Talk:Greek alphabet/Archive 3

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Derived from the Phoenician Alphabet?

Does not one here know of the epigraphs of Alonnisos and Dispiliou? They have greek letters and are dated to be old as 5260BC. This puts into question the claim that they originate from the Phoenician Alphabet. —Preceding unsigned comment added by WhiteMagick (talk • contribs) 00:26, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

That claim that the Greek alphabet arises from Phoenician and not from Linear B or Cypriot definitely wants further evidence. I've added a citation needed tag. k. da-ma-te (talk) 20:30, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

The descendance of Greek from Phoenician is supported by every treatment of Greek you could possibly look up anywhere. The references currently cited in the article are quite sufficient in this respect. About the non-relatedness between Linear B and Greek, the fact is that few sources – at least none of the ones I had quick access to – bother to make any explicit statement about it, because, quite simply, it is blindingly obvious. It's obvious from the fact that there is a temporal gap of several centuries between the demise of the one and the invention of the other, and from the fact that the two are entirely, radically, different structurally. It's a bit like asking for a reference that the Moon is not made of green cheese. Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:54, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

According to some modern scholarship, Greek MAY be derived from Phoenician. Maybe not. The "official story" is not necessarily the correct one. As things stand, the claim is in dispute and it is an active argument. Linear B is a popular culprit as is Cypriot. "... supported by every treatment of Greek you could possibly look up anywhere," is sort of an old and thoughtless argument. If a million people say a wrong thing it is still wrong. Researchers tend toward laziness. Gingermint (talk) 02:13, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Without citable modern scholarship (what we call reliable sources) supporting your position, I'm afraid we have to treat it as original research, which is outside the scope of Wikipedia. Thanks, --Macrakis (talk) 02:34, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Even the ancient Greeks were aware that it derived from the Phoenician. See Herodotus..... --Andriolo (talk) 10:13, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Stigma

If stigma is merely a stylistic ligature, then I agree that it should be removed from the Obsolete Letters table. In that case, it was never a letter. FilipeS (talk) 18:51, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

If theta, phi, chi, psi, sho, sampi bears consonant clusters such as th, ph, ch, ps, sh, ss, and can be letters, then stigma that bears st consonant cluster too can be letter. 216.40.255.90 (talk) 19:14, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

But stigma was never an independent letter. It was always possible and correct to replace it with sigma-tau. Psi cannot be replaced with pi-sigma. Stigma seems to have been always an optional ligature. As such, it should not be regarded as a letter; it is merely a glyph. FilipeS (talk) 19:17, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Stigma is not even a ligature in sense of Æ and Œ, because it doesn't look as contracted ΣΤ, but somewhat different, thus it can be only letter. 216.40.255.90 (talk) 19:21, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

That's a matter of opinion. I think it does look like a sigma merged with a tau, and historically its origin is clearly in a ligature. See here. FilipeS (talk) 19:24, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Thus I can agree, that current stigma is a simplified ΣΤ ligature, but without middle vertical line | included in Τ and without bottom horizontal line _ included in Σ. But because it can be technically utilized as separate letter, better keep it in article. Stigma even bears numerical value 6 like separate letter, but not sum of sigma 200 and tau 300 numerals, which will be 500. 216.40.255.90 (talk) 19:35, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

There are two functions of the symbol stigma ϛ: one as a ligature for the sequence sigma-tau; the other as a Greek numeral, where it is really a glyph for digamma. Neither of these constitutes a "letter" in any conventional sense. Nor is the "letter" stigma ever mentioned in the alphabetical sequence of the Greek letters. Its graphic form is very similar to the final sigma ς (which is of course also not a letter in itself) and sometimes they are mistakenly exchanged.

As a ligature, it is found in many manuscripts and in a few printed texts which use ligatures. Though in modern Greek typography there are essentially no ligatures, some old fonts contain dozens (see the punches for Claude Garamond's grecs du roi), none of which count as 'letters'.

It is silly to write the name of stigma as ϛῖγμα -- unless of course someone can find a WP:Reliable Source for this usage. --Macrakis (talk) 18:58, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Each Greek letter has old spelling with usage of initial old letter and new spelling without usage of initial old letter. Thus in case of Stigma is presented normal practice, as with other obsolete letters, thus nothing is silly. 91.94.11.205 (talk) 21:16, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

That is assuming that stigma is an 'obsolete letter'. But it is a ligature. Can you find any examples in reliable sources where stigma is used in this way? --Macrakis (talk) 21:26, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

If Þorgal Ærgisson can be written in Scandinavian languages with ligature Æ, then stigma name can be too written analogously as ϛῖγμα with ligature ϛ in medieval Greek language. This is obvious. 79.162.61.204 (talk) 14:52, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

But it isn't written like that in modern scholarship, even where modern scholarship discusses the historical name "stigma". Read Use–mention distinction. Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:20, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

As the Æ article says, "Originally a ligature representing a Latin diphthong, [Æ] has been promoted to the full status of a letter in the alphabets of many languages." Where is the evidence that this has happened for stigma? --Macrakis (talk) 15:24, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

This evidence is in existence of stigma itself. Ligatures are always used as letter-cluster replacements. They are never used for nothing. Additionally, I place for your convenience all new Greek Unicode 5.1 codepoints:

• Ͱͱ heta
• Ͳͳ alphabetic, non numeric sampi
• Ͷͷ pamphylian digamma

• Ϗ big kai 79.162.61.204 (talk) 15:34, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

That's ridiculous. Many Latin typefaces include ligatures "ff", "fi", etc. and they even have Unicode codepoints (U+FB00, U+FB01). That doesn't make them letters. Again, please find WP:Reliable sources that a) treats stigma as a letter and/or b) uses it to write the word "stigma". --Macrakis (talk) 19:07, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

I always thought that stigma is a letter or alphabetic ligature in sense of Æ and Œ, but you say that stigma is a ligature in sense of ff and fi, but even these f-related ligatures are used in words, for example stuff and figure. Even Google accepts such input. 79.162.61.204 (talk) 19:48, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

CB, can you please log in with your username when you join in the discussion here? It makes things easier to follow and to connect. Thanks. Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:00, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

