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Some recent edits to the lead [1][ [2]] have changed the description of the history of the uppercase/lowercase distinction, from saying that it developed in the modern era, to saying that it developed "around the third or fourth century". I don't think this is correct. If editors were thinking of the development of minuscule letter forms, those arose much later, in the 9th century or thereabouts. If they were thinking of the use of cursive letter forms that look partly similar to minuscules, those (if I'm not quite mistaken) are even older than the third and fourth century. But neither the medieval minuscule script nor the ancient cursive constitute what that sentence was talking about, a letter case distinction. "Minuscule" and "lower case" are not the same thing. A case distinction exists only when minuscule and majuscule letter forms are used in a functionally complementary way, side by side with each other in the same texts, and the distinction is employed systematically as an orthographical device. What you find in medieval writing is different: you either have texts written entirely in minuscule, or you have a few majuscule letters mixed in for decorative purposes, in titles or marginal initials. But then, these majuscule elements really stand outside the main text; their use is a stylistic decoration but not an orthographical device. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I'm aware, an orthographic case distinction really developed in Greek only after the Renaissance. Fut.Perf. ☼ 06:54, 21 March 2013 (UTC)
In Greece there is also an unofficial letter which is in widespread handwritten usage, it is a letter combining the letters "O" and "U" for the "ou" diphthong, and this letter is usually written in all-capital words. It looks like an omicron ("Ο") with an ypsilon ("Υ") above it. Can we find sources for this Greek letter? Cogiati ( talk) 12:51, 22 July 2013 (UTC)
The Greek alphabet consists of three sets of nine letters representing the numbers 1-9, 10-90, and 100-900. So, 27 letters all together (3 X 9 = 27).
As such, omega is not the last letter of the Greek alphabet because it represents the number 800.
Other letters frequently omitted are digamma/ F = (6) and koppa (similar to Q) = 90.
I think Wikipedia should post the 27 letters of the Greek alphabet and their numeric equivalents. (A numeric equivalency chart is available at www.GreekAlphabeta.com) GreekAlphabeta ( talk) 22:02, 14 November 2013 (UTC)GreekAlphabeta
The 27 Letters of the Greek Alphabet and their Numeric Equivalents
Α α Β β Γ γ Δ δ Ε ε Ϝ ϝ Ζ ζ Η η Θ θ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Ι ι Κ κ Λ λ Μ μ Ν ν Ξ ξ Ο ο Π π Ϟ ϟ 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 Ρ ρ Σ σ Τ τ Υ υ Φ φ Χ χ Ψ ψ Ω ω Ϡ ϡ 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900
GreekAlphabeta ( talk) 13:14, 15 November 2013 (UTC)GreekAlphabeta
Do you think that I should add a column alongside the names of the letters showing IPA pronunciation of the names (Romanized)? 77.127.225.235 ( talk) 22:04, 10 March 2014 (UTC)
I suggest merging English pronunciation of Greek letters into this article under a new heading. Other languages have such a subsection too: e.g. Hebrew alphabet. Please comment! —&naaabsp;Preceding unsigned comment added by אפונה ( talk • contribs) 10:07, 16 March 2014 אפונה ( talk) 04:54, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
User:Lfdder completed the merge, and added the information to the History section. I think that it would be more appropriate to have it a separate heading before the History section, especially because the history section is broken up into a few tables. Also, the lead paragraph in the old article had some information now missing (because it doesn't belong in the History section). Admittedly, it may make a long article even longer. אפונה ( talk) 04:54, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
I'm afraid I disagree with many of the recent edits by User:LlywelynII [4], and intend to partially revert them. In particular:
Sorry for this whole long list of criticism, but I'm afraid I really feel this needs to be reverted. Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:56, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for the constructive response. I'm afraid I stand by most of my points.
1. Most importantly, the scope of the article, on which I will most certainly not compromise. Of course you are right that if you ask somebody how many letters there are "in the Greek alphabet", they will answer in terms of the classical 24-letter alphabet. That's obvious and just as it should be, because that's the classical and prototypical form of this alphabet, and the article was rightly presenting it as such, right up there in the lede (we earlier had versions of this article that gave quite exaggerated undue weight to the archaic extra letters). But at the same time, when you ask people (including experts in the technical literature) what alphabet the inscription on Nestor's Cup is in, or what alphabet this is, or which alphabet Cadmus was traditionally credited with inventing, or which alphabet was the first to have separate phoneme-level symbols for vowels, they will just as obviously all answer it was the "Greek alphabet". I challenge you to find a single reliable source supporting the claim that "the Greek alphabet" didn't exist before 403 BC, as your version presented it. That really flies in the face of every single source in the field I've ever seen. Nobody out in the literature makes any such terminological distinction as you suggest, between "the alphabet" and "alphabets", or "scripts". There is a single alphabet, the Greek one, which had variants, one of them the classical one, others archaic; that alphabet was invented some time around the 8th century or so, from Phoenician, and this article deals with that whole story, from the beginning (of course giving predominant weight to the most important, classical form). The Archaic Greek alphabets article is a sub-topic of this one.
2. About the amount of detail in the lede: let's again just take the example of the details of the Greek-to-Latin borrowing. A prime example of overblown detail. What the passage in the lede is actually about is just the historical significance of Greek – the fact that it occupies that central position in the history of the transmission of alphabetic writing across Europe. To make that point, all it takes is the bare fact of transmission to Latin etc., not the historical details of what happened to individual letters in the process. If you find the story of Latin "c" or "s" so important in the lede, then why not expend the same amount of space to the details of how individual Cyrillic letters were adapted, or what happened between Phoenician and Greek? All of these things can be, and are, treated further down.
