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Does not one here know of the epigraphs of Alonnisos and Dispiliou? They have greek letters and are dated to be old as 5260BC. This puts into question the claim that they originate from the Phoenician Alphabet. —Preceding unsigned comment added by WhiteMagick ( talk • contribs) 00:26, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
That claim that the Greek alphabet arises from Phoenician and not from Linear B or Cypriot definitely wants further evidence. I've added a citation needed tag. k. da-ma-te ( talk) 20:30, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
According to some modern scholarship, Greek MAY be derived from Phoenician. Maybe not. The "official story" is not necessarily the correct one. As things stand, the claim is in dispute and it is an active argument. Linear B is a popular culprit as is Cypriot. "... supported by every treatment of Greek you could possibly look up anywhere," is sort of an old and thoughtless argument. If a million people say a wrong thing it is still wrong. Researchers tend toward laziness. Gingermint ( talk) 02:13, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
Even the ancient Greeks were aware that it derived from the Phoenician. See Herodotus..... --
Andriolo (
talk) 10:13, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
If stigma is merely a stylistic ligature, then I agree that it should be removed from the Obsolete Letters table. In that case, it was never a letter. FilipeS ( talk) 18:51, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
But stigma was never an independent letter. It was always possible and correct to replace it with sigma-tau. Psi cannot be replaced with pi-sigma. Stigma seems to have been always an optional ligature. As such, it should not be regarded as a letter; it is merely a glyph. FilipeS ( talk) 19:17, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
That's a matter of opinion. I think it does look like a sigma merged with a tau, and historically its origin is clearly in a ligature. See here. FilipeS ( talk) 19:24, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
There are two functions of the symbol stigma ϛ: one as a ligature for the sequence sigma-tau; the other as a Greek numeral, where it is really a glyph for digamma. Neither of these constitutes a "letter" in any conventional sense. Nor is the "letter" stigma ever mentioned in the alphabetical sequence of the Greek letters. Its graphic form is very similar to the final sigma ς (which is of course also not a letter in itself) and sometimes they are mistakenly exchanged.
As a ligature, it is found in many manuscripts and in a few printed texts which use ligatures. Though in modern Greek typography there are essentially no ligatures, some old fonts contain dozens (see the punches for Claude Garamond's grecs du roi), none of which count as 'letters'.
It is silly to write the name of stigma as ϛῖγμα -- unless of course someone can find a WP:Reliable Source for this usage. -- Macrakis ( talk) 18:58, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
That is assuming that stigma is an 'obsolete letter'. But it is a ligature. Can you find any examples in reliable sources where stigma is used in this way? -- Macrakis ( talk) 21:26, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
But it isn't written like that in modern scholarship, even where modern scholarship discusses the historical name "stigma". Read Use–mention distinction. Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:20, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
This evidence is in existence of stigma itself. Ligatures are always used as letter-cluster replacements. They are never used for nothing. Additionally, I place for your convenience all new Greek Unicode 5.1 codepoints:
I always thought that stigma is a letter or alphabetic ligature in sense of Æ and Œ, but you say that stigma is a ligature in sense of ff and fi, but even these f-related ligatures are used in words, for example stuff and figure. Even Google accepts such input. 79.162.61.204 ( talk) 19:48, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
What would make you think that it is a letter like Scandinavian Æ? Of course ligatures like ff are used to typeset words; that doesn't make them "letters". And back to the original question: do you have any Reliable Source that shows the rendition ϛῖγμα? Sure, it was used in manuscripts, but many other ligatures were also used in manuscripts. Anon/CB, you are the only one as far as I can tell arguing for stigma as a letter. Until you or someone else finds evidence, I think we can safely remove stigma as a letter of the Greek alphabet, and remove the spelling ϛῖγμα. -- Macrakis ( talk) 20:17, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
Of course I meant User:CBMIBM. Can you please clarify, are you saying you are not CBMIBM? Just curious. Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:47, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
From what has been said in this discussion, I conclude that stigma should be considered a glyph variant of the grapheme "ςτ", and not a proper letter. With respect to Latin Æ and Œ, they started out as glyph variants as well, and in some languages (English, French...) they are still no more than variants of "AE" and "OE". In other languages, however (Danish, Norwegian...), they are used to represent individual sounds, with a different sound value from "AE" and "OE". So they are proper, independent letters in some alphabets. FilipeS ( talk) 21:17, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
As I predicted, codepoints in beta and final Unicode 5.1 remains the same, exactly according to official Unicode statement that even in beta stage codepoints remains final and stable. CBMIBM ( talk) 09:06, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
When is the source that substantiates the claim that stigma is a letter? FilipeS ( talk) 09:46, 27 June 2008 (UTC)
I'm really confused. I feel like an idiot now, but I always thought stigma was just another way of writing sigma. Don't you write stigma when you're finishing a word? ουρανός, for example? Isn't that stigma, or is that still sigma, just different? I'm confused. Can some one explain it, the article doesn't really. -Panther ( talk) 18:25, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Anybody know why the "obsolete letters" table gives the historical pronunciation of waw as "probably" [w], and not just as [w]? Is there any serious alternative? Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:56, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
Ah, thanks for the pointer. Interesting case. Given that both [w] > [v], and [w] > zero, are pretty natural sound changes, while [v] > zero would be odd, and on the other side digamma < idg. /ŭ/ seems etymologically certain, I'll go out on an OR limb and declare [w] as established. As long as nobody comes across an actual alternative proposal for Ancient Greek. Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:14, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
When we write something between brackets [ ], we mean the sound. See International Phonetic Alphabet. ;-) FilipeS ( talk) 21:56, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
We should have a section on the development of the lettershapes: ancient cursive forms, the shift to uncial style in Byzantine times, the adaptation to typesetting, the innovation of uppercase/lowercase usage... Anybody has some good material at hand? Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:48, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
User Mackaris has just removed the letter sho from the Obsolete letters table. However, judging from the previous discussion, there is no consensus in favour of this change. FilipeS ( talk) 18:28, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
Well, you have a point about the Roman/Latin alphabet article. It is true that sho can be considered an "uncommon" letter of the Greek alphabet. But the thing is that there are many, many rare extra letters in the Latin alphabet, whereas that does not seem to be the case with the Greek alphabet, which has historically not been used by as many languages. And I'm not sure that the Coptic letters should be considered letters of the Greek alphabet, rather than part of an independent (though Greek-based) alphabet, like the Cyrillic alphabet is. FilipeS ( talk) 19:12, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
Coptic is different from Bactrian in the same way that the Latin alphabet or the Cyrillic alphabet are different from Bactrian. Nobody regards the former as variants of the Greek alphabet nowadays. FilipeS ( talk) 19:54, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
According to the Greek Grammar text book taught in Greek elementary schools, the letters ε, ο and υ are pronounced έψιλο, όμικρο and ύψιλο respectively (without the finite ν). pinikas ( talk) 19:06, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
See further discussion at Talk:Alpha and Omega... AnonMoos ( talk) 17:30, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
Reference note: The user going by CBMIBM (who has also been warned repeatedly on his talk page by editors) has archived the detailed talk page here to hide his recent massive edits to the Greek alphabet page. Perhaps a Wikipedian with some time can restore both the talk page, the Greek alphabet table, and place protection on the page. Sturmde ( talk) 16:08, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
With regard to the Wikinger (CBMIBM) image Image:Greek alphabet extended.png -- the additions to the standard Greek alphabet of 24 letters there are a miscellaneous grab-bag of various archaic letters (rarely used after ca. 300 B.C.), numerical symbols not usually used as letters, letters used only in the writing of non-Greek languages, and medieval ligatures identified with numerical symbols. There was never a single historical alphabetic sequence, or sequence of alphabetic symbols used numerically, which included all these "letters". See further at Talk:Alpha and Omega. AnonMoos ( talk) 00:51, 16 March 2008 (UTC)
This sentence appears in the second paragraph of the section currently labeled history: "Its most notable change, as an adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet, is the introduction of vowel letters, without which Greek, unlike Phoenician, would be illegible." Is this sentence stating that Phoenician was illegible, or legible but without the use of vowels? I am assuming the latter simply because the former is absurd, and if so, I believe the sentence should be reworded to resonate the intended meaning more clearly. ( PhilipDSullivan ( talk) 00:17, 9 February 2008 (UTC))
This page appears in the category Keyboard layouts, but I don't see anything about Greek keyboards here. There's an article about the QWERTZ keyboard (used in German-speaking countries), and one about the AZERTY keyboard (used in French-speaking countries), but I haven't found one on Greek keyboards. See the image at http://www.anotek.com/ANOTEKCLASSIC.GIF. Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:57, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
Am I the only one to object to the "Pronunciation" column in this section? The supposed English pronunciation is inaccurate (I've never heard anyone pronounce "psi" in English with a silent p) and it's a disgrace to not use proper IPA in an article on a linguistic subject. I was about to correct it myself until I realised it's an image. -- rossb ( talk) 22:35, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
Please take a look at this wiki - page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispilio_Tablet. In the last twelve years there are findings basically from to archaelogists n.sampson and g.hourmouziadis that testify that there have been written texts from 5000 - 6000bc. Please update the article —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.75.239.19 ( talk) 14:57, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
The article states that the alternative "curled" form of beta is mainly used at the ends of words. Given that a Greek word cannot normally end with a beta, I wonder why there should be a special version for this position? -- rossb ( talk) 16:44, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
For example, Greek letter Stigma can be spelled as Ϛιγμα using Stigma itself instead of Στιγμα, because here: http://anubis.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n1743.pdf is good example of its usage as Stigma itself within words instead of Sigma-Tau sequence within the same words with many book references in printed text beginning with words: "SMALL LETTER STIGMA was used widely in Greek typography throughout the history of printing Greek." CBMIBM ( talk) 09:14, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
got jealous of the
German Alphabet.