What would make you think that it is a letter like Scandinavian Æ? Of course ligatures like ff are used to typeset words; that doesn't make them "letters". And back to the original question: do you have any Reliable Source that shows the rendition ϛῖγμα? Sure, it was used in manuscripts, but many other ligatures were also used in manuscripts. Anon/CB, you are the only one as far as I can tell arguing for stigma as a letter. Until you or someone else finds evidence, I think we can safely remove stigma as a letter of the Greek alphabet, and remove the spelling ϛῖγμα. --Macrakis (talk) 20:17, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

I am not any Civil Band (Radio Team), CBMIBM, IBMCBM, MBM, Atari, Amiga, Amstrad or other registered Wikipedian. I'm anonymous. I don't have any reliable sources. I only thought, that stigma is a letter, but I now give up. Let's stigma will be missed as you wish, if you don't consider it a letter. 79.162.61.204 (talk) 20:40, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Of course I meant User:CBMIBM. Can you please clarify, are you saying you are not CBMIBM? Just curious. Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:47, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

I am former User:Wikinger, but lost my complicated hex-dump like password. 79.162.58.228 (talk) 09:54, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

From what has been said in this discussion, I conclude that stigma should be considered a glyph variant of the grapheme "ςτ", and not a proper letter. With respect to Latin Æ and Œ, they started out as glyph variants as well, and in some languages (English, French...) they are still no more than variants of "AE" and "OE". In other languages, however (Danish, Norwegian...), they are used to represent individual sounds, with a different sound value from "AE" and "OE". So they are proper, independent letters in some alphabets. FilipeS (talk) 21:17, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Because T-shaped alphabetic Sampi was introduced recently to Wikipedia, I think that it is in T-shape not corrupted, but fully fledged letter. For proof look into Sampi article to compare alphabetic T-Sampi and numeric C-Sampi. As you see, T-Sampi is more like russian П and too Greek PI, with addition of |, while C-Sampi is more like russian Э and too Greek LUNATE EPSILON, with addition of -. In this way T-Sampi should be primary, and C-Sampi secondary. 91.94.153.30 (talk) 16:55, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

As I predicted, codepoints in beta and final Unicode 5.1 remains the same, exactly according to official Unicode statement that even in beta stage codepoints remains final and stable. CBMIBM (talk) 09:06, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

My qualm is that Table_Greekletters now only almost contains the whole system for Greek numerals. If you want to call stigma merely a glyph, then perhaps our Table should be Table_Greekglyphs instead. Simply put, leaving out stigma necessitates a Table_Greeknumerals being added to almost each Greek letter page. By the way I do not understand why you compare Ϛ to ΣΤ, when the lower case, ϛ, looks like στ in . :)--Thecurran (talk) 04:22, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

I should have noted that the last example shows stigma in a word-initial position so, since it is not restricted to word-medials and word-finals, there should be no problem accepting ϛῖγμα as a reasonable spelling in circumstances (eras/locales) that accepted stigma usage in words. As most sources did not permit stigma usage, asking for that exact spelling might be an unreasonable burden. The spellings of English letters are hardly agreed on ais it is.

Where are the sources that substantiate the statements, "But stigma was never an independent letter. It was always possible and correct to replace it with sigma-tau.", anyway? Given the use of globalized terms, like "never" and "always", it actually seems unverifiable. All one would have to believe in would be that a memo once existed that contained stigma but not sigma-tau. It should not be an important point either way as the pages for other obsolete letters do not show their Greek spellings. Also please, note that digraphs have an extra special usage in Greek in the first place, like the mu-pi that makes "b" in birra (beer) or the gamma-gamma that makes "ng" in evangelion (good news). :)-Thecurran (talk) 04:44, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

When is the source that substantiates the claim that stigma is a letter? FilipeS (talk) 09:46, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, your grammar seems somewhat ambiguous. The picture I chose was Image:Stigma-var.png from the Byzantine period uploaded by User:Bender235 as referenced in Stigma (letter). Please see also http://anubis.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n1743.pdf as referenced in Talk:Greek alphabet#Acrophonic_names_of_Greek_letters. It seems you are suggesting that stigma has never been a letter. What do you mean? :)--Thecurran (talk) 07:31, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I think people have become a bit tired of discussing stigma, just after (hopefully) finishing with that incredibly disruptive POV-pusher CBMIBM and his obsessions over it. Now, stigma, as a glyph element denoting an "s-t" combination, is indeed not a letter, but simply a glyph contraction in handwriting. The fact you're probably missing is how commonplace that was. There were dozens or even hundreds of conventional ligatures of that sort (see Greek ligatures), the "s-t" combination is merely one of them, with no special status whatsoever. The only reason it has its separate representation in the modern computer encodings is its role as a numeral, which really has little to do with its "s-t" function, and doesn't make it an alphabetic letter either. It never had a position in the alphabet, it never was a systematic element of the orthographic system (a grapheme in the technical sense), and it is never, ever, used in real-life encoded representations of Greek text these days, outside its role as a numeral. By the way, I also very much doubt even its name "stigma" is authentic. The word stigma is originally just a word meaning 'symbol, marking' (from a verb stizo, 'to mark') and has nothing to do with this particular symbol. Its use as a character name is evidently motivated by reanalysing the word as an acrophonic representing the initial st- sound combination, with -igma analogous to sigma and other letter names in -ma. But when that name was coopted in this way I don't know, it was very likely only in modern times. Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:29, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

I do not entirely agree with what you say but I can still see your point. The root of what I am saying though is that this table is on each page for the regular Greek letters and if we keep stigma off, we would also have to attach a Greek numeral table bearing each of the same symbols and stigma to each of these pages because Greek numerals are also a noteworthy subject. Having two such similar tables on each would be visually confusing. I understand you wish to count stigma as a glyph or numeral but not a letter, but please uderstand that it is a creation of the Greek alphabet and without practically doubling the table, perhaps changing the name of this one would serve both purposes nicely. :)--Thecurran (talk)

Of course the numerals are interesting. But why does that mean they have to be in a box repeated on all sorts of unrelated articles? Their role is explained in Greek numerals, in the main table at Greek alphabet, and again individually in the main text of each character article. Fut.Perf. ☼ 06:51, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm really confused. I feel like an idiot now, but I always thought stigma was just another way of writing sigma. Don't you write stigma when you're finishing a word? ουρανός, for example? Isn't that stigma, or is that still sigma, just different? I'm confused. Can some one explain it, the article doesn't really. -Panther (talk) 18:25, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

No, those are supposed to be different things. In modern print fonts, the numeral stigma and the final form of sigma may look quite similar, but they can be distinguished because they never occur in the same environment. In older handwriting the didn't necessarily look that close. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:22, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

"Probably" [w]?