3a. About Aristophanes of Byzantium: The statement in Greek diacritics is unsourced. What Aristophanes is traditionally credited with is the invention of the accent system. While that of the breathings has often been thrown in together with the accents in older treatments, current literature stresses that it quite probably happened independently [6] [7].
3b. μπάζω, μπαίνω, μπαλλώνω, μπαμπάς, μπας, μπερδεύω, μπήγω, μπλέκω, μπορώ, μπόχα, μπροστά; ντόπιος, ντρέπομαι, ντροπή, ντύνω; γκαμήλα, γκαρδιακός, γκαστρώνω, γκλίτσα, γκρεμίζω, γκρεμός are all words of purely Greek stock. Innumerable others are of Italian or Turkish etymology but have been in the language for centuries; the correct term for such items is not "foreign words" but "loanwords". – More to the point, if you really insist on explaining the actual differences between the ancient and modern sound-symbol correspondences, then I'd guess the far more immediately noticeable change is that in the vowels (multiple symbols falling together in the sound value /i/. And before you deal with the introduction of <μπ, ντ, γκ>, it would be important to first explain the change that actually triggered this (the fricativization of <β, δ, γ>.
3c. About the pre-history of the introduction of monotonic: again, context. The sole point of mentioning the accents in the lede is to prepare the reader for the fact that there are those two different diacritic styles today. Details are extraneous to that.
6. Again, you are overlooking the fact that the domain for which those official schemes have converged is exclusively that of official transcriptions of personal and geographical names. As you yourself notice, actual (reversible) transliteration schemes remain different (and the differences between the ELOT, UN and ALA-LC columns in that part of your romanization table are by no means "minor"). And you have again overlooked the fact that in addition to either of these domains, there's the whole area of how, for example, a whole sentence of Greek would be transcribed (on a phonological basis) in a language guide for foreigners or a linguistic discussion. I still think the most important point to present here to the reader, up front, is that they have to be prepared to see Greek rendered in many different ways, in different contexts and for different purposes.
Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:14, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
I'm afraid I disagree with the recent edit by @ Piledhighandeep: [8], introducing the distinction of Greek as a true "alphabet" as opposed to the Phoenician "abjad" in the intro. As far as I am aware, the terminology that wants to restrict the term "alphabet" to those of the Greek (consonant + vowels) type and strictly distinguishes the latter from "abjads" is not a commonly employed one in the literature. While certainly influential, it is essentially just a personal invention of one author, Peter Daniels (in The World's Writing Systems). Most other authors continue to call scripts of the Phoenician type "alphabets" as a matter of course. This terminology should therefore not be allowed to monopolize our treatment like this. The distinction is already present in the article, properly contextualized and hedged, in the "history" section ("According to a definition used by some modern authors, this feature makes Greek the first "alphabet" in the narrow sense,] as distinguished from the purely consonantal alphabets of the Semitic type, which according to this terminology are called "abjads".) That's about as much coverage as we should give it here. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:02, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
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In the table with the heading "Letters" the Greek letter 'M' is named in English as 'mu'. This is incorrect as the second letter 'u' is actually pronounced 'i' in Greek, as the name of the Greek letter 'u' is pronounced 'ipsilon'. Hence the Greek letter 'Y' or 'u' in the table is incorrectly named as 'upsilon'. Think of the letter as an English Y as used in the words tally, rally, funny or sunny, rather than the English letter 'U'. This can be confusing because the upper case ipsilon 'Y' and the lower case ipsilon 'u' represent different sounds in the English language. This also applies to the Greek letter 'N' or 'v'. The correct pronunciation of these letters is therefore 'Mi' and 'Ni' rather than 'Mu' and 'Nu'. Most monosyllabic Greek letters are pronounced with a short 'i' sound such as in the word 'Si', the Italian or Spanish word for 'Yes'. For example: 'M' (Mi), 'N' (Ni), 'Ξ' (Xi) or (Ksi), 'Π' (Pi), 'Φ' (Phi), 'Χ' (Chi) and 'Ψ' (Psi). The exceptions are 'P' (Rho) or (Ro) and 'T', which brings me to my next point. The English pronunciation of the Greek letter 'T' in the table is written as 'Tau'. This is incorrect as the Greek ipsilon (u) is also used to make other sounds when combined with other letters. For example, when it is preceded by an 'o' as in 'ou' it represents the short sound 'oo' as in book, look and took. Greek examples are φρouto, pronounced 'frooto' (fruit) and τou, pronounced 'tu' (his). When preceded by an 'a', as is the case here 'au', the sound it represents is 'aph' or 'af' as in the words 'tough', 'enough' and 'gruff'. Greek examples include 'aυτo', pronounced 'afto' (that) or 'aυτoκιvιτo', pronounsed 'aftokinito' (automobile). Hence the Greek letter 'T' or 'τ' in the table should be pronounced 'taf', exactly like the English word 'tough' not 'tau'. The confusion probably lies in the fact that there are three lettters that make the 'i' sound in the Greek alphabet: 'Η' or 'η', 'Ι' or 'ι' and 'Y' or 'u'. Combinations of 'oι' and 'ει' also make the 'i' sound (confusing even for a Greek, trust me). The pronunciations are correctly labelled in the tables in the section below titled "Letter names" so I thought the inconsistency could be rectified to more accurately reflect the Modern Greek pronunciations. Cheers. Dorothy Dixer ( talk) 23:24, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
When I saw that the article claimed that chi represented a velar fricative in IPA, I changed it to say that it represented a uvular one. My edit was promptly reverted. As per Voiceless velar fricative and Voiceless uvular fricative, I believe that the Latin letter x represents a velar fricative, and the Greek letter chi represents a uvular one, and that my edit was correct, unless there is something major that I'm missing. If there is something I'm missing, please mention it here, but for the time being I'm going to change it back. Thanks. 44Dume ( talk) 18:36, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
Does anyone have the time and knowledge to write something about it? Aristarchus of Samothrace and other ancient greek Philologists and their textcritical signs.
