived from waw but was placed near the end of the Greek alphabet. Digamma or wau is in turn the ancestor of the Latin letter F. As an alphabetic letter, it is attested in archaic a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Koppa (letter)
Koppa or qoppa (; as a modern numeral sign: ) is a letter that was used in early forms of the Greek alphabet, derived from Phoenician qoph (). It was originally used to denote the sound, but dropped out of use as an alphabetic character in favor of Kappa (Κ). It has remained in use as a numeral symbol (90) in the system of Greek numerals, although with a modified shape. Koppa is the source of Latin Q, as well as the Cyrillic numeral sign of the same name ( Koppa). Alphabetic In Phoenician, qoph was pronounced ; in Greek, which lacked such a sound, it was instead used for before back vowels Ο, Υ and Ω. In this function, it was borrowed into the Italic alphabets and ultimately into Latin. However, as the sound had two redundant spellings, koppa was eventually replaced by kappa (Κ) in Greek. It remained in use as a letter in some Doric regions into the 5th century BC. The koppa was used as a symbol for the city of Corinth, which had the early spelling of . Numer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Omega
Omega (; capital: Ω, lowercase: ω; Ancient Greek ὦ, later ὦ μέγα, Modern Greek ωμέγα) is the twenty-fourth and final letter in the Greek alphabet. In the Greek numeric system/isopsephy (gematria), it has a value of 800. The word literally means "great O" (''ō mega'', mega meaning "great"), as opposed to omicron, which means "little O" (''o mikron'', micron meaning "little"). In phonetic terms, the Ancient Greek Ω represented a long open-mid back rounded vowel , comparable to the "aw" of the English word ''raw'' in dialects without the cot–caught merger, in contrast to omicron which represented the close-mid back rounded vowel , and the digraph ''ου'' which represented the long close-mid back rounded vowel . In Modern Greek, both omega and omicron represent the mid back rounded vowel or . The letter omega is transliterated into a Latin-script alphabet as ''ō'' or simply ''o''. As the final letter in the Greek alphabet, omega is often used t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pi (letter)
Pi (uppercase Π, lowercase π and ϖ; el, πι ) is the sixteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the voiceless bilabial plosive . In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 80. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Pe (). Letters that arose from pi include Latin P, Cyrillic Pe (П, п), Coptic pi (Ⲡ, ⲡ), and Gothic pairthra (𐍀). Uppercase Pi The uppercase letter Π is used as a symbol for: * In textual criticism, '' Codex Petropolitanus'', a 9th-century uncial codex of the Gospels, now located in St. Petersburg, Russia. * In legal shorthand, it represents a plaintiff. In science and engineering: * The product operator in mathematics, indicated with capital pi notation (in analogy to the use of the capital Sigma as summation symbol). * The osmotic pressure in chemistry. * The viscous stress tensor in continuum mechanics and fluid dynamics. Lowercase Pi The lowercase letter π is used as a symbol for: * The mathematical real transcen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zeta
Zeta (, ; uppercase Ζ, lowercase ζ; grc, ζῆτα, el, ζήτα, label= Demotic Greek, classical or ''zē̂ta''; ''zíta'') is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 7. It was derived from the Phoenician letter zayin . Letters that arose from zeta include the Roman Z and Cyrillic З. Name Unlike the other Greek letters, this letter did not take its name from the Phoenician letter from which it was derived; it was given a new name on the pattern of beta, eta and theta. The word ''zeta'' is the ancestor of ''zed'', the name of the Latin letter Z in Commonwealth English. Swedish and many Romanic languages (such as Italian and Spanish) do not distinguish between the Greek and Roman forms of the letter; "''zeta''" is used to refer to the Roman letter Z as well as the Greek letter. Uses Letter The letter ζ represents the voiced alveolar fricative in Modern Greek Modern Greek (, , or , ''Kiní Neoellinikí Gl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