Anybody know why the "obsolete letters" table gives the historical pronunciation of waw as "probably" [w], and not just as [w]? Is there any serious alternative? Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:56, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

The digamma article offers /v/ but only as the sole surviving modern example of the phoneme, namely Tsakonian βάννε for SMG αρνί. ·ΚέκρωΨ· (talk) 16:07, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Ah, thanks for the pointer. Interesting case. Given that both [w] > [v], and [w] > zero, are pretty natural sound changes, while [v] > zero would be odd, and on the other side digamma < idg. /ŭ/ seems etymologically certain, I'll go out on an OR limb and declare [w] as established. As long as nobody comes across an actual alternative proposal for Ancient Greek. Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:14, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Sounds [v] and [w] can simply be alternate spellings of the same /ŭ/.79.162.54.8 (talk) 21:52, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

When we write something between brackets [ ], we mean the sound. See International Phonetic Alphabet. ;-) FilipeS (talk) 21:56, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

I agree. 91.94.48.166 (talk) 09:24, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Paleography/typography info?

We should have a section on the development of the lettershapes: ancient cursive forms, the shift to uncial style in Byzantine times, the adaptation to typesetting, the innovation of uppercase/lowercase usage... Anybody has some good material at hand? Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:48, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Sho

User Mackaris has just removed the letter sho from the Obsolete letters table. However, judging from the previous discussion, there is no consensus in favour of this change. FilipeS (talk) 18:28, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

I would support removal of the letter from the table. There is no way that this was ever part of what anyone would normally think of as the Greek alphabet. Moreover it would seem that even the name of the letter is prbably a modern invention. --rossb (talk) 18:45, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Anyway, I did not delete it, I moved the mention of the Bactrian letter Sho from the table to the discussion of Bactrian. Please compare the treatment of the Greek alphabet to the treatment of the Roman alphabet. The very many letters which are added to the Roman alphabet for other languages (e.g. Ŵ, ß, ɸ) are not treated in the main Roman alphabet article. Neither are the Coptic letters treated in the Greek alphabet article.

Everson and Sims-Williams (paper cited in Sho (letter)) argue that it should be grouped with Greek letters in Unicode; this does not make it a "Greek letter". --Macrakis (talk) 18:53, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Well, you have a point about the Roman/Latin alphabet article. It is true that sho can be considered an "uncommon" letter of the Greek alphabet. But the thing is that there are many, many rare extra letters in the Latin alphabet, whereas that does not seem to be the case with the Greek alphabet, which has historically not been used by as many languages. And I'm not sure that the Coptic letters should be considered letters of the Greek alphabet, rather than part of an independent (though Greek-based) alphabet, like the Cyrillic alphabet is. FilipeS (talk) 19:12, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

How is the Coptic case different from the Bactrian? As for Greek, actually there are a bunch of things which could be called "letters" which have been used with it, e.g. for writing Arvanitika or for clarifying when sigma is voiced (in dialectology), etc. --Macrakis (talk) 19:35, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Coptic is different from Bactrian in the same way that the Latin alphabet or the Cyrillic alphabet are different from Bactrian. Nobody regards the former as variants of the Greek alphabet nowadays. FilipeS (talk) 19:54, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Names of letters ε, ο and υ

According to the Greek Grammar text book taught in Greek elementary schools, the letters ε, ο and υ are pronounced έψιλο, όμικρο and ύψιλο respectively (without the finite ν). pinikas (talk) 19:06, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

What you are talking about is the name of the letters, not their pronunciation.

I notice that Mackaris has reverted Pinikas' edit. How about writing the nu between parentheses? FilipeS (talk) 19:14, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Pinika, please give a reference. The Babiniotis and Andriotis dictionaries (1998 eds.) include the ν; the Greek Wikipedia includes the ν; and Web usage is 100:1 in favor of the version with ν. At best, even if the non-ν form is being taught in elementary schools, the ν could be put in parentheses. --Macrakis (talk) 19:17, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

I am not an expert on the field, but I think that if we are talking about Modern Greek and not Katharevousa, the correct form would be without the ν at the end. Anyway, the book i was reffering to was "Νεοελληνική Γραμματική : της ε' και στ' δημοτικού / Τσολάκης Χρίστος / Αθήνα / Οργανισμός Εκδόσεως Διδακτικών Βιβλίων / ISBN 960-06-0171-2 pinikas (talk) 19:25, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Babiniotis and Andriotis are not Katharevousa, neither is the Greek Wikipedia, or most Greek written on the Web. Perhaps the Ministry of Education is now using the forms without final ν; was there a decree to this effect? do more recent editions of the dictionaries use the form without ν? If so, putting the ν in parentheses would be appropriate -- apparently common usage has not caught up even if this is the new official form. --Macrakis (talk) 19:32, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

The common usage in Greece is the one with the ν. Everyone in Greece would say εψιλον instead of έψιλο. Ofcourse that doesn't mean it's also the official form. Take the letter ε for example. έψιλον -> ε ψιλόν (simple e). Now the word ψιλόν is Katharevousa. It Modern Greek someone would say ψιλό. My opinion is that if we are talking strictly about Modern Greek, the correct form would be έψιλο instead of έψιλον. pinikas (talk) 19:59, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

If it's not the spelling commoly used by native speakers, we can't put it up in Wikipedia... FilipeS (talk) 20:02, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Stigma, Sho, Sampi, etc.

See further discussion at Talk:Alpha and Omega... AnonMoos (talk) 17:30, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Protection?

