The Greek Alphabet

The present 24-letter Greek alphabet, shown at the right, is the result of a long development. It evolved from Phoenician alphabets, which probably were inspired by Egyptian hieratic writing, by the addition of vowels. The letters representing double sounds, and distinguishing long and short vowels, were mostly added later, and a few letters from early alphabets that were regarded as superfluous were dropped. These are shown at the left. Most of these letters were retained for number notation, however, as shown.

The pronunciation shown is very approximate. Greek spelling and pronunciation differ between dialects, and have changed greatly over the course of time. The spelling, however, has always been intended to represent the actual pronunciation. Since heroic times there has been a constant tendency to combine and simplify vowel sounds, as evidenced by the Attic contractions. At present, there are only five pure vowel sounds, which is not enough to make the distinctions necessary in classical Greek. Classical scholars generally pronounce Greek rather like Latin, which has probably been done for a very long time. They defend the pronunciation of b as a hard b instead of a voiced v, and eu , au> as diphthongs rather than as ef and af, as in modern Greek. At the same time, they use the modern th for q and f for f.

Greek was originally written with letters like the capitals shown. The small letters evolved from them for easier writing on papyrus with a pen. Just when they attained their present shape is difficult to determine, but I think it was well on the way by 100 AD. Accents and breathings were added by 200 BC to ease the path of learners of Greek, which was becoming a general language. How Greek actually sounded when the accent was by pitch, which the accents describe, is unknown. It is now pronounced with a stress accent on any accented syllable, and modern Greek uses only the acute accent.

The basic accent is the acute. When it is on the final syllable, it changes to a grave when another word follows in the sentence. There are several other rules for accents, but this is the most commonly appearing. The circumflex accent is a combination of the acute and grave, and often represents a contraction involving an accented vowel. It is only used on long vowels, and only on one of the final two syllables. No accent can fall beyond the third syllable from the end of a word. If the final vowel is long, the accent must be on one of the last two syllables. It is often pulled towards the end of the word by inflection, when the ending has a long vowel.

The breathings are rough (an h-sound) and smooth (no h-sound), and must be used on all initial vowels and the letter r, which gets a rough breathing at the start of a word. This aspiration gradually disappeared, and is absent in modern Greek. They say that the comma-like breathings are two parts of the letter H, pulled apart when it was adopted for the long e instead of the aspiration.

Greek punctuation uses the full stop and the comma generally as in English. A high dot is like a semicolon or colon, used before further explanation or continuation of an idea, and the interrogation looks like a semicolon. Possibly sentences were separated by punctuation and spacing before individual words were clearly separated by spaces. Roman inscriptions usually separated words, so it is hard to believe that this was not done in writing to some degree, in Greek as well as Latin.

The first step in learning Greek is to learn the alphabet. The way to do this is to write out the small letters in order until you can do it neatly and quickly. It makes sense to memorize the letters in order because you will want to look up words in a lexicon, which will be arranged alphabetically. Once you have the small letters, the capitals will be no problem. Just make sure to get them the right way round. It is easy to print the small letters like a medieval scribe, and helps in recognition. Once you know the alphabet, it will only take a year or so of reading before you are comfortable, so cheer up!

Composed by J. B. Calvert
Last revised 8 August 1999