Origins , one of the oldest preserved inscriptions in the Greek alphabet, During the
Mycenaean period, between roughly the 16th and 12th centuries BC, a script called
Linear B was used to write the earliest attested form of the Greek language, known as
Mycenaean Greek. This writing system, unrelated to the Greek alphabet, last appeared in the 13th century BC. Inscription written in the Greek alphabet begin to emerge from the 8th century BC onward. While early samples of the Greek alphabet date from at least 775 BC, the oldest known substantial and comprehensible inscriptions, such as those on the
Dipylon vase, the
cup of Nestor, and
cup of Acesander, date from /30 BC. It is accepted that the introduction of the alphabet occurred some time prior to these inscriptions. While earlier dates have been proposed, the Greek alphabet is commonly held to have originated some time in the late 9th or early 8th century BC, conventionally around 800 BC. However, the Phoenician alphabet was limited to consonants. When it was adopted for writing Greek, certain consonants were adapted in order to express vowels. The use of both vowels and consonants makes Greek the first
alphabet in the narrow sense, as distinguished from the
abjads used in
Semitic languages, which have letters only for consonants. , Greek initially took over all of the 22 letters of Phoenician. Five were reassigned to denote vowel sounds: the glide consonants (
yodh) and (
waw) were used for [i] (,
iota) and [u] (,
upsilon); the
glottal stop consonant (
aleph) was used for [a] (,
alpha); the
pharyngeal (
ʿayin) was turned into [o] (,
omicron); and the letter for (
he) was turned into [e] (,
epsilon). A doublet of
waw was also borrowed as a consonant for [w] (,
digamma). In addition, the Phoenician letter for the emphatic glottal (
heth) was borrowed in two different functions by different dialects of Greek: as a letter for /h/ (,
heta) by those dialects that had such a sound, and as an additional vowel letter for the long (,
eta) by those dialects that lacked the consonant. Eventually, a seventh vowel letter for the long (,
omega) was introduced. Greek also introduced three new consonant letters for its aspirated plosive sounds and consonant clusters: (
phi) for , (
chi) for and (
psi) for . In western Greek variants, was instead used for and for . The origin of these letters is a matter of some debate. Three of the original Phoenician letters dropped out of use before the alphabet took its classical shape: the letter Ϻ (
san), which had been in competition with Σ (
sigma) denoting the same phoneme /s/; the letter Ϙ (
qoppa), which was redundant with Κ (
kappa) for /k/, and Ϝ (
digamma), whose sound value /w/ dropped out of the spoken language before or during the classical period. Greek was originally written predominantly from right to left, just like Phoenician, but scribes could freely alternate between directions. For a time, a writing style with alternating right-to-left and left-to-right lines (called
boustrophedon, literally 'ox-turning', after the manner of an ox ploughing a field) was common, until in the classical period the left-to-right writing direction became the norm. Individual letter shapes were mirrored depending on the writing direction of the current line.
Archaic variants There were initially numerous
local (epichoric) variants of the Greek alphabet, which differed in the use and non-use of the additional vowel and consonant symbols and several other features. Epichoric alphabets are commonly divided into four major types according to their different treatments of additional consonant letters for the aspirated consonants (/pʰ, kʰ/) and consonant clusters (/ks, ps/) of Greek. These four types are often conventionally labelled as "green", "red", "light blue" and "dark blue" types, based on a colour-coded map in a seminal 19th-century work on the topic, by
Adolf Kirchhoff (1867). The "green" (or southern) type is the most archaic and closest to the Phoenician. The "red" (or western) type is the one that was later transmitted to the West and became the ancestor of the
Latin alphabet, and bears some crucial features characteristic of that later development. The "blue" (or eastern) type is the one from which the later standard Greek alphabet emerged.
Athens used a local form of the "light blue" alphabet type until the end of the 5th century BC, which lacked the letters Ξ and Ψ as well as the vowel symbols Η and Ω. In the Old Attic alphabet, stood for and for . was used for all three sounds (correspondinɡ to classical ), and was used for all of (corresponding to classical ). The letter (heta) was used for the consonant . Some variant local letter forms were also characteristic of Athenian writing, some of which were shared with the neighboring (but otherwise "red") alphabet of
Euboia: a form of that resembled a Latin
L () and a form of that resembled a Latin
S (). • Upsilon is also derived from
waw (). The classical twenty-four-letter alphabet that is now used to represent the Greek language was originally the local alphabet of
Ionia. By the late 5th century BC, it was commonly used by many Athenians. In 403 BC, at the suggestion of the
archon Eucleides, the Athenian Assembly formally abandoned the Old Attic alphabet and adopted the Ionian alphabet as part of the democratic reforms after the
overthrow of the
Thirty Tyrants. Because of Eucleides's role in suggesting the idea to adopt the Ionian alphabet, the standard twenty-four-letter Greek alphabet is sometimes known as the "Eucleidean alphabet". Roughly thirty years later, the Eucleidean alphabet was adopted in Boeotia and it may have been adopted a few years previously in
Macedonia. By the end of the 4th century BC, it had displaced local alphabets across the Greek-speaking world to become the standard form of the Greek alphabet.
Letter names When the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet, they took over not only the letter shapes and sound values but also the names by which the sequence of the alphabet could be recited and memorized. In Phoenician, each letter name was a word that began with the sound represented by that letter; thus
ʾaleph, the word for "ox", was used as the name for the glottal stop ,
bet, or "house", for the sound, and so on. When the letters were adopted by the Greeks, most of the Phoenician names were maintained or modified slightly to fit Greek phonology; thus,
ʾaleph, bet, gimel became
alpha, beta, gamma. The Greek names of the following letters are more or less straightforward continuations of their Phoenician antecedents. Between Ancient and Modern Greek, they have remained largely unchanged, except that their pronunciation has followed regular sound changes along with other words (for instance, in the name of
beta, ancient /b/ regularly changed to modern /v/, and ancient /ɛː/ to modern /i/, resulting in the modern pronunciation
vita). The name of lambda is attested in early sources as besides ; in Modern Greek the spelling is often , reflecting pronunciation.
Letter shapes ), printed in the renaissance typeface
Grecs du roi by
Claude Garamond Like Latin and other alphabetic scripts, Greek originally had only a single form of each letter, without a distinction between uppercase and lowercase. This distinction is an innovation of the modern era, drawing on different lines of development of the letter shapes in earlier handwriting. The oldest forms of the letters in antiquity are
majuscule forms. Besides the upright, straight inscriptional forms (capitals) found in stone carvings or incised pottery, more fluent writing styles adapted for handwriting on soft materials were also developed during antiquity. Such handwriting has been preserved especially from
papyrus manuscripts in
Egypt since the
Hellenistic period. Ancient handwriting developed two distinct styles:
uncial writing, with carefully drawn, rounded block letters of about equal size, used as a
book hand for carefully produced literary and religious manuscripts, and
cursive writing, used for everyday purposes. The cursive forms approached the style of lowercase letter forms, with
ascenders and descenders, as well as many connecting lines and ligatures between letters. In the 9th and 10th centuries, uncial book hands were replaced with a new, more compact writing style, with letter forms partly adapted from the earlier cursive. This
minuscule style remained the dominant form of handwritten Greek into the modern era. During the
Renaissance, western printers adopted the minuscule letter forms as lowercase printed typefaces, while modeling uppercase letters on the ancient inscriptional forms. The orthographic practice of using the letter case distinction for marking proper names, titles, etc. developed in parallel to the practice in Latin and other western languages. == Derived alphabets ==