where do i put this?
CuteHappyBrute ( talk) 04:31, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
CuteHappyBrute ( talk) 06:13, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
I hear someone sparking up a cigarette at the 0:12 and 0:14 mark... Figures... — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
203.49.173.174 (
talk) 01:00, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
While in Cyprus I noticed that "Y" is often translated as "u" (at least when it falls in the middle of a place name). Is this a Cypriot anomaly, or does this need adding to the page (which only lists y, v & f as transliterations in the "Modern Greek" column)? 86.31.247.136 ( talk) 15:55, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
Template:Greek alphabet has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for Deletion page. Thank you. — Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:26, 30 June 2008 (UTC)
From what I read somewhere, Ancient Greek "gg" used to be read "ng", so that "aggelos" was actually read "angelos"; similarly, "gk" was read "nk" and "gch" was read "nch". I couldn't find anything about the phonetical value of these groups of letters anywhere in the article. Shouldn't we write it in the section with the phonetical values of the letters? bogdan ( talk) 22:41, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Hi, why are the letters used in this Hercules poster considered Greek? Most notable the e. I see this very often with Greek restaurants here in the Netherlands. Does anyone have an explanation? Mallerd ( talk) 22:46, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
Yes I meant the Disney cartoon. There is no real Greek alphabet which even looks like the cartoon? Mallerd ( talk) 00:22, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
Greek letters used in English text, he created what I meant. Faux Cyrillic is on the same par. Mallerd ( talk) 15:27, 9 October 2008 (UTC)
Does the nabla symbol deserve any mention? BethelRunner ( talk) 21:30, 27 July 2008 (UTC)
The Armenian alphabet is not a child system of the Greek alphabet. There have been many scholarly debates about this issue in the past, with some classifying the Armenian script as Greek, others as Aramaic. Today, everybody agrees that while three letters are direct adaptions from the Greek alphabet and the general vowel designating system is inspired by the Greek system, the Armenian alphabet is essentially a free invention inspired by all surrounding alphabets at the time of its creation, i.e. the various Persian Pahlavi alphabets (based on Aramaic and very clearly illustrated e.g. in the Armenian ayb [a]) and amongst others also the Greek alphabet. I would thus suggest removing the Armenian alphabet as a child system from the article. Besides of that, if you include the Armenian alphabet, you should include the Georgian one too (also an invention), for they both are interrelated.
Literature:
DANIELS, PETER T. (Hg.) und BRIGHT, WILLIAM (Hg.), The World’s Writing Systems. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996
HAARMANN, HARALD, Universalgeschichte der Schrift. 2., durchges. Auflage. Frankfurt/Main, New York: Campus Verlag, 1991
SCHMITT, RÜDIGER, Grammatik des Klassisch-Armenischen mit sprachvergleichenden Erläuterungen. 2., durchgesehene Auflage. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachen und Literaturen der Universität Innsbruck, 2007 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.167.154.82 ( talk) 22:49, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
I am failing this article for its good article review because it is almost completely devoid of inline citations. Please renominate it once it has more inline citations. Gary King ( talk) 05:58, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
Mediawiki will convert some Unicode characters to canonical mappings. For example, U+1F71 will be automatically converted to U+03AC. The greek letters that will be automatically converted by Mediawiki are 0374, 037E, 0387, 1F71, 1F73, 1F75, 1F77, 1F79, 1F7B, 1F7D, 1FBB, 1FBE, 1FC9, 1FCB, 1FD3, 1FDB, 1FE3, 1FEB, 1FEE, 1FEF, 1FF9, 1FFB, 1FFD.-- ✉ Hello World! 08:20, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
Without special markup | Enclosed in {{ lang-gr}} | Enclosed in {{ polytonic}} | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Original | Remapped | Original | Remapped | Original | Remapped | ||
U+0374 | ʹ | Greek: ʹ | Greek: | ʹ | |||
U+037E | ; | Greek: ; | Greek: | ; | |||
U+0387 | · | Greek: · | Greek: | · | |||
U+1F71 | ά | ά | Greek: ά | Greek: ά | ά | ά | |
U+1F73 | έ | έ | Greek: έ | Greek: έ | έ | έ | |
U+1F75 | ή | ή | Greek: ή | Greek: ή | ή | ή | |
U+1F77 | ί | ί | Greek: ί | Greek: ί | ί | ί | |
U+1F79 | ό | ό | Greek: ό | Greek: ό | ό | ό | |
U+1F7B | ύ | ύ | Greek: ύ | Greek: ύ | ύ | ύ | |
U+1F7D | ώ | ώ | Greek: ώ | Greek: ώ | ώ | ώ | |
U+1FBB | Ά | Ά | Greek: Ά | Greek: Ά | Ά | Ά | |
U+1FBE | ι | Greek: ι | Greek: | ι | |||
U+1FC9 | Έ | Έ | Greek: Έ | Greek: Έ | Έ | Έ | |
U+1FCB | Ή | Ή | Greek: Ή | Greek: Ή | Ή | Ή | |
U+1FD3 | ΐ | ΐ | Greek: ΐ | Greek: ΐ | ΐ | ΐ | |
U+1FDB | Ί | Ί | Greek: Ί | Greek: Ί | Ί | Ί | |
U+1FE3 | ΰ | ΰ | Greek: ΰ | Greek: ΰ | ΰ | ΰ | |
U+1FEB | Ύ | Ύ | Greek: Ύ | Greek: Ύ | Ύ | Ύ | |
U+1FEE | ΅ | Greek: ΅ | Greek: | ΅ | |||
U+1FEF | ` | Greek: ` | Greek: | ` | |||
U+1FF9 | Ό | Ό | Greek: Ό | Greek: Ό | Ό | Ό | |
U+1FFB | Ώ | Ώ | Greek: Ώ | Greek: Ώ | Ώ | Ώ | |
U+1FFD | ´ | Greek: ´ | Greek: | ´ |
Original | Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ |
---|---|
Replacement | Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ |
Shouldn't alphabet in the page title be capitalized to "Greek Alphabet"?