Reference note: The user going by CBMIBM (who has also been warned repeatedly on his talk page by editors) has archived the detailed talk page here to hide his recent massive edits to the Greek alphabet page. Perhaps a Wikipedian with some time can restore both the talk page, the Greek alphabet table, and place protection on the page. Sturmde (talk) 16:08, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Assuming that I archived Greek talk page to hide edits is not true. I simply archived talk page, because it was very big already. For proof of my good intentions, I restored Greek alphabet table again and did the same with templates. I removed these letters only because other editors had edit war and didn't wanted them here. I only provoked edit war again, thus I give up. Maybe you will restore my changes and protect Greek alphabet and its templates from other editors, but not from me - I wanted only add missing letters and nothing more. CBMIBM (talk) 10:49, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Major difference here. By archiving an ACTIVE discussion, you stifle discussion. By Wikipedia rules, an archived page isn't supposed to be edited. All your changes, and those made recently by others are very much disputed, and should be dealt with properly by using consensus and CfV. You claim good intentions, but you made changes based on the input of two people. Furthermore, it's very suspicious to both edit a page AND archive the talk page. It's simply deceitful, and you're not convincing me at all otherwise. Not that you have to. That's just my opinion.--Sturmde (talk) 16:46, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

This discussion was dead from more than half of month when I archived it. I really want to see Heta, Stigma and Sho in article, but I cannot add them again effectively, because of threat of edit war triggering mentioned above by me, which is manifested by reverts made by other editors after readding these letters by me. CBMIBM (talk) 12:19, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

Image:Greek alphabet extended.png

With regard to the Wikinger (CBMIBM) image Image:Greek alphabet extended.png -- the additions to the standard Greek alphabet of 24 letters there are a miscellaneous grab-bag of various archaic letters (rarely used after ca. 300 B.C.), numerical symbols not usually used as letters, letters used only in the writing of non-Greek languages, and medieval ligatures identified with numerical symbols. There was never a single historical alphabetic sequence, or sequence of alphabetic symbols used numerically, which included all these "letters". See further at Talk:Alpha and Omega. AnonMoos (talk) 00:51, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

My Image:Greek alphabet extended.png is in reality a complete grab-bag of all Greek Unicode letters and variants called as such in official Unicode charts. CBMIBM (talk) 16:53, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

Illegible

This sentence appears in the second paragraph of the section currently labeled history: "Its most notable change, as an adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet, is the introduction of vowel letters, without which Greek, unlike Phoenician, would be illegible." Is this sentence stating that Phoenician was illegible, or legible but without the use of vowels? I am assuming the latter simply because the former is absurd, and if so, I believe the sentence should be reworded to resonate the intended meaning more clearly. (PhilipDSullivan (talk) 00:17, 9 February 2008 (UTC))

The sentence means that Greek would be illegible without vowels, while Phoenician was not. FilipeS (talk) 17:20, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks Filipe. (PhilipDSullivan (talk) 17:24, 9 February 2008 (UTC))

I took out the unlike Phoenician phrase. I believe the sentence still retains the same meaning while at the same time being slightly clearer. (PhilipDSullivan (talk) 17:33, 9 February 2008 (UTC))

That seems reasonable enough to me. FilipeS (talk) 18:45, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Greek keyboard

This page appears in the category Keyboard layouts, but I don't see anything about Greek keyboards here. There's an article about the QWERTZ keyboard (used in German-speaking countries), and one about the AZERTY keyboard (used in French-speaking countries), but I haven't found one on Greek keyboards. See the image at http://www.anotek.com/ANOTEKCLASSIC.GIF. Michael Hardy (talk) 00:57, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

English names and pronunciation

Am I the only one to object to the "Pronunciation" column in this section? The supposed English pronunciation is inaccurate (I've never heard anyone pronounce "psi" in English with a silent p) and it's a disgrace to not use proper IPA in an article on a linguistic subject. I was about to correct it myself until I realised it's an image. --rossb (talk) 22:35, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

All those three big images in that section are unnecessary, in my view. Fut.Perf. ☼ 23:09, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

I have removed the section. It is redundant with the existing table, aas RossB says pronunciations should be in IPA, and anyway images are a poor way to present information like this. --Macrakis (talk) 02:44, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

Letter Yot

In Greek alphabet as equivalent of /j/ serves letter Yot. "J" is uppercase and "ȷ" is lowercase. That permits proper distinction from Iota that has value of /i/. Full non-degraded Greek alphabet is listed below, where are given IPA sound values of all Greek letters available as such in Unicode. Note that Beta is for /b/, while Wau is for /w/. Eta is of course for /e/, while Phi is of course for /ph/. This alphabet avoids digraphs completely, even Omega as long /oo/ can be used to write /u/, because English "saloon" that is pronounced /selun/ provides equivalence between /oo/ and /u/. 72.46.132.98 (talk) 20:26, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Is it just me? I can't for the life of me work out what the paragraph above is supposed to mean. --rossb (talk) 23:12, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

This is I - anonymous user, but not you - Ross Burgess. I stated above that today vernacular Greeks even don't know their alphabet in its entirety as defined below, and they currently makes weird tricks such as using Iota both for /i/ and /j/, assigning sound of Wau /w/ to Beta /b/, while substituting Beta itself with Mu-Pi cluster pronounced /b/, conflating of Eta and Iota to /i/ sound, pronouncing Phi as /f/ instead of /ph/, and finally using Omicron-Ypsilon cluster for /u/ instead of more logical solution of using Omega that is sort of duplicate of Omicron with /o/ sound, because Omega has /oo/ sound. Using Omega for /u/, is more logical, because even for example English word "saloon" is pronounced /selun/, what permits safe replacement of excessive Omicron-like sound /oo/ assigned to Omega with /u/. Greeks call themselves most logical nation, but despite of this, I easily fixed their un-logical solutions here. They even use more digraphs that are pronounced in other way as they are written. As one of such examples can serve Gamma-Gamma cluster pronounced /ng/, instead of correct Nu-Gamma cluster pronounced /ng/. 72.46.132.98 (talk) 10:05, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. It reports on things, it does not propose correctives and reforms, criticize the status quo, or publish original research. The above discussion is unencyclopedia and doesn't belong on WP (including on Talk pages). --Macrakis (talk) 13:46, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Thus I must move on to http://www.internet-encyclopedia.org , where such things are appreciated. 72.46.132.98 (talk) 16:04, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

comments

Please take a look at this wiki - page http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Dispilio_Tablet. In the last twelve years there are findings basically from to archaelogists n.sampson and g.hourmouziadis that testify that there have been written texts from 5000 - 6000bc. Please update the article —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.75.239.19 (talk) 14:57, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Even if the Dispilio Tablet contains "writing" (a claim which as far as I know Hourmouziadis has not published in any archaeology journal), it is surely not Greek, being far too early, and surely not related to the Greek Alphabet, which is what this article is about. --Macrakis (talk) 11:38, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Dispillio Tablet contains Linear A syllabary, that is not alphabetic at all. CBMIBM (talk) 12:01, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