I have found some sources, see:
Brill's Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship, 2015 (2 Vols.) pp. 549-562 and: The ambiguity of signs: critical σημεῖα from Zenodotus to Origenes. Author, Francesca Schironi — Preceding unsigned comment added by Informationskampagne ( talk • contribs) 22:45, 2 July 2016 (UTC)
There are also "pictures" of these signs in this book.
Informationskampagne (
talk) 14:29, 8 November 2015 (UTC)
I am not an expert at all, and so I hesitate just changing things, but I was trying to translate words and could not find the symbol ϑ on this page in the table. Apparently it is a variation of θ; 'theta', see /info/en/?search=Theta. Could it be added into the table or perhaps even as a footnote? (Like the two forms of Sigma). I leave the decision to the editors most active on this page. It will help people (beginners, like me) just trying to decipher symbols. Thank you! Jelle1975 ( talk) 06:30, 30 April 2016 (UTC)
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A simple copy-edit: In the last paragraph of the Greek alphabet#Diacritics section, the text "Although it is not a diacritic the Comma has" should be replaced with "Although it is not a diacritic, the comma has". That is, insert a comma and down-case Comma. Thank you! 71.41.210.146 ( talk) 14:33, 17 November 2016 (UTC)
Shouldn't an article with this title start with the Greek alphabet? Keith-264 ( talk) 14:40, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
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Isn't the table in the digraphs section missing a few of the digraphs/combinations? The preceding text mentions several that are not included in the table (e.g. "there is also ⟨ου⟩, pronounced /u/"). Mortenpi ( talk) 01:24, 26 December 2017 (UTC)
In the section of Use as Numerals, there should be a reference to isopsephy. It's highly important to the entire structure of the ancient to modern Greek language. Isopsephy influenced Hebrew Gematria, Arabic Abjad numerals, and simple English Gematria. 73.204.120.223 ( talk) 14:09, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
@ Katalophyromai: I'm uneasy about the English approximations for Ancient Greek sounds, even though they're sourced, and I recognize them as ones that I've seen before. Many of the approximations for vowels are misleading to some or most readers, because vowels differ so much between English dialects (see International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects).
I'll give a few examples. O in soft is a decent approximation for omicron (ο) in many dialects of British English and in Australian and New Zealand English, where it is pronounced [ɔ] (though usually spelled /ɒ/), but in most dialects of North American English, soft has the same vowel as father, so using this approximation leads people to pronounce omicron like alpha (α). I've often heard λόγος pronounced like *λάγας. (That gets on my nerves.)
Some are just bad, like i in bit as an approximation for short iota (ι), because in Ancient Greek it was probably a pretty close vowel [i] (so that short and long iota had about the same quality). I in bit might be a decent approximation in Australian English out of the major English dialects (where the vowel is often nearly close [i]), while in modern RP and New Zealand English as well as much of North American English I think it's close-mid to mid (and probably central or between front and central), so it's closer in quality to ε or ει than to short ι. So for most readers this approximation will lead to a very inaccurate pronunciation.
The consonant approximations are mostly good, except for word-initial b, d, g for beta, delta, gamma (β, δ, γ). Generally when word-initial, b, d, g are not fully voiced. (There isn't much pressure for them to be fully voiced in that position because they are distinguished from p, t, k by not being aspirated.) But beta, delta, and gamma were probably fully voiced in all positions, because otherwise they couldn't be distinguished from pi, tau, kappa (π, τ, κ). English intervocalic b, d, g would be a better approximation.
I'm not sure how to solve this. I'd like to qualify some approximations with dialects, change some, to remove others, and add better ones, but some or all of those actions are likely to conflict with WP:OR because I'm not basing this on sources. — Eru· tuon 20:34, 29 September 2018 (UTC)
"eta - [ɛː] - similar to a as in English late". Not even close in my accent! Wiktionary shows it as /leɪt/ (a diphthong, not a long monophthong). In my accent it's /læɪ̯t/. This gives me no idea how the sound was spoken. The closest English pronunciation is a nonrhotic "air" /ɛː(ɹ)/, although many English speakers say it as a diphthong: /ɛə(ɹ)/. Danielklein ( talk) 05:26, 19 December 2018 (UTC)
From the table of examples, Ancient Greek has no letter for 'y' sound as in 'yellow'. What gives? PametUGlavu ( talk) 11:25, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
I appreciate the efforts that have lately gone into developing this article, especially the many edits by User:Katolophyromai. Yet, I'm afraid I'm not quite happy with the overall direction of some of this editing, especially with the enormous expansion of the table of letters in the first section. I remember the time, back before 2012, when the whole article was structured around a gigantic "main table" that tried to do everything at once: letter names in multiple versions, glyph variants, pronunciations in multiple versions, transliteration in multiple versions, and so on. I then proposed to split this up to make it more readable. This involved the creation of a very small summary table, listing only the bare letters, their English names, and two columns with the most representative sound values in Ancient and Modern Greek respectively [10]. The idea was to offer only a very quick overview, just making the reader familiar with the basic shapes, identities and ordering of the letters. Something that could be taken in at a glance. All the gory details were to be covered further down in specialized sections.
