Greek script
| Greek script | |
|---|---|
| Script type | |
Time period | ~800 BC to the present[1] |
| Related scripts | |
Parent systems | Proto-Sinaitic alphabet
|
Child systems | Gothic Glagolitic Cyrillic Coptic Armenian alphabet Old Italic alphabet Latin script |
| ISO 15924 | |
| ISO 15924 | Grek (200), Greek |
| Unicode | |
Unicode alias | Greek |
| U+0370–U+03FF Greek and Coptic, U+1F00–U+1FFF Greek Extended | |
The Greek script is the graphic basis of the Greek alphabet, and is used primarily for that purpose and for scientific and mathematical symbols. It has also been adapted to write other languages, sometimes with additional letters.
The Greek script derived from the Phoenician alphabet,[2] and is the earliest known alphabetic script to systematically write vowels as well as consonants.[3]
Derived scripts
[edit]
The Greek script was ancestral to several others:[4]
- The Etruscan alphabet, adopted from an archaic form of the Greek alphabet brought to Italy by Greek colonists in the late 8th century BC;
- Via Etruscan, the Latin script, together with various other ancient scripts in Italy;
- The Gothic alphabet, devised in the 4th century to write the Gothic language, based on a combination of Greek and Latin uncial models;[5]
- The Glagolitic alphabet, devised in the 9th century for writing Old Church Slavonic;
- The Cyrillic script, which replaced the Glagolitic alphabet shortly afterwards.
- The Coptic script used for writing the Coptic language of Egypt.
The Armenian and Georgian scripts are almost certainly modeled on the Greek alphabet, but their graphic forms are quite different.[6]
Derived alphabets
[edit]Apart from the daughter scripts listed above, which were adapted from Greek but developed into separate writing systems, the Greek alphabet has also been adapted at various times and places to write other languages.[7]
Antiquity
[edit]- Most of the Iron Age alphabets of Asia Minor were also adopted around the same time, as the early Greek alphabet was adopted from the Phoenician Alphabet. The Lydian and Carian alphabets are generally believed to derive from the Greek alphabet, although it is not clear which variant is the direct ancestor. While some of these alphabets such as Phrygian had slight differences from the Greek counterpart, some like Carian alphabet had mostly different values and several other characters inherited from pre-Greek local scripts. They were in use c. 800–300 BC until all the Anatolian languages were extinct due to Hellenization.[8][9][10][11][12]
- The original Old Italic alphabets was the early Greek alphabet with only slight modifications.
- It was used in some Paleo-Balkan languages, including Thracian. For other neighboring languages or dialects, such as Ancient Macedonian, isolated words are preserved in Greek texts, but no continuous texts are preserved.
- The Greco-Iberian alphabet was used for writing the ancient Iberian language in parts of modern Spain.
- Gaulish inscriptions (in modern France) used a Greek alphabet until the Roman conquest
- The Bactrian language, an Iranian language spoken in what is now Afghanistan, was written in a Greek alphabet during the Kushan Empire (65–250 AD). It adds an extra letter ⟨þ⟩ for the sh sound [ʃ].[13]
- Derived from Indo-Greek coinage, the coins of Nahapana and Chastana of the Western Satraps featured an Indo-Aryan language legend written in Greek or pseudo-Greek letters. The subsequent rulers' coins had the Greek script degrade to a mere ornament that no longer represented any legible legend.[14]
- The Coptic alphabet adds eight letters derived from Demotic. It is still used today, mostly in Egypt, to write Coptic, the liturgical language of Egyptian Christians. Letters usually retain an uncial form different from the forms used for Greek today. The alphabet of Old Nubian is an adaptation of Coptic.
Middle Ages
[edit]- Coins from the 4th-8th centuries known as mordovkas were used as currency in Eastern Europe by Uralic peoples and were written in Moksha using Greek uncial script.[15]
- An 8th-century Arabic fragment preserves a text in a Greek alphabet,[16] as does a 9th- or 10th-century psalm translation fragment.[17]
- An Old Ossetic inscription of the 10th–12th centuries found in Arxyz, the oldest known attestation of an Ossetic language.