TheUnfortunate ( talk) 21:42, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
Okay, thanks TheUnfortunate ( talk) 16:17, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
I was looking at an icon of my Yi Ya's and I noticed the writing on it had the letter "C". I'm quite puzzled. Then I saw a picture of an ancient Greek mosaic from Israel with the letter "C" on it as well. Did Ancient & Byzantine Greece use the letter "C"? Kostantino888Z ( talk) 01:00, 30 November 2008 (UTC)
in table 1, Resh Sin Taw and Waw do not share the corresponding numeric values. in the second table, Qoph does not share the corresponding numeric value. see: 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley
Cfzeitler ( talk) 03:46, 11 December 2008 (UTC)
Oh. Excuse me. Share with the corresponding Greek letters. And although the numeric values of letters might not be strictly on topic(?) I thought quoting an authoritative source wouldn't hurt. ( I have never heard that there were _two_ sets of numeric values for any of the classic alphabets! )
Cfzeitler ( talk) 03:13, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
oops! ( is my face red! ) Those are phoenician letters! i totally thought they were hebrew... —Preceding unsigned comment added by Cfzeitler ( talk • contribs) 04:35, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
It seems very odd to me that the Latin alphabet would be considered a "child" system. The first reason is just that I know how much the Greeks absolutely hate the Latin alphabet with all their heart and make a point of teaching this hatred to their children. However, besides that it just seem factually inaccurate to call Latin a Child system from Greek. The Phoenicians were out and about in ships doing their trading thing and establishing cities like Carthage and all that. The letters were out on the market in circulation. The Latin alphabet came into being from the Etruscan writing which seems to either have borrowed the letters directly from the Phoenicians, whom we know they had contact with, or adopted the "alphabet" at the same time or even before the Greeks did. It was certainly adopted for use by the Etruscans in its original form well before the Greeks adapted the alphabet to better represent the Greek language. In this way it would be much better to say that the Latin Alphabet is cognate with the Greek alphabet.
Keep in mind, this is a different situation from what happened with Cyrillic or Coptic where the Greek alphabet having already been adapted to write Greek lost many characteristics of the original Phoenician form. These are true child sytems. However, calling Latin a Child system of Greek is like calling Syriac a child system of Hebrew. There are clear similarities and some borrowing going on but the systems are cognate coming from an original source.
The Latin Language is not Greek. It is not based on Greek. It does not depend on Greek. It did not need to borrow anything from Greek in order to be understood in speech or in writing. Latin did borrow the letters K, Y and Z so that we could stick them into Greek words that were popular for a time but that does not mean that Latin is a Child System of Greek. Latin is a completely different Language with a Completely different alphabet that is either congnate with Greek or indeed may be older.
This is why Latin has F and V but Greek has neither. This is also why Latin does not have Theta, nor Phi, nor Psi. Latin adopted the letter H from the Phoenicians direclty which is why it has retained its H sound and has not been turned into an E or an I. The Latin letter X did not come from Chi but was created from the Roman Numeral system. The Roman Numeral system is also likely the reason the original Phoenician letter Y (vav) was cut short to V and twisted to form F.
There is no question that the Greeks adopted the alphabet from the Phoenicians direclty and not from the Romans but that does not mean that the Romans must have borrowed the alphabet from the Greeks whom they did not have contact with yet. Semitic peoples were in contact with the Etruscans and later the Romans well before the Romans came into meaningful contact with the Greeks. It is far more likely that the Latin Alphabet was borrowed directly from people like the Cathaginians than from the Greeks. Greece is not the only doorway into Europe. The Phoenicians didn't have to go to Greece first and give the Greeks the Alphabet but be denied access to the rest of Europe because the Greeks wanted to make sure that all the other European systems would be Child Systems. That is silly. The Romans were reading and writing Latin in the Latin alphabet well before Alexander's conquests made the Greek language and alphabet part of a lingua franca. The Romans were not in contact with the Greeks when they began writing, nor were the Greeks important enough to the Romans for them to be heard of.
Latin as a Child System of Greek is not factual and is pure biased conjecture. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 219.127.251.137 ( talk) 06:55, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
After helping my friend learn the Greek alphabet by singing it to the tune of "Frere Jacques." I found a free transcription of the song at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frère_Jacques, and used that to write up the alphabet as the lyrics. BUT I cannot add it to the page because I don't know how PLUS the page is protected! Help! -- Lindsey ( talk) 21:50, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
{{editsemiprotected}}
The alpha through omega logo need to be change as this link "
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Greek_alphabet_alpha-omega.svg" as the image source
Rather than simply changing the text, I thought I'd put this out here for the true Greek scholars, but I have a concern. When I studied modern Greek in the early 70's, the polytonic spelling was still de rigeur. The accents we learned were ὀξεία, βαρεία, and περισπωμένη - the last of which was always represented with a tilde (~) as in Κανόνες Πολυτονικῆς Γραμματικῆς. From what I've seen, there seems to be fluidity in both typography and nomenclature when referring to the περισπωμένη accent - in fact, I've often seen it represented with an inverted breve ( ̑ ). The whole point here is that I think it's a bit inaccurate to simply call perispomeni a "circumflex" which is properly "^". ccdesan ( talk) 18:46, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
From the "History" section of the article:
The first sentence presumably means mid-eighth century BC. The fact that it's BC needs to be stated.
The distinction between the "Greek alphabet" in the first paragraph and the "Greek alphabet we recognise today" in the second is not clear. If there is no distinction intended then the text needs rewording to avoid giving the impression that there is. 86.133.247.170 ( talk) 04:26, 25 November 2009 (UTC).
Perhaps the Fraternities and Sororities could be removed from the disambiguation label at the very top of the page. I find it impossible to imagine that anyone looking for "frats" on wikipedia would accidently wind up at "greek alphabet" and be confused. Or, maybe not, if it's a Friday or Saturday night. Or, really, most other nights. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.174.36.6 ( talk) 03:12, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
On the list of letters with the title "The Greek Alphabet" at the top of the article, all the letter have their names in the standard "american" pronunciation (beta, mu, nu, etc). Shouldn't they be in their Greek names (vita, mi, ni respectively and so on)? 79.103.193.174 ( talk) 21:14, 27 February 2010 (UTC)
In the sidebar, shouldn't the obsolete letters/other characters be displayed by text, rather than .svg images? 75.28.176.237 ( talk) 00:20, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
{{ editsemiprotected}} the jewish people's were the first people's basically given credit to the linear language. This obviously predates the Greek's, sorry too be a little out there but I do love this website. Funny enough, I am am an an Agnostic, and don't get me started on the logic of the term! Thank You! Philip White
65.184.32.11 ( talk) 05:40, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
I think that Chi (Χχ) is another form of Phoenician letter Kaph
(
together with Kappa (Κκ) because they look smilar.. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.86.55.140 ( talk) 13:26, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
This article has used the BCE/CE date convention since a date was first entered in its text, 11:00, 12 June 2004. I checked it because I was suspicious of this edit by a now-blocked user who had a history of forcing these changes, covered by edit summaries invoking consistency: "to match the rest of the article".
I see the date convention, which has been forced to BC/AD more than once, has not previously been discussed at the Talkpage and expect that there is no issue with the usual Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers). I have inserted an invisible ("commented-out") note at the head of the text: this article has used the BCE/CE convention since 11:00, 12 June 2004. Should you see that it has been messed with, you may suspect furtive changes are to be enforced. I just hate to be bullied, don't you?-- Wetman ( talk) 22:25, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/greece/thrace/byzantium/Moushmov_3210.1.jpg (coin of Byzantion, 340 BC)
"BY" for BYZANTION, but "Beta" is different! Böri ( talk) 11:13, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
I can't tell what's what - is it just my end or does everyone have that problem? I have to find words that I know start rough or smooth, then copy and paste. I don't know why I bother since the end result is still ambiguous anyway. McZeus ( talk) 23:33, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
I can't see which way the ball curves but I assume ἂ is smooth. Have I missed it or should I run for the next base? A legend for the given table would be convenient. Anyhow McZeus ( talk) 23:25, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
Ah—just let the cursor hover on a letter and it will tell you if its rough or smooth! This is a secret rite that opens the initiate's eyes to the full glory of the Greek alphabet (otherwise you must bathe a piglet in the sea). Eyeless in Gaza ( talk) 06:59, 12 December 2011 (UTC)
A 9th century dating is supported by the following footnote:
A ninth-century inscription, apparently in Johnston's article, is unusual enough to be specifically mentioned here. Can we get the example Johnston cites please?-- Wetman ( talk) 12:41, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
This
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67.82.19.52 (
talk) 01:15, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
the alphabets must be pronounced appropriately.