Ever since then, that table has tended to grow. First, somebody moved it out of the lead section to below the TOC, making it less visible for the reader in search of a quick overview (so that, more recently, somebody else felt the need to duplicate it with yet another list of letters in the lead paragraph). Then, people started adding: the native spellings of the letter names in addition to the Latin ones; a Latin transliteration column; large amounts of phonological detail (such as up to four positional realization variants for Modern Greek gamma and iota), and so on. With the new "approximate equivalent" columns for pronunciation, the table is now approaching the dimensions of that old pre-2012 "main table" again. Now it's even got esoteric details quite extraneous to its purported function as part of a "sound values" section, such as the historic variants of the letter name "lambda" (but why not also those of "omicron" or "epsilon" and all the others?) or the obsolete historic glyph variant of "lunate sigma". There's so much in this table that is in need of extra illustration, disclaimers or explanation that it even needs its own footnote sections (not just one but two sections, actually), plus massive numbers of regular footnotes (such that the reader wanting to follow the links to the notes will end up being directed to three different lists.)
Sorry, folks, but I don't think this is reader-friendly. I hate to say this now, when people have already invested so much work in this expansion, but personally I'd much rather see the whole thing returned to something a lot more similar to what we had back here: [11]. Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:29, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
The table has 5 notes at the bottom; one is about omega. Is a similar statement true about eta?? (For clarification, this question is about the statement that eta is introduced to English speakers as the sound of ay in hay.) Georgia guy ( talk) 02:13, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
The letter omega ⟨ω⟩ is normally taught to English speakers as [oʊ], the long o as in English go, in order to more clearly distinguish it from omicron ⟨ο⟩.[22][15] This is not the sound it actually made in classical Attic Greek.[22][15]
I was trying to add it to eta by changing it to:
The letters eta and omega ⟨ω⟩ are normally taught to English speakers as [ei] and [oʊ], the long a o as in English hay and go, in order to more clearly distinguish it from epsilon and omicron ⟨ο⟩.[22][15] These are not the sounds it actually made in classical Attic Greek.[22][15] Georgia guy ( talk) 14:56, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
This article gives the vowel sound in "pet" as an approximation for epsilon. However, the article for that vowel sound gives "may" as the example for most dialects, except for Australian, the example for the latter being "bed". The article for Open-mid front unrounded vowel, which this article gives as the ancient value for eta, has "bed" as the example for General American, Received Pronunciation, Northern English, and Scottish. The way I pronounce the words (I think my dialect is General American), "pet" and "bed" have the same vowel. Therefore I think that it should be made more explicit which specific dialect the English examples in the "Approximate western European equivalent" column are from. ZFT ( talk) 22:59, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
It is more harmful than helpful. The number of people who speak western European languages (esp. English) outside western Europe (Eg. India, Pakistan, Phillipines) far exceeds the population of western Europeans. They are left wondering : "WTF are they talking about? Is this how Ancient Greek is supposed to be spoken? Or was I wrong about how that western European/ English word is pronounced all along??" Example: Δ δ = d as in English delete. That's retroflex here in India, not alveolar. The IPA clears it up. Similarly with Θ θ = "t as in English top". This table column might help some Anglo Saxons, but it frustrates and confuses LOT more people. विश्वासो वासुकेयः ( talk) 03:19, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
The example of ό,τι is the only one that exists, as far as I'm concerned, and in this instance it is not referred to as a comma, rather a diastolē/diastoli (in Greek διαστολή) which is another name for the comma in Mathematics as well. Its invention and use is solely modern, as it is only seen in the word ό,τι , which didn't exist prior to Demotic/Modern Standard Greek. It is a modern substitute for the longer word οτιδήποτε, which is quite older, and means "whatever". Ό,τι has only moderly appeared, and the need to make a distinction between it and ότι (that, as used in the reported speech, not an indicative pronoun) which was already in use. In the spoken language, the two are very easy to differentiate, as they are used in completely different grammatical situations. So, it should be described as diastoli, not a comma. LightningLighting ( talk) 12:49, 25 January 2020 (UTC)
The lower-case tau is not represented throughout the article in the way it is usually seen as in the Greekalphabet.svg, shown in the infobox, which is the way users of Greek symbols are accustomed to read it. I attempted a couple of fixes, but none worked. Is there any experienced user who knows how to fix this? Gciriani ( talk) 13:27, 30 October 2020 (UTC)
May I suggest to use a sound file for each letter? rather than describing it how to pronounce. Jackzhp ( talk) 12:27, 5 March 2021 (UTC)
What Mastronarde writes about the pronunciation of Y in Ancient Greek is nonsense since u in French lune and ruse have the same length. What he writes about German equivalents is misleading since the long and short y in German differ in pronunciation, not only in length. -- Espoo ( talk) 05:59, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
The article says that the letter omicron is pronounced like the letter oh in the German word ohne. I know very little German, but isn't ohne pronounced with a long initial vowel, /ˈoːnə/? Imerologul Valah ( talk) — Preceding undated comment added 21:18, 20 June 2022 (UTC)
