Heta is a conventional name for the historical
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 we ...
letter
Eta
Eta (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἦτα ''ē̂ta'' or ell, ήτα ''ita'' ) is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the close front unrounded vowel . Originally denoting the voiceless glottal fricative in most dialects, ...
(Η) and several of its variants, when used in their original function of denoting the consonant .
Overview
The letter Η had been adopted by Greek from the
Phoenician letter
Heth
Heth, sometimes written Chet, but more accurately Ḥet, is the eighth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Ḥēt 𐤇 , Hebrew Ḥēth , Aramaic Ḥēth , Syriac Ḥēṯ ܚ, Arabic Ḥā' , and Maltese Ħ, ħ.
Heth originall ...
(
![Phoenician heth](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Phoenician_heth.svg)
) originally with this consonantal sound value, and ''Hēta'' was its original name. The
Italic alphabets, and ultimately
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
, adopted the letter H from this Greek usage. However, Greek dialects progressively lost the sound from their phonological systems. In the
Ionic dialects, where this loss of happened early, the name of the letter naturally changed to ''Ēta'', and the letter was subsequently turned from a consonant to a new use as a vowel, denoting the long
half-open sound. In this function it later entered the classical orthography adopted across the whole of Greece. According to traditional accounts, the new vowel, ''Ēta'', was originally the innovation of the poet
Simonides of Ceos
Simonides of Ceos (; grc-gre, Σιμωνίδης ὁ Κεῖος; c. 556–468 BC) was a Greek lyric poet, born in Ioulis on Ceos. The scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria included him in the canonical list of the nine lyric poets esteemed ...
(556-468 BC).
![Thera Arkhagetas inscription](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Thera_Arkhagetas_inscription.svg)
In dialects that still had the sound as part of their phonological systems, including early
Athens
Athens ( ; el, Αθήνα, Athína ; grc, Ἀθῆναι, Athênai (pl.) ) is both the capital and largest city of Greece. With a population close to four million, it is also the seventh largest city in the European Union. Athens dominates ...
, the same letter continued to be used in its consonantal function. Just like
vocalic
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...
Eta, it could occur in a number of glyph variants in different local varieties of the alphabet, including one shaped like a square "8" similar to the original Phoenician (
![Greek Eta archaic](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Greek_Eta_archaic.svg)
), but also a plain square (
![Greek Eta square](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Greek_Eta_square.svg)
), a crossed square (
![Greek Eta cross](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/Greek_Eta_cross.svg)
), shapes with two horizontal (
![Greek Eta 2-bars](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Greek_Eta_2-bars.svg)
![Greek Eta square-2-bars](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Greek_Eta_square-2-bars.svg)
) or with diagonal bars (
![Greek Eta diagonal](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/Greek_Eta_diagonal.svg)
![Greek Eta diagonal-2-bars](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4b/Greek_Eta_diagonal-2-bars.svg)
).
![Eta and Heta](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Eta_and_Heta.svg)
During the classical era, more dialects adopted the new Ionian vocalic Eta (as Athens did around c. 400 BC). As many of these dialects nevertheless still also pronounced , they faced the problem of distinguishing between their own old consonantal symbol and the new vocalic symbol. Some dialects, including classical Attic, simply omitted the marking of the -sound. In others (for instance
Rhodes
Rhodes (; el, Ρόδος , translit=Ródos ) is the largest and the historical capital of the Dodecanese islands of Greece. Administratively, the island forms a separate municipality within the Rhodes regional unit, which is part of the So ...
), the same symbol was used in both functions. Others distinguished between glyph variants, for instance in
Delphi
Delphi (; ), in legend previously called Pytho (Πυθώ), in ancient times was a sacred precinct that served as the seat of Pythia, the major oracle who was consulted about important decisions throughout the ancient classical world. The oracle ...
by using the closed square sign (
![Greek Eta archaic](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Greek_Eta_archaic.svg)
) for , and the open H for the vowel. In the southern Italian colonies of
Heracleia and
Tarentum Tarentum may refer to:
* Taranto, Apulia, Italy, on the site of the ancient Roman city of Tarentum (formerly the Greek colony of Taras)
**See also History of Taranto
* Tarentum (Campus Martius), also Terentum, an area in or on the edge of the Camp ...
