While contemporary consonantal alphabets eventually added vowel diacritics centuries later, it was Greek that introduced the concept of writing vowels. While alphabets such as Phoenician (φοινικικό αλφάβητο) already existed, they lacked one feature that would have made them a truly accurate representation of human speech, vowels. As a matter of fact, Greek was the first true alphabet in world history. Without the Greek alphabet, there would be no Roman alphabet, Cyrillic (κυριλλικό), or even Germanic runes (γερμανικές ρούνους) for that matter. That’s because the Roman/Latin alphabet (λατινικό αλφάβητο) that we currently use was originally a variant of the Greek alphabet. In fact, several of the Greek letters you see should already be familiar to you.
You have probably seen Greek letters (ελληνικά γράμματα) in several places throughout the day in everyday life: on the walls of fraternities, in math (μαθηματικά) and science (επιστήμη,) in ancient manuscripts of the Bible (Η Αγία Γραφή) found in museums and on the Web, etc. Major Languages Using the Orthography as Main or Major Script: Greek, English (in certain scientific contexts)
Nations Using Greek as Official or Major Language: Greece, Cyprus Number of Written Characters: 24 (excluding capital, lowercase, cursive, and final forms) Approximate Date of Emergence: 8th Century BC
0 kommentar(er)