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Some recent edits to the lead [1][ [2]] have changed the description of the history of the uppercase/lowercase distinction, from saying that it developed in the modern era, to saying that it developed "around the third or fourth century". I don't think this is correct. If editors were thinking of the development of minuscule letter forms, those arose much later, in the 9th century or thereabouts. If they were thinking of the use of cursive letter forms that look partly similar to minuscules, those (if I'm not quite mistaken) are even older than the third and fourth century. But neither the medieval minuscule script nor the ancient cursive constitute what that sentence was talking about, a letter case distinction. "Minuscule" and "lower case" are not the same thing. A case distinction exists only when minuscule and majuscule letter forms are used in a functionally complementary way, side by side with each other in the same texts, and the distinction is employed systematically as an orthographical device. What you find in medieval writing is different: you either have texts written entirely in minuscule, or you have a few majuscule letters mixed in for decorative purposes, in titles or marginal initials. But then, these majuscule elements really stand outside the main text; their use is a stylistic decoration but not an orthographical device. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I'm aware, an orthographic case distinction really developed in Greek only after the Renaissance. Fut.Perf. ☼ 06:54, 21 March 2013 (UTC)
In Greece there is also an unofficial letter which is in widespread handwritten usage, it is a letter combining the letters "O" and "U" for the "ou" diphthong, and this letter is usually written in all-capital words. It looks like an omicron ("Ο") with an ypsilon ("Υ") above it. Can we find sources for this Greek letter? Cogiati ( talk) 12:51, 22 July 2013 (UTC)
The Greek alphabet consists of three sets of nine letters representing the numbers 1-9, 10-90, and 100-900. So, 27 letters all together (3 X 9 = 27).
As such, omega is not the last letter of the Greek alphabet because it represents the number 800.
Other letters frequently omitted are digamma/ F = (6) and koppa (similar to Q) = 90.
I think Wikipedia should post the 27 letters of the Greek alphabet and their numeric equivalents. (A numeric equivalency chart is available at www.GreekAlphabeta.com) GreekAlphabeta ( talk) 22:02, 14 November 2013 (UTC)GreekAlphabeta
The 27 Letters of the Greek Alphabet and their Numeric Equivalents
Α α Β β Γ γ Δ δ Ε ε Ϝ ϝ Ζ ζ Η η Θ θ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Ι ι Κ κ Λ λ Μ μ Ν ν Ξ ξ Ο ο Π π Ϟ ϟ 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 Ρ ρ Σ σ Τ τ Υ υ Φ φ Χ χ Ψ ψ Ω ω Ϡ ϡ 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900
GreekAlphabeta ( talk) 13:14, 15 November 2013 (UTC)GreekAlphabeta
Do you think that I should add a column alongside the names of the letters showing IPA pronunciation of the names (Romanized)? 77.127.225.235 ( talk) 22:04, 10 March 2014 (UTC)
I suggest merging English pronunciation of Greek letters into this article under a new heading. Other languages have such a subsection too: e.g. Hebrew alphabet. Please comment! —&naaabsp;Preceding unsigned comment added by אפונה ( talk • contribs) 10:07, 16 March 2014 אפונה ( talk) 04:54, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
User:Lfdder completed the merge, and added the information to the History section. I think that it would be more appropriate to have it a separate heading before the History section, especially because the history section is broken up into a few tables. Also, the lead paragraph in the old article had some information now missing (because it doesn't belong in the History section). Admittedly, it may make a long article even longer. אפונה ( talk) 04:54, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
I'm afraid I disagree with many of the recent edits by User:LlywelynII [4], and intend to partially revert them. In particular:
Sorry for this whole long list of criticism, but I'm afraid I really feel this needs to be reverted. Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:56, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for the constructive response. I'm afraid I stand by most of my points.
1. Most importantly, the scope of the article, on which I will most certainly not compromise. Of course you are right that if you ask somebody how many letters there are "in the Greek alphabet", they will answer in terms of the classical 24-letter alphabet. That's obvious and just as it should be, because that's the classical and prototypical form of this alphabet, and the article was rightly presenting it as such, right up there in the lede (we earlier had versions of this article that gave quite exaggerated undue weight to the archaic extra letters). But at the same time, when you ask people (including experts in the technical literature) what alphabet the inscription on Nestor's Cup is in, or what alphabet this is, or which alphabet Cadmus was traditionally credited with inventing, or which alphabet was the first to have separate phoneme-level symbols for vowels, they will just as obviously all answer it was the "Greek alphabet". I challenge you to find a single reliable source supporting the claim that "the Greek alphabet" didn't exist before 403 BC, as your version presented it. That really flies in the face of every single source in the field I've ever seen. Nobody out in the literature makes any such terminological distinction as you suggest, between "the alphabet" and "alphabets", or "scripts". There is a single alphabet, the Greek one, which had variants, one of them the classical one, others archaic; that alphabet was invented some time around the 8th century or so, from Phoenician, and this article deals with that whole story, from the beginning (of course giving predominant weight to the most important, classical form). The Archaic Greek alphabets article is a sub-topic of this one.
2. About the amount of detail in the lede: let's again just take the example of the details of the Greek-to-Latin borrowing. A prime example of overblown detail. What the passage in the lede is actually about is just the historical significance of Greek – the fact that it occupies that central position in the history of the transmission of alphabetic writing across Europe. To make that point, all it takes is the bare fact of transmission to Latin etc., not the historical details of what happened to individual letters in the process. If you find the story of Latin "c" or "s" so important in the lede, then why not expend the same amount of space to the details of how individual Cyrillic letters were adapted, or what happened between Phoenician and Greek? All of these things can be, and are, treated further down.