Hi all,
I was browsing the page and noticed under the section "Combining and letter-free diacritics", the diacritic "perispomeni" is incorrectly identified as a circumflex ( ˆ ) , when it is actually a tilde ( ˜ ).
Best,
plogue87 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Plogue87 ( talk • contribs) 20:54, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
This
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The letter 'T' in English is pronounced "Taf" or "Taph" not "Tau".
Pesplout ( talk) 00:44, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
Not done: I've heard it called 'tau' in numerous places, and a quick search in dictionary.com finds multiple entries for "tau" and none for "taf" (related to the Greek alphabet). Unless you have some very strong sources saying otherwise, this would be an incorrect change. Qwyrxian ( talk) 10:08, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
This is a detail, but why go out of our way and claim "2,400 years" of a 24-letter-alphabet (without any reference) rather than just saying the modern alphabet has 24 letters? Because stigma and qoppa were numerals, they never dropped out of the alphabet until the Greeks started using Arabic numerals. This was a few hundred years ago, I suppose. Also, stigma was actually in use in print. Yeah it was a ligature, but so is W. If it's used and it's listed in the alphabet, it must be counted as a letter, otherwise there will be no end of argument whether w (=uu) or Scandinavian þ (=th) or Gothic ƕ (=hw) are "letters".Medieval listings of the Greek alphabet will have 26 letters (or 27?). But I could also just have tagged the claim for citation instead of attempting to qualify it. -- dab (𒁳) 06:50, 27 January 2012 (UTC)
(ec) : I agree that the 2,400 years thing is not very useful – simply because it sounds as if that were some peacock-worthy achievement. But I disagree about the retention of the numerals. Those listings that include them (and by the way, if they do, it's always 27, not 26, including ϛ,ϟ,ϡ) are typically Western, foreign treatments, which are just trying to combine the representation of the numeral system and that of the alphabet proper into one – something that native Greek sources rarely did, as far as I know. It's also noteworthy that in the St. Gallen listing you point to the three numerals have no letter names, and there is an explanatory note below that they serve only for expressing numerals. From Greek usage, it appears that letter names of these three items were not consistently used and known, so it seems clear they were not routinely included in reciting the alphabetic sequence. An interesting bit I happened to come across last year is the following from one of the ancient grammatical commentators, where the number 24 is explicitly discussed, and a distinction between "γράμματα" ('characters') and "στοιχεία" ('alphabetic letter') is made, where the latter explicitly excludes ϛ,ϟ,ϡ:
It is as always a pleasure to press you for references, Fut.Perf. As I said, this is a minor point. But since you have brought up these excellent references, and the distinction between native and foreign treatment, there is no reason not to include this distinction of γράμματα vs. στοιχεῖα in the article. -- dab (𒁳) 09:39, 27 January 2012 (UTC)
Just a minor edit request. Instead of linking to the disambiguation page, can Chi simply be linked to the Greek letter, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi_%28letter%29 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.233.149.232 ( talk) 15:20, 2 February 2012 (UTC)
Main article: Greek letters used in mathematics, science, and engineering
Following: ... lower case pi (π) for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, ... there needs to be added the clause: capital pi for the [running total|cumulative product], which complements SIGMA for the cumulative sum. Also, this is also noted in the main article. This is a major error of omission/oversight. 198.123.52.150 ( talk) 22:27, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
The following is a salient misconception: "epsilon (ε) for an arbitrarily small positive number".
No, the whole point of the use of epsilon in proofs in mathematics - especially in limits, continuity, and calculus - is that epsilon can be ANY positive number whatsoever. You might find this hard to believe, but these proofs start off with:
Let ε greater than zero be given.
In other words, you can give me any positive number that you choose to, and if that number is one
sagan (unit of measurement) (four billion), then so be it.
Someone else might choose unity, and someone else might choose 0.001.
The point is that my proof has to work for any positive number that you care to name, or else the proof is not a valid one.
Often, my goal is to find some other positive number, usually called "delta" that depends on epsilon - but it satisfies the condition of the proof. Hence, we are back into the Greek alphabet again with "delta".
D.A.W., Master of Arts in Mathematics, University of Alabama in Huntsville
98.67.170.12 (
talk) 18:45, 13 May 2012 (UTC)
In the "Obsolete Letters" section, under Sampi, there is a grammar error; "...and then remained in use as a numeral for 900." It should be until, if I am correct. 174.69.205.140 ( talk) 00:19, 27 May 2012 (UTC)
I'd like to question the creation of a seperate article Greek script and consequent removal of that information from this article. The new article on Greek script seems rather short and out of context. I think it would be much better as part of this article. Yaris678 ( talk) 16:35, 10 July 2012 (UTC)
Just a brief addition, as you said above that this kind of split "is done in all writing stystems regarding "script" and "alphabet", such as indeed Latin and Cyrillic." This is not quite true. As far as I can see, it is in fact only done with these two, plus Arabic. All other alphabetic scripts, including for instance Hebrew or Armenian along with many others, have a single page. Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic are indeed the three alphabetic scripts for which such a division makes sense, because they are international scripts that have long transcended the use for the single language they were originally designed for, and which have very rich internal variation in functions and forms between one language and the next. On the other hand, Hebrew and Armenian are much more comparable to Greek in this respect (note that both Hebrew and Armenian actually also have some uses for different languages, and at least in the case of Hebrew quite a bit more notable ones than in the case of Greek – see Ladino and Yiddish – but these are all treated in a single article.) Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:56, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks, Stavro. DePiep has indicated [11] he wants to give a fuller argument later. Well, fine. DePiep, if you wish to pursue this split further, then please answer the following questions:
Looking forward to your answers. (And until this discussion moves somewhere, I'm redirecting the other page back here again to the stable status quo ante, in the obvious absence of a consensus for a change.) Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:06, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
Since we're discussing this article, here's a rather radical idea I've been toying with. For years, people have gotten used to the idea that the core of this article must be that huge "main table" that tries to combine almost everything about each letter in one place: Phoenician descent, shapes, sound values in multiple versions, letter names and their pronunciation in multiple versions, transliteration in multiple versions, numeric values.
This seems to be a leftover from the time when people wanted to submit this article as a "list article" to the "Featured Lists" process (which failed back in 2005). No other major alphabet article has a similar approach (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Cyrillic). On the other hand, the normative power of en-Wikipedia is so great that almost all other Wikipedias, from Furlan to Telugu, now have a copy of this thing.