It's not Linear A either, as far as I know. Far too early. Fut.Perf. ☼ 16:21, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Linear A I got from this talk: http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Talk:Dispilio_Tablet . Which nature has script from Dispillio Tablet? Alphabetic, syllabic, word-level ideographic or even sentence-level ideographic? CBMIBM (talk) 17:29, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

The claim about Linear A was made as a piece of OR by some Wikipedian, and the posting on that talkpage merely quotes it as something unsourced and false. Nobody knows what kind of script those signs are, if they are writing at all. Fut.Perf. ☼ 17:39, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Alternative version of beta

The article states that the alternative "curled" form of beta is mainly used at the ends of words. Given that a Greek word cannot normally end with a beta, I wonder why there should be a special version for this position? --rossb (talk) 16:44, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Ooops, my bad. I was writing from memory and must have got that wrong without thinking. There was some tradition though that it was regulated according to position in the word somehow. Fut.Perf. ☼ 16:47, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Acrophonic names of Greek letters

For example, Greek letter Stigma can be spelled as Ϛιγμα using Stigma itself instead of Στιγμα, because here: http://anubis.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n1743.pdf is good example of its usage as Stigma itself within words instead of Sigma-Tau sequence within the same words with many book references in printed text beginning with words: "SMALL LETTER STIGMA was used widely in Greek typography throughout the history of printing Greek." CBMIBM (talk) 09:14, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Stop obsessing. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:30, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Please read and acknowledge properly provided verifiable sources, instead of talking clinical crap. I see that you have unjust prejudice against me by calling me (psychiatric) obsessionate. CBMIBM (talk) 09:51, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Fut.Perf. is accurately describing your behavior. Could you please stop with this stigma stuff? --Macrakis (talk) 13:41, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

If you still reject all official reliable Unicode sources, because of preferring non-Unicode sources, I stop because of your scepticism in manner of full Unicode Greek alphabet that is as follows:

Now I explain my reasons of interest in Greek alphabet: I think that each name in Greek should begin without exceptions acrophonically with letter to which it is assigned, and each symbol called as letter in Unicode should be present. In this way English Wikipedia is highly POV, because rejects official Unicode definition of Greek alphabet. In other wikis my edits were accepted flawlessly. Meanwhile I found somewhere Greek "Times Ind" counterpart of Gerhard Köbler's Latin "Times German" from http://www.koeblergerhard.de/idgwbhin.html that contains all Unicode Greek letters to write Proto-Indo-European as first Adamic language with first non-abjad alphabet - namely Greek. Both fonts maps characters identically inside their full 256 character set. I use for PIE naming of letters format: A, BA, GA, DA ... as Fijians do: http://www.fijituwawa.com/songs.shtml because this scheme finalizes each consonant spelling with A - first letter of alphabet. Greek numbers that I see inside "Times Ind" font are as follows: 0, I, II, III, III‧I, III‧II, III‧III, III‧III‧I, III‧III‧II, III‧III‧III to make borrowing of letters and digits from Phoenicians on equal footing. Really serifs are joined to form ligatures. Please note that Zero looks as full height derivative of Phoenician empty place ‧ sign. I noticed that name of Greek counterpart font is intended in that way, that "Times Ind" and "Times German" are a subset of "Times Ind-o-German-isch" divisable into "Times Ind-isch" and "Times German-isch". All letters in Greek counterpart font are capital, and are placed into codes of small letters of Latin counterpart, while capital places are filled with empty squares, because in font there were more small than capital letters, and PIE uses only small Latin letters in PDFs. "Times Ind" font is done in such way, that font change automatically changes small Latin PIE text into big Greek PIE text. As you see, I am rationalistic, but never psychic, as Fut.Perf described me. Do you allow placing this Greek alphabet proposal in Proto-Indo-European language article? CBMIBM (talk) 14:23, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

No. The Greek alphabet has nothing whatsoever to do with Proto-Indo-European. Stop pushing your confused private phantasies. Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:32, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I only wanted to join "first tongue" with "first alphabet". Thus I will put these true reconstructions based on Anne Catherine Emmerich called by you as phantasies into Wikinfo, where such things are allowed and appreciated. Really, PIE had no alphabet, but sentence-level ideographic script that doesn't carry any phonetic information because of its very high abstraction level, as is described and referenced from Anne Catherine Emmerich in Adamic language article, thus best thing for PIE really would be earliest available non-abjad script - the Greek alphabet. My reconstructions are not confused, they want only to avoid confusion of tongues completely - especially for all Catholics. That's all. CBMIBM (talk) 14:39, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Please use Wikinfo for such Original Research things. Thanks. 91.94.180.26 (talk) 16:08, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

CBMIBM, Unicode is a character encoding standard, not an "official" definition of the Greek or any other alphabet. As for the business about "first tongue", "sentence-level ideographic script", etc., this is all fringe or original research and doesn't belong here. --Macrakis (talk) 16:23, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

But Unicode at least tells me which glyph is symbol and which is letter proper. CBMIBM (talk) 16:42, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

It defines some characters (not glyphs) as "letters" in a very useful but narrow technical sense. It is not authoritative for philological/linguistics issues. --Macrakis (talk) 19:55, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Both Indogermanisches Wörterbuch and Greek "Times Ind" font intended for native writing PIE are available in Files section of Cybalist. CBMIBM (talk) 08:39, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Huh? --Macrakis (talk) 16:41, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Don't be surprised. Gerhard Köbler already provided his Indogermanisches Wörterbuch here: http://www.koeblergerhard.de/idgwbhin.html and Cybalist simply mirrored it, adding some additional files mentioned above by me. Mirror is available only for Cybalist members. CBMIBM (talk) 17:29, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

"Huh?" referred to various logical errors, including assuming that a character included in a font somewhere is a member of the "Greek alphabet"; that there is such a thing as "a native writing PIE", etc. Please stop wasting our time. --Macrakis (talk) 17:38, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Alphabet Audio

got jealous of the German Alphabet.
where do i put this?