3a. About Aristophanes of Byzantium: The statement in Greek diacritics is unsourced. What Aristophanes is traditionally credited with is the invention of the accent system. While that of the breathings has often been thrown in together with the accents in older treatments, current literature stresses that it quite probably happened independently [6] [7].
3b. μπάζω, μπαίνω, μπαλλώνω, μπαμπάς, μπας, μπερδεύω, μπήγω, μπλέκω, μπορώ, μπόχα, μπροστά; ντόπιος, ντρέπομαι, ντροπή, ντύνω; γκαμήλα, γκαρδιακός, γκαστρώνω, γκλίτσα, γκρεμίζω, γκρεμός are all words of purely Greek stock. Innumerable others are of Italian or Turkish etymology but have been in the language for centuries; the correct term for such items is not "foreign words" but "loanwords". – More to the point, if you really insist on explaining the actual differences between the ancient and modern sound-symbol correspondences, then I'd guess the far more immediately noticeable change is that in the vowels (multiple symbols falling together in the sound value /i/. And before you deal with the introduction of <μπ, ντ, γκ>, it would be important to first explain the change that actually triggered this (the fricativization of <β, δ, γ>.
3c. About the pre-history of the introduction of monotonic: again, context. The sole point of mentioning the accents in the lede is to prepare the reader for the fact that there are those two different diacritic styles today. Details are extraneous to that.
6. Again, you are overlooking the fact that the domain for which those official schemes have converged is exclusively that of official transcriptions of personal and geographical names. As you yourself notice, actual (reversible) transliteration schemes remain different (and the differences between the ELOT, UN and ALA-LC columns in that part of your romanization table are by no means "minor"). And you have again overlooked the fact that in addition to either of these domains, there's the whole area of how, for example, a whole sentence of Greek would be transcribed (on a phonological basis) in a language guide for foreigners or a linguistic discussion. I still think the most important point to present here to the reader, up front, is that they have to be prepared to see Greek rendered in many different ways, in different contexts and for different purposes.
Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:14, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
I'm afraid I disagree with the recent edit by @ Piledhighandeep: [8], introducing the distinction of Greek as a true "alphabet" as opposed to the Phoenician "abjad" in the intro. As far as I am aware, the terminology that wants to restrict the term "alphabet" to those of the Greek (consonant + vowels) type and strictly distinguishes the latter from "abjads" is not a commonly employed one in the literature. While certainly influential, it is essentially just a personal invention of one author, Peter Daniels (in The World's Writing Systems). Most other authors continue to call scripts of the Phoenician type "alphabets" as a matter of course. This terminology should therefore not be allowed to monopolize our treatment like this. The distinction is already present in the article, properly contextualized and hedged, in the "history" section ("According to a definition used by some modern authors, this feature makes Greek the first "alphabet" in the narrow sense,] as distinguished from the purely consonantal alphabets of the Semitic type, which according to this terminology are called "abjads".) That's about as much coverage as we should give it here. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:02, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
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In the table with the heading "Letters" the Greek letter 'M' is named in English as 'mu'. This is incorrect as the second letter 'u' is actually pronounced 'i' in Greek, as the name of the Greek letter 'u' is pronounced 'ipsilon'. Hence the Greek letter 'Y' or 'u' in the table is incorrectly named as 'upsilon'. Think of the letter as an English Y as used in the words tally, rally, funny or sunny, rather than the English letter 'U'. This can be confusing because the upper case ipsilon 'Y' and the lower case ipsilon 'u' represent different sounds in the English language. This also applies to the Greek letter 'N' or 'v'. The correct pronunciation of these letters is therefore 'Mi' and 'Ni' rather than 'Mu' and 'Nu'. Most monosyllabic Greek letters are pronounced with a short 'i' sound such as in the word 'Si', the Italian or Spanish word for 'Yes'. For example: 'M' (Mi), 'N' (Ni), 'Ξ' (Xi) or (Ksi), 'Π' (Pi), 'Φ' (Phi), 'Χ' (Chi) and 'Ψ' (Psi). The exceptions are 'P' (Rho) or (Ro) and 'T', which brings me to my next point. The English pronunciation of the Greek letter 'T' in the table is written as 'Tau'. This is incorrect as the Greek ipsilon (u) is also used to make other sounds when combined with other letters. For example, when it is preceded by an 'o' as in 'ou' it represents the short sound 'oo' as in book, look and took. Greek examples are φρouto, pronounced 'frooto' (fruit) and τou, pronounced 'tu' (his). When preceded by an 'a', as is the case here 'au', the sound it represents is 'aph' or 'af' as in the words 'tough', 'enough' and 'gruff'. Greek examples include 'aυτo', pronounced 'afto' (that) or 'aυτoκιvιτo', pronounsed 'aftokinito' (automobile). Hence the Greek letter 'T' or 'τ' in the table should be pronounced 'taf', exactly like the English word 'tough' not 'tau'. The confusion probably lies in the fact that there are three lettters that make the 'i' sound in the Greek alphabet: 'Η' or 'η', 'Ι' or 'ι' and 'Y' or 'u'. Combinations of 'oι' and 'ει' also make the 'i' sound (confusing even for a Greek, trust me). The pronunciations are correctly labelled in the tables in the section below titled "Letter names" so I thought the inconsistency could be rectified to more accurately reflect the Modern Greek pronunciations. Cheers. Dorothy Dixer ( talk) 23:24, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
When I saw that the article claimed that chi represented a velar fricative in IPA, I changed it to say that it represented a uvular one. My edit was promptly reverted. As per Voiceless velar fricative and Voiceless uvular fricative, I believe that the Latin letter x represents a velar fricative, and the Greek letter chi represents a uvular one, and that my edit was correct, unless there is something major that I'm missing. If there is something I'm missing, please mention it here, but for the time being I'm going to change it back. Thanks. 44Dume ( talk) 18:36, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
Does anyone have the time and knowledge to write something about it? Aristarchus of Samothrace and other ancient greek Philologists and their textcritical signs.
