Greek Alphabet Letters & Numerals Symbols History

The history of the Greek alphabet starts with the adoption of Phoenician letter forms and continues to the present day. This article concentrates on the early period, before the codification of the now-standard Greek alphabet.

The Phoenician alphabet was strictly speaking one that was consistently explicit only about consonants, though even by the 9th century BC it had developed matres lectionis to indicate some, mostly final, vowels.

Greek alphabet, writing system that was developed in Greece about 1000 bc. It is the direct or indirect ancestor of all modern European alphabets. Derived from the North Semitic alphabet via that of the Phoenicians, the Greek alphabet was modified to make it more efficient and accurate for writing a non-Semitic language by the addition of several new letters and the modification or dropping of several others. Most important, some of the symbols of the Semitic alphabet, which represented only consonants, were made to represent vowels: the Semitic consonants ʾalef, he, yod, ʠayin, and vav became the Greek letters alpha, epsilon, iota, omicron, and upsilon, representing the vowels a,e,i,o, and u, respectively. The addition of symbols for the vowel sounds greatly increased the accuracy and legibility of the writing system for non-Semitic languages.

Greek numerals, also known as Ionic, Ionian, Milesian, or Alexandrian numerals, are a system of writing numbers using the letters of the Greek alphabet. In modern Greece, they are still used for ordinal numbers and in contexts similar to those in which Roman numerals are still used elsewhere in the West. For ordinary cardinal numbers, however, Greece uses Arabic numerals.