Problems with this approach:
So, my proposal:
Thoughts? – Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:43, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
Is there a reason that left and right angle brackets (“<” and “>”) in the form of Unicode characters “〈” “〉” (Hex-3008 and 3009) are used instead of either direct “<” “>” or “<” “>” (or, for that matter——unless there is some sort of coding conflict——just regular quote marks)? ~Kaimbridge~ ( talk) 13:16, 9 September 2012 (UTC)
Usage | Unicode | SGML/HTML/XML entities | Sample | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Technical/mathematical (common) |
U+003C | Less-than sign | < < | <a, b> |
U+003E | Greater-than sign | > > | ||
Technical/mathematical (specialized) |
U+27E8 | Mathematical left angle bracket | ⟨ ⟨* | ⟨a, b⟩ |
U+27E9 | Mathematical right angle bracket | ⟩ ⟩* | ||
Quotation (halfwidth East-Asian texts) |
U+2329 | Left pointing angle bracket | 〈 ⟨* | 〈deprecated〉 |
U+232A | Right pointing angle bracket | 〉 ⟩* | ||
Quotation (fullwidth East-Asian texts) |
U+3008 | Left angle bracket | 〈 | 〈a, b〉 |
U+3009 | Right angle bracket | 〉 |
Interesting, thanks. Never noticed that duplication between U+27E* and U+232* sets. Would the U+27E* codepoints display better in your browser? Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:45, 11 September 2012 (UTC)
This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Does not one here know of the epigraphs of Alonnisos and Dispiliou? They have greek letters and are dated to be old as 5260BC. This puts into question the claim that they originate from the Phoenician Alphabet. —Preceding unsigned comment added by WhiteMagick ( talk • contribs) 00:26, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
That claim that the Greek alphabet arises from Phoenician and not from Linear B or Cypriot definitely wants further evidence. I've added a citation needed tag. k. da-ma-te ( talk) 20:30, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
According to some modern scholarship, Greek MAY be derived from Phoenician. Maybe not. The "official story" is not necessarily the correct one. As things stand, the claim is in dispute and it is an active argument. Linear B is a popular culprit as is Cypriot. "... supported by every treatment of Greek you could possibly look up anywhere," is sort of an old and thoughtless argument. If a million people say a wrong thing it is still wrong. Researchers tend toward laziness. Gingermint ( talk) 02:13, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
Even the ancient Greeks were aware that it derived from the Phoenician. See Herodotus..... --
Andriolo (
talk) 10:13, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
If stigma is merely a stylistic ligature, then I agree that it should be removed from the Obsolete Letters table. In that case, it was never a letter. FilipeS ( talk) 18:51, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
But stigma was never an independent letter. It was always possible and correct to replace it with sigma-tau. Psi cannot be replaced with pi-sigma. Stigma seems to have been always an optional ligature. As such, it should not be regarded as a letter; it is merely a glyph. FilipeS ( talk) 19:17, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
That's a matter of opinion. I think it does look like a sigma merged with a tau, and historically its origin is clearly in a ligature. See here. FilipeS ( talk) 19:24, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
There are two functions of the symbol stigma ϛ: one as a ligature for the sequence sigma-tau; the other as a Greek numeral, where it is really a glyph for digamma. Neither of these constitutes a "letter" in any conventional sense. Nor is the "letter" stigma ever mentioned in the alphabetical sequence of the Greek letters. Its graphic form is very similar to the final sigma ς (which is of course also not a letter in itself) and sometimes they are mistakenly exchanged.
As a ligature, it is found in many manuscripts and in a few printed texts which use ligatures. Though in modern Greek typography there are essentially no ligatures, some old fonts contain dozens (see the punches for Claude Garamond's grecs du roi), none of which count as 'letters'.
It is silly to write the name of stigma as ϛῖγμα -- unless of course someone can find a WP:Reliable Source for this usage. -- Macrakis ( talk) 18:58, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
That is assuming that stigma is an 'obsolete letter'. But it is a ligature. Can you find any examples in reliable sources where stigma is used in this way? -- Macrakis ( talk) 21:26, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
But it isn't written like that in modern scholarship, even where modern scholarship discusses the historical name "stigma". Read Use–mention distinction. Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:20, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
This evidence is in existence of stigma itself. Ligatures are always used as letter-cluster replacements. They are never used for nothing. Additionally, I place for your convenience all new Greek Unicode 5.1 codepoints:
I always thought that stigma is a letter or alphabetic ligature in sense of Æ and Œ, but you say that stigma is a ligature in sense of ff and fi, but even these f-related ligatures are used in words, for example stuff and figure. Even Google accepts such input. 79.162.61.204 ( talk) 19:48, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
What would make you think that it is a letter like Scandinavian Æ? Of course ligatures like ff are used to typeset words; that doesn't make them "letters". And back to the original question: do you have any Reliable Source that shows the rendition ϛῖγμα? Sure, it was used in manuscripts, but many other ligatures were also used in manuscripts. Anon/CB, you are the only one as far as I can tell arguing for stigma as a letter. Until you or someone else finds evidence, I think we can safely remove stigma as a letter of the Greek alphabet, and remove the spelling ϛῖγμα. -- Macrakis ( talk) 20:17, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
Of course I meant User:CBMIBM. Can you please clarify, are you saying you are not CBMIBM? Just curious. Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:47, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
From what has been said in this discussion, I conclude that stigma should be considered a glyph variant of the grapheme "ςτ", and not a proper letter. With respect to Latin Æ and Œ, they started out as glyph variants as well, and in some languages (English, French...) they are still no more than variants of "AE" and "OE". In other languages, however (Danish, Norwegian...), they are used to represent individual sounds, with a different sound value from "AE" and "OE". So they are proper, independent letters in some alphabets. FilipeS ( talk) 21:17, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
As I predicted, codepoints in beta and final Unicode 5.1 remains the same, exactly according to official Unicode statement that even in beta stage codepoints remains final and stable. CBMIBM ( talk) 09:06, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
When is the source that substantiates the claim that stigma is a letter? FilipeS ( talk) 09:46, 27 June 2008 (UTC)
I'm really confused. I feel like an idiot now, but I always thought stigma was just another way of writing sigma. Don't you write stigma when you're finishing a word? ουρανός, for example? Isn't that stigma, or is that still sigma, just different? I'm confused. Can some one explain it, the article doesn't really. -Panther ( talk) 18:25, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Anybody know why the "obsolete letters" table gives the historical pronunciation of waw as "probably" [w], and not just as [w]? Is there any serious alternative? Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:56, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
Ah, thanks for the pointer. Interesting case. Given that both [w] > [v], and [w] > zero, are pretty natural sound changes, while [v] > zero would be odd, and on the other side digamma < idg. /ŭ/ seems etymologically certain, I'll go out on an OR limb and declare [w] as established. As long as nobody comes across an actual alternative proposal for Ancient Greek. Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:14, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
When we write something between brackets [ ], we mean the sound. See International Phonetic Alphabet. ;-) FilipeS ( talk) 21:56, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
We should have a section on the development of the lettershapes: ancient cursive forms, the shift to uncial style in Byzantine times, the adaptation to typesetting, the innovation of uppercase/lowercase usage... Anybody has some good material at hand? Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:48, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
User Mackaris has just removed the letter sho from the Obsolete letters table. However, judging from the previous discussion, there is no consensus in favour of this change. FilipeS ( talk) 18:28, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
Well, you have a point about the Roman/Latin alphabet article. It is true that sho can be considered an "uncommon" letter of the Greek alphabet. But the thing is that there are many, many rare extra letters in the Latin alphabet, whereas that does not seem to be the case with the Greek alphabet, which has historically not been used by as many languages. And I'm not sure that the Coptic letters should be considered letters of the Greek alphabet, rather than part of an independent (though Greek-based) alphabet, like the Cyrillic alphabet is. FilipeS ( talk) 19:12, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
Coptic is different from Bactrian in the same way that the Latin alphabet or the Cyrillic alphabet are different from Bactrian. Nobody regards the former as variants of the Greek alphabet nowadays. FilipeS ( talk) 19:54, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
According to the Greek Grammar text book taught in Greek elementary schools, the letters ε, ο and υ are pronounced έψιλο, όμικρο and ύψιλο respectively (without the finite ν). pinikas ( talk) 19:06, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
See further discussion at Talk:Alpha and Omega... AnonMoos ( talk) 17:30, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
Reference note: The user going by CBMIBM (who has also been warned repeatedly on his talk page by editors) has archived the detailed talk page here to hide his recent massive edits to the Greek alphabet page. Perhaps a Wikipedian with some time can restore both the talk page, the Greek alphabet table, and place protection on the page. Sturmde ( talk) 16:08, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
With regard to the Wikinger (CBMIBM) image Image:Greek alphabet extended.png -- the additions to the standard Greek alphabet of 24 letters there are a miscellaneous grab-bag of various archaic letters (rarely used after ca. 300 B.C.), numerical symbols not usually used as letters, letters used only in the writing of non-Greek languages, and medieval ligatures identified with numerical symbols. There was never a single historical alphabetic sequence, or sequence of alphabetic symbols used numerically, which included all these "letters". See further at Talk:Alpha and Omega. AnonMoos ( talk) 00:51, 16 March 2008 (UTC)
This sentence appears in the second paragraph of the section currently labeled history: "Its most notable change, as an adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet, is the introduction of vowel letters, without which Greek, unlike Phoenician, would be illegible." Is this sentence stating that Phoenician was illegible, or legible but without the use of vowels? I am assuming the latter simply because the former is absurd, and if so, I believe the sentence should be reworded to resonate the intended meaning more clearly. ( PhilipDSullivan ( talk) 00:17, 9 February 2008 (UTC))
This page appears in the category Keyboard layouts, but I don't see anything about Greek keyboards here. There's an article about the QWERTZ keyboard (used in German-speaking countries), and one about the AZERTY keyboard (used in French-speaking countries), but I haven't found one on Greek keyboards. See the image at http://www.anotek.com/ANOTEKCLASSIC.GIF. Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:57, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
Am I the only one to object to the "Pronunciation" column in this section? The supposed English pronunciation is inaccurate (I've never heard anyone pronounce "psi" in English with a silent p) and it's a disgrace to not use proper IPA in an article on a linguistic subject. I was about to correct it myself until I realised it's an image. -- rossb ( talk) 22:35, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
Please take a look at this wiki - page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispilio_Tablet. In the last twelve years there are findings basically from to archaelogists n.sampson and g.hourmouziadis that testify that there have been written texts from 5000 - 6000bc. Please update the article —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.75.239.19 ( talk) 14:57, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
The article states that the alternative "curled" form of beta is mainly used at the ends of words. Given that a Greek word cannot normally end with a beta, I wonder why there should be a special version for this position? -- rossb ( talk) 16:44, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
For example, Greek letter Stigma can be spelled as Ϛιγμα using Stigma itself instead of Στιγμα, because here: http://anubis.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n1743.pdf is good example of its usage as Stigma itself within words instead of Sigma-Tau sequence within the same words with many book references in printed text beginning with words: "SMALL LETTER STIGMA was used widely in Greek typography throughout the history of printing Greek." CBMIBM ( talk) 09:14, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
got jealous of the
German Alphabet.