I have found some sources, see:
Brill's Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship, 2015 (2 Vols.) pp. 549-562 and: The ambiguity of signs: critical σημεῖα from Zenodotus to Origenes. Author, Francesca Schironi — Preceding unsigned comment added by Informationskampagne ( talk • contribs) 22:45, 2 July 2016 (UTC)
There are also "pictures" of these signs in this book.
Informationskampagne (
talk) 14:29, 8 November 2015 (UTC)
I am not an expert at all, and so I hesitate just changing things, but I was trying to translate words and could not find the symbol ϑ on this page in the table. Apparently it is a variation of θ; 'theta', see /info/en/?search=Theta. Could it be added into the table or perhaps even as a footnote? (Like the two forms of Sigma). I leave the decision to the editors most active on this page. It will help people (beginners, like me) just trying to decipher symbols. Thank you! Jelle1975 ( talk) 06:30, 30 April 2016 (UTC)
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A simple copy-edit: In the last paragraph of the Greek alphabet#Diacritics section, the text "Although it is not a diacritic the Comma has" should be replaced with "Although it is not a diacritic, the comma has". That is, insert a comma and down-case Comma. Thank you! 71.41.210.146 ( talk) 14:33, 17 November 2016 (UTC)
Shouldn't an article with this title start with the Greek alphabet? Keith-264 ( talk) 14:40, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
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Isn't the table in the digraphs section missing a few of the digraphs/combinations? The preceding text mentions several that are not included in the table (e.g. "there is also ⟨ου⟩, pronounced /u/"). Mortenpi ( talk) 01:24, 26 December 2017 (UTC)
In the section of Use as Numerals, there should be a reference to isopsephy. It's highly important to the entire structure of the ancient to modern Greek language. Isopsephy influenced Hebrew Gematria, Arabic Abjad numerals, and simple English Gematria. 73.204.120.223 ( talk) 14:09, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
@ Katalophyromai: I'm uneasy about the English approximations for Ancient Greek sounds, even though they're sourced, and I recognize them as ones that I've seen before. Many of the approximations for vowels are misleading to some or most readers, because vowels differ so much between English dialects (see International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects).
I'll give a few examples. O in soft is a decent approximation for omicron (ο) in many dialects of British English and in Australian and New Zealand English, where it is pronounced [ɔ] (though usually spelled /ɒ/), but in most dialects of North American English, soft has the same vowel as father, so using this approximation leads people to pronounce omicron like alpha (α). I've often heard λόγος pronounced like *λάγας. (That gets on my nerves.)
Some are just bad, like i in bit as an approximation for short iota (ι), because in Ancient Greek it was probably a pretty close vowel [i] (so that short and long iota had about the same quality). I in bit might be a decent approximation in Australian English out of the major English dialects (where the vowel is often nearly close [i]), while in modern RP and New Zealand English as well as much of North American English I think it's close-mid to mid (and probably central or between front and central), so it's closer in quality to ε or ει than to short ι. So for most readers this approximation will lead to a very inaccurate pronunciation.
The consonant approximations are mostly good, except for word-initial b, d, g for beta, delta, gamma (β, δ, γ). Generally when word-initial, b, d, g are not fully voiced. (There isn't much pressure for them to be fully voiced in that position because they are distinguished from p, t, k by not being aspirated.) But beta, delta, and gamma were probably fully voiced in all positions, because otherwise they couldn't be distinguished from pi, tau, kappa (π, τ, κ). English intervocalic b, d, g would be a better approximation.
I'm not sure how to solve this. I'd like to qualify some approximations with dialects, change some, to remove others, and add better ones, but some or all of those actions are likely to conflict with WP:OR because I'm not basing this on sources. — Eru· tuon 20:34, 29 September 2018 (UTC)
"eta - [ɛː] - similar to a as in English late". Not even close in my accent! Wiktionary shows it as /leɪt/ (a diphthong, not a long monophthong). In my accent it's /læɪ̯t/. This gives me no idea how the sound was spoken. The closest English pronunciation is a nonrhotic "air" /ɛː(ɹ)/, although many English speakers say it as a diphthong: /ɛə(ɹ)/. Danielklein ( talk) 05:26, 19 December 2018 (UTC)
From the table of examples, Ancient Greek has no letter for 'y' sound as in 'yellow'. What gives? PametUGlavu ( talk) 11:25, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
I appreciate the efforts that have lately gone into developing this article, especially the many edits by User:Katolophyromai. Yet, I'm afraid I'm not quite happy with the overall direction of some of this editing, especially with the enormous expansion of the table of letters in the first section. I remember the time, back before 2012, when the whole article was structured around a gigantic "main table" that tried to do everything at once: letter names in multiple versions, glyph variants, pronunciations in multiple versions, transliteration in multiple versions, and so on. I then proposed to split this up to make it more readable. This involved the creation of a very small summary table, listing only the bare letters, their English names, and two columns with the most representative sound values in Ancient and Modern Greek respectively [10]. The idea was to offer only a very quick overview, just making the reader familiar with the basic shapes, identities and ordering of the letters. Something that could be taken in at a glance. All the gory details were to be covered further down in specialized sections.