CuteHappyBrute (talk) 04:31, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Nice job. I put it in as a link at the top of the alphabet table, in the column that gives the modern Greek letter names. Fut.Perf. ☼ 05:57, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

thanx a bunch mate ;]

CuteHappyBrute (talk) 06:13, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

I hear someone sparking up a cigarette at the 0:12 and 0:14 mark... Figures... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.49.173.174 (talk) 01:00, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Upsilon

While in Cyprus I noticed that "Y" is often translated as "u" (at least when it falls in the middle of a place name). Is this a Cypriot anomaly, or does this need adding to the page (which only lists y, v & f as transliterations in the "Modern Greek" column)? 86.31.247.136 (talk) 15:55, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

TfD nomination of Template:Greek alphabet

Template:Greek alphabet has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for Deletion page. Thank you. — Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:26, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

gg vs. ng in Ancient Greek

From what I read somewhere, Ancient Greek "gg" used to be read "ng", so that "aggelos" was actually read "angelos"; similarly, "gk" was read "nk" and "gch" was read "nch". I couldn't find anything about the phonetical value of these groups of letters anywhere in the article. Shouldn't we write it in the section with the phonetical values of the letters? bogdan (talk) 22:41, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

This article is about the alphabet. Orthography and phonology, ancient and modern, are treated separately. In the "Digraphs and diphthongs" section, there is a "main article" pointer to Greek orthography which covers this and other issues. See also Ancient Greek phonology, Koine Greek phonology, and Modern Greek phonology. --Macrakis (talk) 01:30, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Image from Disney's Hercules (1997 film)

Hi, why are the letters used in this Hercules poster considered Greek? Most notable the e. I see this very often with Greek restaurants here in the Netherlands. Does anyone have an explanation? Mallerd (talk) 22:46, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

If you mean the one from the Disney cartoon, the creators are just being cute, like when English letters are written with caligraphy strokes to suggest Chinese. Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} 04:58, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

Yes I meant the Disney cartoon. There is no real Greek alphabet which even looks like the cartoon? Mallerd (talk) 00:22, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Greek letters used in English text, he created what I meant. Faux Cyrillic is on the same par. Mallerd (talk) 15:27, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Nabla

Does the nabla symbol deserve any mention? BethelRunner (talk) 21:30, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

It is no more a letter of the Greek alphabet than the for all symbol ∀ is a letter of the Latin alphabet. In both cases, it is a mathematical symbol based on a letter. I suppose there could be a section on symbols whose design is based on letters. (Is the multiplication sign × based on the letter x?) --Macrakis (talk) 02:58, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

And don't forget the snack crackers called Goldfish, which are modeled on the lower-case of the letter Alpha. Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} 05:01, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

Armenian Alphabet: Child System?

The Armenian alphabet is not a child system of the Greek alphabet. There have been many scholarly debates about this issue in the past, with some classifying the Armenian script as Greek, others as Aramaic. Today, everybody agrees that while three letters are direct adaptions from the Greek alphabet and the general vowel designating system is inspired by the Greek system, the Armenian alphabet is essentially a free invention inspired by all surrounding alphabets at the time of its creation, i.e. the various Persian Pahlavi alphabets (based on Aramaic and very clearly illustrated e.g. in the Armenian ayb [a]) and amongst others also the Greek alphabet. I would thus suggest removing the Armenian alphabet as a child system from the article. Besides of that, if you include the Armenian alphabet, you should include the Georgian one too (also an invention), for they both are interrelated.

Literature:

DANIELS, PETER T. (Hg.) und BRIGHT, WILLIAM (Hg.), The World’s Writing Systems. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996

HAARMANN, HARALD, Universalgeschichte der Schrift. 2., durchges. Auflage. Frankfurt/Main, New York: Campus Verlag, 1991

SCHMITT, RÜDIGER, Grammatik des Klassisch-Armenischen mit sprachvergleichenden Erläuterungen. 2., durchgesehene Auflage. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachen und Literaturen der Universität Innsbruck, 2007 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.167.154.82 (talk) 22:49, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Greek alphabet/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

I am failing this article for its good article review because it is almost completely devoid of inline citations. Please renominate it once it has more inline citations. Gary King (talk) 05:58, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Greek letters automatically converted by Mediawiki

Mediawiki will convert some Unicode characters to canonical mappings. For example, U+1F71 will be automatically converted to U+03AC. The greek letters that will be automatically converted by Mediawiki are 0374, 037E, 0387, 1F71, 1F73, 1F75, 1F77, 1F79, 1F7B, 1F7D, 1FBB, 1FBE, 1FC9, 1FCB, 1FD3, 1FDB, 1FE3, 1FEB, 1FEE, 1FEF, 1FF9, 1FFB, 1FFD.--✉ Hello World! 08:20, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Thank you Sl for this notification. For the less technically minded: This means that the "polytonic" characters with "oxia" (acute) accents are going to be replaced with the (nominally equivalent) characters from the "monotonic" range with "tonos" accents. Should be no problem in theory. In practice, there's a bit of a problem because browsers often select different fonts for characters from the polytonic and monotonic ranges. For me, on Firefox/WindowsXP, the replacement characters in the right-hand column of each pair in the table below are displayed differently than those on the left. (And that's true no matter which of the markup options is used.) This means that display of polytonic strings gets typographically mixed up. But we have this problem when mixing normal consonantal characters with polytonic accented vowels anyway, so I guess this change will not make too much of an additional difference. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:03, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Without special markup				Enclosed in {{lang-gr}}		Enclosed in {{polytonic}}
Original		Remapped		Original	Remapped	Original	Remapped
U+0374	ʹ			Greek: ʹ	Greek:	ʹ
U+037E	;			Greek: ;	Greek:	;
U+0387	·			Greek: ·	Greek:	·
U+1F71	ά		ά	Greek: ά	Greek: ά	ά	ά
U+1F73	έ		έ	Greek: έ	Greek: έ	έ	έ
U+1F75	ή		ή	Greek: ή	Greek: ή	ή	ή
U+1F77	ί		ί	Greek: ί	Greek: ί	ί	ί
U+1F79	ό		ό	Greek: ό	Greek: ό	ό	ό
U+1F7B	ύ		ύ	Greek: ύ	Greek: ύ	ύ	ύ
U+1F7D	ώ		ώ	Greek: ώ	Greek: ώ	ώ	ώ
U+1FBB	Ά		Ά	Greek: Ά	Greek: Ά	Ά	Ά
U+1FBE	ι			Greek: ι	Greek:	ι
U+1FC9	Έ		Έ	Greek: Έ	Greek: Έ	Έ	Έ
U+1FCB	Ή		Ή	Greek: Ή	Greek: Ή	Ή	Ή
U+1FD3	ΐ		ΐ	Greek: ΐ	Greek: ΐ	ΐ	ΐ
U+1FDB	Ί		Ί	Greek: Ί	Greek: Ί	Ί	Ί
U+1FE3	ΰ		ΰ	Greek: ΰ	Greek: ΰ	ΰ	ΰ
U+1FEB	Ύ		Ύ	Greek: Ύ	Greek: Ύ	Ύ	Ύ
U+1FEE	΅			Greek: ΅	Greek:	΅
U+1FEF	`			Greek: `	Greek:	`
U+1FF9	Ό		Ό	Greek: Ό	Greek: Ό	Ό	Ό
U+1FFB	Ώ		Ώ	Greek: Ώ	Greek: Ώ	Ώ	Ώ
U+1FFD	´			Greek: ´	Greek:	´

Original	Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ
Replacement	Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ

Capital

Shouldn't alphabet in the page title be capitalized to "Greek Alphabet"?