where do i put this?
CuteHappyBrute ( talk) 04:31, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
CuteHappyBrute ( talk) 06:13, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
I hear someone sparking up a cigarette at the 0:12 and 0:14 mark... Figures... — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
203.49.173.174 (
talk) 01:00, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
While in Cyprus I noticed that "Y" is often translated as "u" (at least when it falls in the middle of a place name). Is this a Cypriot anomaly, or does this need adding to the page (which only lists y, v & f as transliterations in the "Modern Greek" column)? 86.31.247.136 ( talk) 15:55, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
Template:Greek alphabet has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for Deletion page. Thank you. — Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:26, 30 June 2008 (UTC)
From what I read somewhere, Ancient Greek "gg" used to be read "ng", so that "aggelos" was actually read "angelos"; similarly, "gk" was read "nk" and "gch" was read "nch". I couldn't find anything about the phonetical value of these groups of letters anywhere in the article. Shouldn't we write it in the section with the phonetical values of the letters? bogdan ( talk) 22:41, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Hi, why are the letters used in this Hercules poster considered Greek? Most notable the e. I see this very often with Greek restaurants here in the Netherlands. Does anyone have an explanation? Mallerd ( talk) 22:46, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
Yes I meant the Disney cartoon. There is no real Greek alphabet which even looks like the cartoon? Mallerd ( talk) 00:22, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
Greek letters used in English text, he created what I meant. Faux Cyrillic is on the same par. Mallerd ( talk) 15:27, 9 October 2008 (UTC)
Does the nabla symbol deserve any mention? BethelRunner ( talk) 21:30, 27 July 2008 (UTC)
The Armenian alphabet is not a child system of the Greek alphabet. There have been many scholarly debates about this issue in the past, with some classifying the Armenian script as Greek, others as Aramaic. Today, everybody agrees that while three letters are direct adaptions from the Greek alphabet and the general vowel designating system is inspired by the Greek system, the Armenian alphabet is essentially a free invention inspired by all surrounding alphabets at the time of its creation, i.e. the various Persian Pahlavi alphabets (based on Aramaic and very clearly illustrated e.g. in the Armenian ayb [a]) and amongst others also the Greek alphabet. I would thus suggest removing the Armenian alphabet as a child system from the article. Besides of that, if you include the Armenian alphabet, you should include the Georgian one too (also an invention), for they both are interrelated.
Literature:
DANIELS, PETER T. (Hg.) und BRIGHT, WILLIAM (Hg.), The World’s Writing Systems. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996
HAARMANN, HARALD, Universalgeschichte der Schrift. 2., durchges. Auflage. Frankfurt/Main, New York: Campus Verlag, 1991
SCHMITT, RÜDIGER, Grammatik des Klassisch-Armenischen mit sprachvergleichenden Erläuterungen. 2., durchgesehene Auflage. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachen und Literaturen der Universität Innsbruck, 2007 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.167.154.82 ( talk) 22:49, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
I am failing this article for its good article review because it is almost completely devoid of inline citations. Please renominate it once it has more inline citations. Gary King ( talk) 05:58, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
Mediawiki will convert some Unicode characters to canonical mappings. For example, U+1F71 will be automatically converted to U+03AC. The greek letters that will be automatically converted by Mediawiki are 0374, 037E, 0387, 1F71, 1F73, 1F75, 1F77, 1F79, 1F7B, 1F7D, 1FBB, 1FBE, 1FC9, 1FCB, 1FD3, 1FDB, 1FE3, 1FEB, 1FEE, 1FEF, 1FF9, 1FFB, 1FFD.-- ✉ Hello World! 08:20, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
Without special markup | Enclosed in {{ lang-gr}} | Enclosed in {{ polytonic}} | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Original | Remapped | Original | Remapped | Original | Remapped | ||
U+0374 | ʹ | Greek: ʹ | Greek: | ʹ | |||
U+037E | ; | Greek: ; | Greek: | ; | |||
U+0387 | · | Greek: · | Greek: | · | |||
U+1F71 | ά | ά | Greek: ά | Greek: ά | ά | ά | |
U+1F73 | έ | έ | Greek: έ | Greek: έ | έ | έ | |
U+1F75 | ή | ή | Greek: ή | Greek: ή | ή | ή | |
U+1F77 | ί | ί | Greek: ί | Greek: ί | ί | ί | |
U+1F79 | ό | ό | Greek: ό | Greek: ό | ό | ό | |
U+1F7B | ύ | ύ | Greek: ύ | Greek: ύ | ύ | ύ | |
U+1F7D | ώ | ώ | Greek: ώ | Greek: ώ | ώ | ώ | |
U+1FBB | Ά | Ά | Greek: Ά | Greek: Ά | Ά | Ά | |
U+1FBE | ι | Greek: ι | Greek: | ι | |||
U+1FC9 | Έ | Έ | Greek: Έ | Greek: Έ | Έ | Έ | |
U+1FCB | Ή | Ή | Greek: Ή | Greek: Ή | Ή | Ή | |
U+1FD3 | ΐ | ΐ | Greek: ΐ | Greek: ΐ | ΐ | ΐ | |
U+1FDB | Ί | Ί | Greek: Ί | Greek: Ί | Ί | Ί | |
U+1FE3 | ΰ | ΰ | Greek: ΰ | Greek: ΰ | ΰ | ΰ | |
U+1FEB | Ύ | Ύ | Greek: Ύ | Greek: Ύ | Ύ | Ύ | |
U+1FEE | ΅ | Greek: ΅ | Greek: | ΅ | |||
U+1FEF | ` | Greek: ` | Greek: | ` | |||
U+1FF9 | Ό | Ό | Greek: Ό | Greek: Ό | Ό | Ό | |
U+1FFB | Ώ | Ώ | Greek: Ώ | Greek: Ώ | Ώ | Ώ | |
U+1FFD | ´ | Greek: ´ | Greek: | ´ |
Original | Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ |
---|---|
Replacement | Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ |
Shouldn't alphabet in the page title be capitalized to "Greek Alphabet"?