- The Old Nubian language of Makuria (modern Sudan) adds three Coptic letters, two letters derived from Meroitic script, and a digraph of two Greek gammas used for the velar nasal sound.
- Various South Slavic dialects, similar to the modern Bulgarian and Macedonian languages, have been written in Greek script.[18][19][20][21] The modern South Slavic languages now use modified Cyrillic alphabets.
Early modern
[edit]
- Turkish spoken by Orthodox Christians (Karamanlides) was often written in Greek script, and called Karamanlidika.
- Tosk Albanian was often written using a Greek alphabet, starting in about 1500.[22] The printing press at Moschopolis published several Albanian texts in Greek script during the 18th century. It was only in 1908 that the Monastir conference standardized a Latin orthography for both Tosk and Gheg. Greek spelling is still occasionally used for the local Albanian dialects (Arvanitika) in Greece.
- Gagauz, a Turkic language of the northeast Balkans spoken by Orthodox Christians, was apparently written in a Greek alphabet in the late 19th century. In 1957, it was standardized on Cyrillic, and in 1996, a Gagauz alphabet based on Latin characters was adopted (derived from the Turkish alphabet).
- Surguch, a Turkic language, was spoken by a small group of Orthodox Christians in northern Greece. It is now written in Latin or Cyrillic characters.
- Urum or Greek Tatar, spoken by Orthodox Christians, used a Greek alphabet.
- Judaeo-Spanish or Ladino, a Jewish dialect of Spanish, has occasionally been published in Greek characters in Greece.[23]
- The Italian humanist Giovan Giorgio Trissino tried to add some Greek letters (Ɛ ε, Ꞷ ω) to Italian orthography in 1524.[24]
References
[edit]- ^ Swiggers 1996.
- ^ The Development of the Greek Alphabet within the Chronology of the ANE Archived 2015-04-12 at the Wayback Machine (2009), Quote: "Naveh gives four major reasons why it is universally agreed that the Greek alphabet was developed from an early Phoenician alphabet.
1 According to Herodutous "the Phoenicians who came with Cadmus... brought into Hellas the alphabet, which had hitherto been unknown, as I think, to the Greeks."
2 The Greek Letters, alpha, beta, gimmel have no meaning in Greek but the meaning of most of their Semitic equivalents is known. For example, 'aleph' means 'ox', 'bet' means 'house' and 'gimmel' means 'throw stick'.
3 Early Greek letters are very similar and sometimes identical to the West Semitic letters.
4 The letter sequence between the Semitic and Greek alphabets is identical. (Naveh 1982)" - ^ Horrocks 2014, p. xviii: "By redeploying letters that that denoted consonant sounds irrelevant to Greek, the vowels could now be written systematically, thus producing the first 'true' alphabet"; Howatson 2013, p. 35; Swiggers 1996, p. 265
- ^ Coulmas 1996.
- ^ Murdoch 2004, p. 156
- ^ George L. Campbell, Christopher Moseley, The Routledge Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets, pp. 51ff, 96ff
- ^ Macrakis 1996.
- ^ Understanding Relations Between Scripts II Archived 2022-05-22 at the Wayback Machine by Philip J Boyes & Philippa M Steele. Published in the UK in 2020 by Oxbow Books: "The Carian alphabet resembles the Greek alphabet, though, as in the case of Phrygian, no single Greek variant can be identified as its ancestor", "It is generally assumed that the Lydian alphabet is derived from the Greek alphabet, but the exact relationship remains unclear (Melchert 2004)"
- ^ Britannica – Lycian Alphabet Archived 2024-07-10 at the Wayback Machine "The Lycian alphabet is clearly related to the Greek, but the exact nature of the relationship is uncertain. Several letters appear to be related to symbols of the Cretan and Cyprian writing systems."