Ever since then, that table has tended to grow. First, somebody moved it out of the lead section to below the TOC, making it less visible for the reader in search of a quick overview (so that, more recently, somebody else felt the need to duplicate it with yet another list of letters in the lead paragraph). Then, people started adding: the native spellings of the letter names in addition to the Latin ones; a Latin transliteration column; large amounts of phonological detail (such as up to four positional realization variants for Modern Greek gamma and iota), and so on. With the new "approximate equivalent" columns for pronunciation, the table is now approaching the dimensions of that old pre-2012 "main table" again. Now it's even got esoteric details quite extraneous to its purported function as part of a "sound values" section, such as the historic variants of the letter name "lambda" (but why not also those of "omicron" or "epsilon" and all the others?) or the obsolete historic glyph variant of "lunate sigma". There's so much in this table that is in need of extra illustration, disclaimers or explanation that it even needs its own footnote sections (not just one but two sections, actually), plus massive numbers of regular footnotes (such that the reader wanting to follow the links to the notes will end up being directed to three different lists.)
Sorry, folks, but I don't think this is reader-friendly. I hate to say this now, when people have already invested so much work in this expansion, but personally I'd much rather see the whole thing returned to something a lot more similar to what we had back here: [11]. Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:29, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
The table has 5 notes at the bottom; one is about omega. Is a similar statement true about eta?? (For clarification, this question is about the statement that eta is introduced to English speakers as the sound of ay in hay.) Georgia guy ( talk) 02:13, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
The letter omega ⟨ω⟩ is normally taught to English speakers as [oʊ], the long o as in English go, in order to more clearly distinguish it from omicron ⟨ο⟩.[22][15] This is not the sound it actually made in classical Attic Greek.[22][15]
I was trying to add it to eta by changing it to:
The letters eta and omega ⟨ω⟩ are normally taught to English speakers as [ei] and [oʊ], the long a o as in English hay and go, in order to more clearly distinguish it from epsilon and omicron ⟨ο⟩.[22][15] These are not the sounds it actually made in classical Attic Greek.[22][15] Georgia guy ( talk) 14:56, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
This article gives the vowel sound in "pet" as an approximation for epsilon. However, the article for that vowel sound gives "may" as the example for most dialects, except for Australian, the example for the latter being "bed". The article for Open-mid front unrounded vowel, which this article gives as the ancient value for eta, has "bed" as the example for General American, Received Pronunciation, Northern English, and Scottish. The way I pronounce the words (I think my dialect is General American), "pet" and "bed" have the same vowel. Therefore I think that it should be made more explicit which specific dialect the English examples in the "Approximate western European equivalent" column are from. ZFT ( talk) 22:59, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
It is more harmful than helpful. The number of people who speak western European languages (esp. English) outside western Europe (Eg. India, Pakistan, Phillipines) far exceeds the population of western Europeans. They are left wondering : "WTF are they talking about? Is this how Ancient Greek is supposed to be spoken? Or was I wrong about how that western European/ English word is pronounced all along??" Example: Δ δ = d as in English delete. That's retroflex here in India, not alveolar. The IPA clears it up. Similarly with Θ θ = "t as in English top". This table column might help some Anglo Saxons, but it frustrates and confuses LOT more people. विश्वासो वासुकेयः ( talk) 03:19, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
The example of ό,τι is the only one that exists, as far as I'm concerned, and in this instance it is not referred to as a comma, rather a diastolē/diastoli (in Greek διαστολή) which is another name for the comma in Mathematics as well. Its invention and use is solely modern, as it is only seen in the word ό,τι , which didn't exist prior to Demotic/Modern Standard Greek. It is a modern substitute for the longer word οτιδήποτε, which is quite older, and means "whatever". Ό,τι has only moderly appeared, and the need to make a distinction between it and ότι (that, as used in the reported speech, not an indicative pronoun) which was already in use. In the spoken language, the two are very easy to differentiate, as they are used in completely different grammatical situations. So, it should be described as diastoli, not a comma. LightningLighting ( talk) 12:49, 25 January 2020 (UTC)
The lower-case tau is not represented throughout the article in the way it is usually seen as in the Greekalphabet.svg, shown in the infobox, which is the way users of Greek symbols are accustomed to read it. I attempted a couple of fixes, but none worked. Is there any experienced user who knows how to fix this? Gciriani ( talk) 13:27, 30 October 2020 (UTC)
May I suggest to use a sound file for each letter? rather than describing it how to pronounce. Jackzhp ( talk) 12:27, 5 March 2021 (UTC)
What Mastronarde writes about the pronunciation of Y in Ancient Greek is nonsense since u in French lune and ruse have the same length. What he writes about German equivalents is misleading since the long and short y in German differ in pronunciation, not only in length. -- Espoo ( talk) 05:59, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
The article says that the letter omicron is pronounced like the letter oh in the German word ohne. I know very little German, but isn't ohne pronounced with a long initial vowel, /ˈoːnə/? Imerologul Valah ( talk) — Preceding undated comment added 21:18, 20 June 2022 (UTC)