TheUnfortunate (talk) 21:42, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization): "For page titles, always use lowercase after the first word, and do not capitalize second and subsequent words, unless: the title is a proper noun..." --macrakis (talk) 13:19, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

Okay, thanks TheUnfortunate (talk) 16:17, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

The Letter "C"

I was looking at an icon of my Yi Ya's and I noticed the writing on it had the letter "C". I'm quite puzzled. Then I saw a picture of an ancient Greek mosaic from Israel with the letter "C" on it as well. Did Ancient & Byzantine Greece use the letter "C"? Kostantino888Z (talk) 01:00, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

See Sigma#Lunate sigma. Fut.Perf. ☼ 01:15, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

numeric values

in table 1, Resh Sin Taw and Waw do not share the corresponding numeric values. in the second table, Qoph does not share the corresponding numeric value. see: 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley

Cfzeitler (talk) 03:46, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Don't know what you mean by "share". Share with what? Do you mean there's a mistake somewhere? (And, incidentally, we are not dealing with Qabala here.) Fut.Perf. ☼ 06:36, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Oh. Excuse me. Share with the corresponding Greek letters. And although the numeric values of letters might not be strictly on topic(?) I thought quoting an authoritative source wouldn't hurt. ( I have never heard that there were _two_ sets of numeric values for any of the classic alphabets! )

Cfzeitler (talk) 03:13, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

oops! ( is my face red! ) Those are phoenician letters! i totally thought they were hebrew... —Preceding unsigned comment added by Cfzeitler (talk • contribs) 04:35, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Latin Child?

It seems very odd to me that the Latin alphabet would be considered a "child" system. The first reason is just that I know how much the Greeks absolutely hate the Latin alphabet with all their heart and make a point of teaching this hatred to their children. However, besides that it just seem factually inaccurate to call Latin a Child system from Greek. The Phoenicians were out and about in ships doing their trading thing and establishing cities like Carthage and all that. The letters were out on the market in circulation. The Latin alphabet came into being from the Etruscan writing which seems to either have borrowed the letters directly from the Phoenicians, whom we know they had contact with, or adopted the "alphabet" at the same time or even before the Greeks did. It was certainly adopted for use by the Etruscans in its original form well before the Greeks adapted the alphabet to better represent the Greek language. In this way it would be much better to say that the Latin Alphabet is cognate with the Greek alphabet.

Keep in mind, this is a different situation from what happened with Cyrillic or Coptic where the Greek alphabet having already been adapted to write Greek lost many characteristics of the original Phoenician form. These are true child sytems. However, calling Latin a Child system of Greek is like calling Syriac a child system of Hebrew. There are clear similarities and some borrowing going on but the systems are cognate coming from an original source.

The Latin Language is not Greek. It is not based on Greek. It does not depend on Greek. It did not need to borrow anything from Greek in order to be understood in speech or in writing. Latin did borrow the letters K, Y and Z so that we could stick them into Greek words that were popular for a time but that does not mean that Latin is a Child System of Greek. Latin is a completely different Language with a Completely different alphabet that is either congnate with Greek or indeed may be older.

This is why Latin has F and V but Greek has neither. This is also why Latin does not have Theta, nor Phi, nor Psi. Latin adopted the letter H from the Phoenicians direclty which is why it has retained its H sound and has not been turned into an E or an I. The Latin letter X did not come from Chi but was created from the Roman Numeral system. The Roman Numeral system is also likely the reason the original Phoenician letter Y (vav) was cut short to V and twisted to form F.

There is no question that the Greeks adopted the alphabet from the Phoenicians direclty and not from the Romans but that does not mean that the Romans must have borrowed the alphabet from the Greeks whom they did not have contact with yet. Semitic peoples were in contact with the Etruscans and later the Romans well before the Romans came into meaningful contact with the Greeks. It is far more likely that the Latin Alphabet was borrowed directly from people like the Cathaginians than from the Greeks. Greece is not the only doorway into Europe. The Phoenicians didn't have to go to Greece first and give the Greeks the Alphabet but be denied access to the rest of Europe because the Greeks wanted to make sure that all the other European systems would be Child Systems. That is silly. The Romans were reading and writing Latin in the Latin alphabet well before Alexander's conquests made the Greek language and alphabet part of a lingua franca. The Romans were not in contact with the Greeks when they began writing, nor were the Greeks important enough to the Romans for them to be heard of.

Latin as a Child System of Greek is not factual and is pure biased conjecture. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 219.127.251.137 (talk) 06:55, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Latin writing is child of Greek writing, because Greek people already had letters that survived in Latin, but were dropped later by Greek people themselves:

83.25.255.163 (talk) 18:51, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Rather than argue, please find reliable sources for your positions. --macrakis (talk) 20:43, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Reliable sources are here:

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8

91.204.208.141 (talk) 15:23, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Alphabet Set to Music

After helping my friend learn the Greek alphabet by singing it to the tune of "Frere Jacques." I found a free transcription of the song at http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Frère_Jacques, and used that to write up the alphabet as the lyrics. BUT I cannot add it to the page because I don't know how PLUS the page is protected! Help! --Lindsey (talk) 21:50, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

That's probably a nice idea for you and your friend, but I'm afraid it would have no place in this article anyway, since singing the alphabet to that tune is just a private idea of yours and not a notable, commonly encountered and well-documented practice. Please bear in mind that Wikipedia is not supposed to be a Howto-guide, but wants to document things that are attested in reliable sources. Fut.Perf. ☼ 22:18, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

I understand...I'm a noob here. Would there be a place for it under "External Links" or somesuch? I think this would be very beneficial for people who are trying to learn the alphabet as part of pledgeship for a fraternity or sorority. --Lindsey (talk) 01:55, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