TheUnfortunate ( talk) 21:42, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
Okay, thanks TheUnfortunate ( talk) 16:17, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
I was looking at an icon of my Yi Ya's and I noticed the writing on it had the letter "C". I'm quite puzzled. Then I saw a picture of an ancient Greek mosaic from Israel with the letter "C" on it as well. Did Ancient & Byzantine Greece use the letter "C"? Kostantino888Z ( talk) 01:00, 30 November 2008 (UTC)
in table 1, Resh Sin Taw and Waw do not share the corresponding numeric values. in the second table, Qoph does not share the corresponding numeric value. see: 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley
Cfzeitler ( talk) 03:46, 11 December 2008 (UTC)
Oh. Excuse me. Share with the corresponding Greek letters. And although the numeric values of letters might not be strictly on topic(?) I thought quoting an authoritative source wouldn't hurt. ( I have never heard that there were _two_ sets of numeric values for any of the classic alphabets! )
Cfzeitler ( talk) 03:13, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
oops! ( is my face red! ) Those are phoenician letters! i totally thought they were hebrew... —Preceding unsigned comment added by Cfzeitler ( talk • contribs) 04:35, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
It seems very odd to me that the Latin alphabet would be considered a "child" system. The first reason is just that I know how much the Greeks absolutely hate the Latin alphabet with all their heart and make a point of teaching this hatred to their children. However, besides that it just seem factually inaccurate to call Latin a Child system from Greek. The Phoenicians were out and about in ships doing their trading thing and establishing cities like Carthage and all that. The letters were out on the market in circulation. The Latin alphabet came into being from the Etruscan writing which seems to either have borrowed the letters directly from the Phoenicians, whom we know they had contact with, or adopted the "alphabet" at the same time or even before the Greeks did. It was certainly adopted for use by the Etruscans in its original form well before the Greeks adapted the alphabet to better represent the Greek language. In this way it would be much better to say that the Latin Alphabet is cognate with the Greek alphabet.
Keep in mind, this is a different situation from what happened with Cyrillic or Coptic where the Greek alphabet having already been adapted to write Greek lost many characteristics of the original Phoenician form. These are true child sytems. However, calling Latin a Child system of Greek is like calling Syriac a child system of Hebrew. There are clear similarities and some borrowing going on but the systems are cognate coming from an original source.
The Latin Language is not Greek. It is not based on Greek. It does not depend on Greek. It did not need to borrow anything from Greek in order to be understood in speech or in writing. Latin did borrow the letters K, Y and Z so that we could stick them into Greek words that were popular for a time but that does not mean that Latin is a Child System of Greek. Latin is a completely different Language with a Completely different alphabet that is either congnate with Greek or indeed may be older.
This is why Latin has F and V but Greek has neither. This is also why Latin does not have Theta, nor Phi, nor Psi. Latin adopted the letter H from the Phoenicians direclty which is why it has retained its H sound and has not been turned into an E or an I. The Latin letter X did not come from Chi but was created from the Roman Numeral system. The Roman Numeral system is also likely the reason the original Phoenician letter Y (vav) was cut short to V and twisted to form F.
There is no question that the Greeks adopted the alphabet from the Phoenicians direclty and not from the Romans but that does not mean that the Romans must have borrowed the alphabet from the Greeks whom they did not have contact with yet. Semitic peoples were in contact with the Etruscans and later the Romans well before the Romans came into meaningful contact with the Greeks. It is far more likely that the Latin Alphabet was borrowed directly from people like the Cathaginians than from the Greeks. Greece is not the only doorway into Europe. The Phoenicians didn't have to go to Greece first and give the Greeks the Alphabet but be denied access to the rest of Europe because the Greeks wanted to make sure that all the other European systems would be Child Systems. That is silly. The Romans were reading and writing Latin in the Latin alphabet well before Alexander's conquests made the Greek language and alphabet part of a lingua franca. The Romans were not in contact with the Greeks when they began writing, nor were the Greeks important enough to the Romans for them to be heard of.
Latin as a Child System of Greek is not factual and is pure biased conjecture. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 219.127.251.137 ( talk) 06:55, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
After helping my friend learn the Greek alphabet by singing it to the tune of "Frere Jacques." I found a free transcription of the song at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frère_Jacques, and used that to write up the alphabet as the lyrics. BUT I cannot add it to the page because I don't know how PLUS the page is protected! Help! -- Lindsey ( talk) 21:50, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
{{editsemiprotected}}
The alpha through omega logo need to be change as this link "
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Greek_alphabet_alpha-omega.svg" as the image source
Rather than simply changing the text, I thought I'd put this out here for the true Greek scholars, but I have a concern. When I studied modern Greek in the early 70's, the polytonic spelling was still de rigeur. The accents we learned were ὀξεία, βαρεία, and περισπωμένη - the last of which was always represented with a tilde (~) as in Κανόνες Πολυτονικῆς Γραμματικῆς. From what I've seen, there seems to be fluidity in both typography and nomenclature when referring to the περισπωμένη accent - in fact, I've often seen it represented with an inverted breve ( ̑ ). The whole point here is that I think it's a bit inaccurate to simply call perispomeni a "circumflex" which is properly "^". ccdesan ( talk) 18:46, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
From the "History" section of the article:
The first sentence presumably means mid-eighth century BC. The fact that it's BC needs to be stated.
The distinction between the "Greek alphabet" in the first paragraph and the "Greek alphabet we recognise today" in the second is not clear. If there is no distinction intended then the text needs rewording to avoid giving the impression that there is. 86.133.247.170 ( talk) 04:26, 25 November 2009 (UTC).
Perhaps the Fraternities and Sororities could be removed from the disambiguation label at the very top of the page. I find it impossible to imagine that anyone looking for "frats" on wikipedia would accidently wind up at "greek alphabet" and be confused. Or, maybe not, if it's a Friday or Saturday night. Or, really, most other nights. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.174.36.6 ( talk) 03:12, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
On the list of letters with the title "The Greek Alphabet" at the top of the article, all the letter have their names in the standard "american" pronunciation (beta, mu, nu, etc). Shouldn't they be in their Greek names (vita, mi, ni respectively and so on)? 79.103.193.174 ( talk) 21:14, 27 February 2010 (UTC)
In the sidebar, shouldn't the obsolete letters/other characters be displayed by text, rather than .svg images? 75.28.176.237 ( talk) 00:20, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
{{ editsemiprotected}} the jewish people's were the first people's basically given credit to the linear language. This obviously predates the Greek's, sorry too be a little out there but I do love this website. Funny enough, I am am an an Agnostic, and don't get me started on the logic of the term! Thank You! Philip White
65.184.32.11 ( talk) 05:40, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
I think that Chi (Χχ) is another form of Phoenician letter Kaph
(
together with Kappa (Κκ) because they look smilar.. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.86.55.140 ( talk) 13:26, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
This article has used the BCE/CE date convention since a date was first entered in its text, 11:00, 12 June 2004. I checked it because I was suspicious of this edit by a now-blocked user who had a history of forcing these changes, covered by edit summaries invoking consistency: "to match the rest of the article".
I see the date convention, which has been forced to BC/AD more than once, has not previously been discussed at the Talkpage and expect that there is no issue with the usual Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers). I have inserted an invisible ("commented-out") note at the head of the text: this article has used the BCE/CE convention since 11:00, 12 June 2004. Should you see that it has been messed with, you may suspect furtive changes are to be enforced. I just hate to be bullied, don't you?-- Wetman ( talk) 22:25, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/greece/thrace/byzantium/Moushmov_3210.1.jpg (coin of Byzantion, 340 BC)
"BY" for BYZANTION, but "Beta" is different! Böri ( talk) 11:13, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
I can't tell what's what - is it just my end or does everyone have that problem? I have to find words that I know start rough or smooth, then copy and paste. I don't know why I bother since the end result is still ambiguous anyway. McZeus ( talk) 23:33, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
I can't see which way the ball curves but I assume ἂ is smooth. Have I missed it or should I run for the next base? A legend for the given table would be convenient. Anyhow McZeus ( talk) 23:25, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
Ah—just let the cursor hover on a letter and it will tell you if its rough or smooth! This is a secret rite that opens the initiate's eyes to the full glory of the Greek alphabet (otherwise you must bathe a piglet in the sea). Eyeless in Gaza ( talk) 06:59, 12 December 2011 (UTC)
A 9th century dating is supported by the following footnote:
A ninth-century inscription, apparently in Johnston's article, is unusual enough to be specifically mentioned here. Can we get the example Johnston cites please?-- Wetman ( talk) 12:41, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
This
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67.82.19.52 (
talk) 01:15, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
the alphabets must be pronounced appropriately.