, a new innovative shape for was invented, consisting of a single vertical stem and a rightward-pointing horizontal bar, like a half H (
![Greek Eta tack](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Greek_Eta_tack.svg)
). From this sign, later scholars developed the
rough breathing
In the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, the rough breathing ( grc, δασὺ πνεῦμα, dasỳ pneûma or ''daseîa''; la, spīritus asper) character is a diacritical mark used to indicate the presence of an sound before a vowel, d ...
or ''spiritus asper'', which brought back the marking of the old sound into the standardized post-classical (
polytonic
Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period. The more complex polytonic orthography ( el, πολυτονικό σύστημα γραφής, translit=polytonikó sýstīma grafī́s), which includes fiv ...
) orthography of Greek in the form of a
diacritic
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...
.
From ''
scholia
Scholia (singular scholium or scholion, from grc, σχόλιον, "comment, interpretation") are grammatical, critical, or explanatory comments – original or copied from prior commentaries – which are inserted in the margin of th ...
'' to the grammar of
Dionysius Thrax
Dionysius Thrax ( grc-gre, Διονύσιος ὁ Θρᾷξ ''Dionýsios ho Thrâix'', 170–90 BC) was a Greek grammarian and a pupil of Aristarchus of Samothrace. He was long considered to be the author of the earliest grammatical text on the G ...
, it appears that the memory of the former consonantal value of the letter Η was still alive in the era of the Alexandrine
Koiné insofar as the name of the vocalic η was still pronounced "heta" and accordingly written with a rough breathing. The later standard spelling of the name ''eta'', however, has the smooth breathing.
Under the Roman emperor
Claudius
Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (; 1 August 10 BC – 13 October AD 54) was the fourth Roman emperor, ruling from AD 41 to 54. A member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, Claudius was born to Nero Claudius Drusus, Drusu ...
in the mid-1st century AD, Latin briefly re-borrowed the letter in the shape of the half-H tack glyph, as one of the so-called
Claudian letters
The Claudian letters were developed by the Roman emperor Claudius (reigned 41–54). He introduced three new letters to the Latin alphabet:
*Ↄ or ↃϹ/X (''antisigma'') to replace BS and PS, much as X stood in for CS and GS. The shape o ...
. It denoted the ''
sonus medius
Latin phonology continually evolved over the centuries, making it difficult for speakers in one era to know how Latin was spoken before then. A given phoneme may be represented by different letters in different periods. This article deals primar ...
'', a short close vowel sound of a quality between ''i'' and ''u''.
In modern transcriptions and editions of ancient Greek
epigraphic
Epigraphy () is the study of inscriptions, or epigraphs, as writing; it is the science of identifying graphemes, clarifying their meanings, classifying their uses according to dates and cultural contexts, and drawing conclusions about the wr ...
text that use consonantal Heta, in any of its shapes, the letter is most often rendered simply with a Latin ''h'', both in Latin transliteration and in Greek scholarly transcriptions (using lowercase in Greek, so that Latin ''h'' and Greek η are distinct). Some authors have also adopted the Heracleian "tack" Heta (
![Greek Eta tack](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Greek_Eta_tack.svg)
) for use in modern transcription.
[Nick Nicholas, "Greek h"](_blank)
Jeffery (1961) uses the tack symbol also as a modern label for the abstract
grapheme
In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system.
The word ''grapheme'' is derived and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called ''graphemics' ...
, i.e. as a cover label for any letter shape denoting in any given local alphabet.
Computer encoding
![Heta uc lc](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Heta_uc_lc.svg)
The
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
standard of computer encoding introduced code points for a tack-shaped "Greek letter Heta" designed for this usage in its version 5.1 of April 2008. Like other archaic letters, Unicode Heta comes in an uppercase and lowercase variant to cater for the needs of modern typography.
Summary of repertoire for FDAM 3 of ISO/IEC 10646
/ref> Type designers have created several designs for this new typographic lowercase form, one of them resembling a lowercase Latin h with a straight rightward horizontal bar. The Greek Heta codepoints are distinct from another set designed to represent the tack-shaped Claudian "Latin letter half H" (Latin Extended-C
Latin Extended-C is a Unicode block containing Latin characters for Uighur New Script, the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, Shona, Claudian Latin and the Swedish Dialect Alphabet.
Block
History
The following Unicode-related documents record the pur ...
).
See also
*Turnstile (symbol)
In mathematical logic and computer science the symbol \vdash has taken the name turnstile because of its resemblance to a typical turnstile if viewed from above. It is also referred to as tee and is often read as "yields", "proves", "satisfies" o ...
(Similar looking glyphs)
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Heta (Letter)
Greek letters