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The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. [3] [4] It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, [5] and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants.
Greek alphabet, writing system developed in Greece about 1000 BCE that became the ancestor of all modern European alphabets. Derived from the North Semitic alphabet, the Greek alphabet was modified to make it more efficient and accurate for writing a non-Semitic language.
The Greek alphabet allowed for the development of Greek culture on every level. It was adopted by the Etruscans, who then transmitted it to the Romans, who developed Latin script, which became the basis for modern-day alphabetic script and enabled the written word as it is presently known.
Many local variants of the Greek alphabet were employed in ancient Greece during the archaic and early classical periods, until around 400 BC, when they were replaced by the classical 24-letter alphabet that is the standard today.
The history of the Greek alphabet starts with the adoption of Phoenician letter forms in the 9th–8th centuries BC during early Archaic Greece and continues to the present day.
The ancient Greek alphabet we are familiar with begins with alpha and ends with omega – something referenced in the Bible. The chart below includes uppercase and lowercase variations of each letter, alongside its anglicised equivalent.
Alphabet - Greek, Phoenician, Letters: The Greek alphabet derived from the North Semitic script in the 8th century bce. The direction of writing in the oldest Greek inscriptions—as in the Semitic scripts—is from right to left, a style that was superseded by the boustrophedon (meaning, in Greek, “as the ox draws the plow”), in which ...