Hi all,
I was browsing the page and noticed under the section "Combining and letter-free diacritics", the diacritic "perispomeni" is incorrectly identified as a circumflex ( ˆ ) , when it is actually a tilde ( ˜ ).
Best,
plogue87 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Plogue87 ( talk • contribs) 20:54, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
This
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The letter 'T' in English is pronounced "Taf" or "Taph" not "Tau".
Pesplout ( talk) 00:44, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
Not done: I've heard it called 'tau' in numerous places, and a quick search in dictionary.com finds multiple entries for "tau" and none for "taf" (related to the Greek alphabet). Unless you have some very strong sources saying otherwise, this would be an incorrect change. Qwyrxian ( talk) 10:08, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
This is a detail, but why go out of our way and claim "2,400 years" of a 24-letter-alphabet (without any reference) rather than just saying the modern alphabet has 24 letters? Because stigma and qoppa were numerals, they never dropped out of the alphabet until the Greeks started using Arabic numerals. This was a few hundred years ago, I suppose. Also, stigma was actually in use in print. Yeah it was a ligature, but so is W. If it's used and it's listed in the alphabet, it must be counted as a letter, otherwise there will be no end of argument whether w (=uu) or Scandinavian þ (=th) or Gothic ƕ (=hw) are "letters".Medieval listings of the Greek alphabet will have 26 letters (or 27?). But I could also just have tagged the claim for citation instead of attempting to qualify it. -- dab (𒁳) 06:50, 27 January 2012 (UTC)
(ec) : I agree that the 2,400 years thing is not very useful – simply because it sounds as if that were some peacock-worthy achievement. But I disagree about the retention of the numerals. Those listings that include them (and by the way, if they do, it's always 27, not 26, including ϛ,ϟ,ϡ) are typically Western, foreign treatments, which are just trying to combine the representation of the numeral system and that of the alphabet proper into one – something that native Greek sources rarely did, as far as I know. It's also noteworthy that in the St. Gallen listing you point to the three numerals have no letter names, and there is an explanatory note below that they serve only for expressing numerals. From Greek usage, it appears that letter names of these three items were not consistently used and known, so it seems clear they were not routinely included in reciting the alphabetic sequence. An interesting bit I happened to come across last year is the following from one of the ancient grammatical commentators, where the number 24 is explicitly discussed, and a distinction between "γράμματα" ('characters') and "στοιχεία" ('alphabetic letter') is made, where the latter explicitly excludes ϛ,ϟ,ϡ:
It is as always a pleasure to press you for references, Fut.Perf. As I said, this is a minor point. But since you have brought up these excellent references, and the distinction between native and foreign treatment, there is no reason not to include this distinction of γράμματα vs. στοιχεῖα in the article. -- dab (𒁳) 09:39, 27 January 2012 (UTC)
Just a minor edit request. Instead of linking to the disambiguation page, can Chi simply be linked to the Greek letter, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi_%28letter%29 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.233.149.232 ( talk) 15:20, 2 February 2012 (UTC)
Main article: Greek letters used in mathematics, science, and engineering
Following: ... lower case pi (π) for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, ... there needs to be added the clause: capital pi for the [running total|cumulative product], which complements SIGMA for the cumulative sum. Also, this is also noted in the main article. This is a major error of omission/oversight. 198.123.52.150 ( talk) 22:27, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
The following is a salient misconception: "epsilon (ε) for an arbitrarily small positive number".
No, the whole point of the use of epsilon in proofs in mathematics - especially in limits, continuity, and calculus - is that epsilon can be ANY positive number whatsoever. You might find this hard to believe, but these proofs start off with:
Let ε greater than zero be given.
In other words, you can give me any positive number that you choose to, and if that number is one
sagan (unit of measurement) (four billion), then so be it.
Someone else might choose unity, and someone else might choose 0.001.
The point is that my proof has to work for any positive number that you care to name, or else the proof is not a valid one.
Often, my goal is to find some other positive number, usually called "delta" that depends on epsilon - but it satisfies the condition of the proof. Hence, we are back into the Greek alphabet again with "delta".
D.A.W., Master of Arts in Mathematics, University of Alabama in Huntsville
98.67.170.12 (
talk) 18:45, 13 May 2012 (UTC)
In the "Obsolete Letters" section, under Sampi, there is a grammar error; "...and then remained in use as a numeral for 900." It should be until, if I am correct. 174.69.205.140 ( talk) 00:19, 27 May 2012 (UTC)
I'd like to question the creation of a seperate article Greek script and consequent removal of that information from this article. The new article on Greek script seems rather short and out of context. I think it would be much better as part of this article. Yaris678 ( talk) 16:35, 10 July 2012 (UTC)
Just a brief addition, as you said above that this kind of split "is done in all writing stystems regarding "script" and "alphabet", such as indeed Latin and Cyrillic." This is not quite true. As far as I can see, it is in fact only done with these two, plus Arabic. All other alphabetic scripts, including for instance Hebrew or Armenian along with many others, have a single page. Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic are indeed the three alphabetic scripts for which such a division makes sense, because they are international scripts that have long transcended the use for the single language they were originally designed for, and which have very rich internal variation in functions and forms between one language and the next. On the other hand, Hebrew and Armenian are much more comparable to Greek in this respect (note that both Hebrew and Armenian actually also have some uses for different languages, and at least in the case of Hebrew quite a bit more notable ones than in the case of Greek – see Ladino and Yiddish – but these are all treated in a single article.) Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:56, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks, Stavro. DePiep has indicated [11] he wants to give a fuller argument later. Well, fine. DePiep, if you wish to pursue this split further, then please answer the following questions:
Looking forward to your answers. (And until this discussion moves somewhere, I'm redirecting the other page back here again to the stable status quo ante, in the obvious absence of a consensus for a change.) Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:06, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
Since we're discussing this article, here's a rather radical idea I've been toying with. For years, people have gotten used to the idea that the core of this article must be that huge "main table" that tries to combine almost everything about each letter in one place: Phoenician descent, shapes, sound values in multiple versions, letter names and their pronunciation in multiple versions, transliteration in multiple versions, numeric values.
This seems to be a leftover from the time when people wanted to submit this article as a "list article" to the "Featured Lists" process (which failed back in 2005). No other major alphabet article has a similar approach (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Cyrillic). On the other hand, the normative power of en-Wikipedia is so great that almost all other Wikipedias, from Furlan to Telugu, now have a copy of this thing.
Problems with this approach:
So, my proposal:
Thoughts? – Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:43, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
Is there a reason that left and right angle brackets (“<” and “>”) in the form of Unicode characters “〈” “〉” (Hex-3008 and 3009) are used instead of either direct “<” “>” or “<” “>” (or, for that matter——unless there is some sort of coding conflict——just regular quote marks)? ~Kaimbridge~ ( talk) 13:16, 9 September 2012 (UTC)
Usage | Unicode | SGML/HTML/XML entities | Sample | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Technical/mathematical (common) |
U+003C | Less-than sign | < < | <a, b> |
U+003E | Greater-than sign | > > | ||
Technical/mathematical (specialized) |
U+27E8 | Mathematical left angle bracket | ⟨ ⟨* | ⟨a, b⟩ |
U+27E9 | Mathematical right angle bracket | ⟩ ⟩* | ||
Quotation (halfwidth East-Asian texts) |
U+2329 | Left pointing angle bracket | 〈 ⟨* | 〈deprecated〉 |
U+232A | Right pointing angle bracket | 〉 ⟩* | ||
Quotation (fullwidth East-Asian texts) |
U+3008 | Left angle bracket | 〈 | 〈a, b〉 |
U+3009 | Right angle bracket | 〉 |
Interesting, thanks. Never noticed that duplication between U+27E* and U+232* sets. Would the U+27E* codepoints display better in your browser? Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:45, 11 September 2012 (UTC)