- ^ Scriptsource.org – Carian Archived 2023-10-29 at the Wayback Machine"Visually, the letters bear a close resemblance to Greek letters. Decipherment was initially attempted on the assumption that those letters which looked like Greek represented the same sounds as their closest visual Greek equivalents. However it has since been established that the phonetic values of the two scripts are very different. For example the theta θ symbol represents 'th' in Greek but 'q' in Carian. Carian was generally written from left to right, although Egyptian writers wrote primarily from right to left. It was written without spaces between words."
- ^ Omniglot.com – Carian Archived 2024-08-27 at the Wayback Machine "The Carian alphabet appears in about 100 pieces of graffiti inscriptions left by Carian mercenaries who served in Egypt. A number of clay tablets, coins and monumental inscriptions have also been found. It was possibly derived from the Phoenician alphabet."
- ^ Ancient Anatolian languages and cultures in contact: some methodological observations Archived 2023-09-03 at the Wayback Machine by Paola Cotticelli-Kurras & Federico Giusfredi (University of Verona, Italy) "During the Iron ages, with a brand new political balance and cultural scenario, the cultures and languages of Anatolia maintained their position of a bridge between the Aegean and the Syro-Mesopotamian worlds, while the North-West Semitic cultures of the Phoenicians and of the Aramaeans also entered the scene. Assuming the 4th century and the hellenization of Anatolia as the terminus ante quem, the correct perspective of a contact-oriented study of the Ancient Anatolian world needs to take as an object a large net of cultures that evolved and changed over almost 16 centuries of documentary history."
- ^ Sims-Williams 1997.
- ^ Rapson, E. J. (1908). Catalogue of the Coins of the Andhra Dynasty, the Western Kṣatrapas, the Traikūṭaka Dynasty, and the 'Bodhi' Dynasty. London: Longman & Co. pp. cxci–cxciv, 65–67, 72–75. ISBN 978-1-332-41465-9.
- ^ Zaikovsky 1929
- ^ J. Blau, "Middle and Old Arabic material for the history of stress in Arabic", Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 35:3:476–84 (October 1972) full text Archived 2024-10-07 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Ahmad Al-Jallad, The Damascus Psalm Fragment: Middle Arabic and the Legacy of Old Ḥigāzī, in series Late Antique and Medieval Islamic Near East (LAMINE) 2, Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2020; full text Archived 2021-07-11 at the Wayback Machine; see also Bible translations into Arabic
- ^ Miletich 1920.
- ^ Mazon & Vaillant 1938.
- ^ Kristophson 1974, p. 11.
- ^ Peyfuss 1989.
- ^ Elsie 1991.
- ^ Katja Šmid, "Los problemas del estudio de la lengua sefardí", Verba Hispanica 10:1:113–24 (2002) full text Archived 2024-10-07 at the Wayback Machine: "Es interesante el hecho que en Bulgaria se imprimieron unas pocas publicaciones en alfabeto cirílico búlgaro y en Grecia en alfabeto griego."
- ^ Trissino, Gian Giorgio (1524). De le lettere nuωvamente aggiunte ne la lingua Italiana (in Italian). Archived from the original on 3 September 2023. Retrieved 20 October 2022 – via Wikisource.
Sources
[edit]- Horrocks, Geoffrey (2014). Greek, A History of the Language and Its Speakers (2nd illustrated ed.). Wiley. ISBN 9781118785157.
- Howatson, M.C., ed. (2013). The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (3rd reprint ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199548552.
- Macrakis, Stavros M (1996). "Character codes for Greek: Problems and modern solutions". In Macrakis, Michael (ed.). Greek letters: from tablets to pixels. Newcastle: Oak Knoll Press. p. 265.
- Sims-Williams, Nicholas (1997). "New Findings in Ancient Afghanistan – the Bactrian documents discovered from the Northern Hindu-Kush". Archived from the original on 2007-06-10.
- Zaikovsky, Bogdan (1929). "Mordovkas Problem". Nizhne-Volzhskaya Oblast Ethnological Scientific Society Review (36–2). Saratov: 30–32.