No, not really, I'm afraid. There's some guidelines on what to include in external links at WP:EL. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:02, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

OMG THIS IS SO HARD TO KNOW —Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.93.99.153 (talk) 22:58, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia allows only reference links, but not advertising links at all. 79.191.247.23 (talk) 10:32, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

An image needs to be fixed

{{editsemiprotected}} The alpha through omega logo need to be change as this link "http://up.wiki.x.io/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Greek_alphabet_alpha-omega.svg" as the image source

What do you mean? That image (File:Greek alphabet alpha-omega.svg) already is the one we are using in the article. What do you want changed? Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:55, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Accent designation

Rather than simply changing the text, I thought I'd put this out here for the true Greek scholars, but I have a concern. When I studied modern Greek in the early 70's, the polytonic spelling was still de rigeur. The accents we learned were ὀξεία, βαρεία, and περισπωμένη - the last of which was always represented with a tilde (~) as in Κανόνες Πολυτονικῆς Γραμματικῆς. From what I've seen, there seems to be fluidity in both typography and nomenclature when referring to the περισπωμένη accent - in fact, I've often seen it represented with an inverted breve ( ̑ ). The whole point here is that I think it's a bit inaccurate to simply call perispomeni a "circumflex" which is properly "^". ccdesan (talk) 18:46, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Confusing

From the "History" section of the article:

"The Greek alphabet emerged in the mid-eighth century ...

"The Greek alphabet we recognize today arose after the Greek Dark Ages..."

The first sentence presumably means mid-eighth century BC. The fact that it's BC needs to be stated.

The distinction between the "Greek alphabet" in the first paragraph and the "Greek alphabet we recognise today" in the second is not clear. If there is no distinction intended then the text needs rewording to avoid giving the impression that there is. 86.133.247.170 (talk) 04:26, 25 November 2009 (UTC).

Fraternities and Sororities? Really?

Perhaps the Fraternities and Sororities could be removed from the disambiguation label at the very top of the page. I find it impossible to imagine that anyone looking for "frats" on wikipedia would accidently wind up at "greek alphabet" and be confused. Or, maybe not, if it's a Friday or Saturday night. Or, really, most other nights. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.174.36.6 (talk) 03:12, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

• I agree. Greek letters have lots of uses -- in the sciences and in mathematics, for example. Why single out this one? I vote we delete it. 86.150.101.251 (talk) 03:37, 10 February 2010 (UTC).

Agreed. "Greek letter organization", on the other hand, sensibly redirects to fraternities and sororities. I have removed the dab comment. --macrakis (talk) 03:56, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

Letter names

On the list of letters with the title "The Greek Alphabet" at the top of the article, all the letter have their names in the standard "american" pronunciation (beta, mu, nu, etc). Shouldn't they be in their Greek names (vita, mi, ni respectively and so on)? 79.103.193.174 (talk) 21:14, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

No, because this is the English language Wikipedia. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:30, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Obsolete letters/other characters

In the sidebar, shouldn't the obsolete letters/other characters be displayed by text, rather than .svg images?75.28.176.237 (talk) 00:20, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Edit request from 65.184.32.11, 24 May 2010

{{editsemiprotected}} the jewish people's were the first people's basically given credit to the linear language. This obviously predates the Greek's, sorry too be a little out there but I do love this website. Funny enough, I am am an an Agnostic, and don't get me started on the logic of the term! Thank You! Philip White

65.184.32.11 (talk) 05:40, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, it's not clear to me what you actually want changed. I also don't think "linear language" means anything. What exactly do you think preceded what? Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:41, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Not done: please be more specific about what needs to be changed.Spitfire19 (Talk) 14:07, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Origin of letter Chi (Χχ)

I think that Chi (Χχ) is another form of Phoenician letter Kaph

(

together with Kappa (Κκ) because they look smilar.. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.86.55.140 (talk) 13:26, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

The BCE/CE date convention

This article has used the BCE/CE date convention since a date was first entered in its text, 11:00, 12 June 2004. I checked it because I was suspicious of this edit by a now-blocked user who had a history of forcing these changes, covered by edit summaries invoking consistency: "to match the rest of the article".

I see the date convention, which has been forced to BC/AD more than once, has not previously been discussed at the Talkpage and expect that there is no issue with the usual Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers). I have inserted an invisible ("commented-out") note at the head of the text: this article has used the BCE/CE convention since 11:00, 12 June 2004. Should you see that it has been messed with, you may suspect furtive changes are to be enforced. I just hate to be bullied, don't you?--Wetman (talk) 22:25, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

"Has used since"? Sorry, but that appears a bit of a misuse of the present perfect to me. In fact, this article used (past tense) the BCE/CE convention during the time of exactly one single edit, which stood between 12 June 2004 and 24 June 2004. That was during a time when the article had been reduced to a stub owing to some copyvio problems with the previous versions (now in the deleted history). Earlier, ever since its first inception in 2001 (admin-only link), it was BC/AD. And in the next edit after the one you linked to, somebody brought most of the much longer body of the previous article, and with it, the BC/AD convention [1]. Ever since then, according to cursory checks of the article's state at random points every few months or so, it appears to have remained solidly BC/AD throughout [2][3][4][5][6][7], with some occasional but inconsistent BCE intrusions [8] and a bit of edit-warring in early 2009 [9][10]. Since then, a few "BCE"s had remained in the lead, with most of the rest of the article still at "BC". This edit brought back consistency and was in line with the article's history. (Note: I have no dog in this fight.) Fut.Perf. ☼ 00:06, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

An archaic form of Beta

http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/greece/thrace/byzantium/Moushmov_3210.1.jpg (coin of Byzantion, 340 BC)

"BY" for BYZANTION, but "Beta" is different! Böri (talk) 11:13, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

True. But this is nothing particularly uncommon: there are too many special local forms of letters to list them all in this main article. I'm working on a new article that's going to be at Greek epichoric alphabets, currently at User:Future Perfect at Sunrise/sandbox. It will eventually list a lot of these. Byzantian beta is covered in the table at the bottom at that page, in the row for Megara, because Byzantium was a Megarian colony and used its version of the alphabet. Such details could of course also be added to the individual letter articles, such as Beta. See commons:Greek epigraphic letters for some more. Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:26, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Thank you Böri (talk) 11:48, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

rough or smooth?

I can't tell what's what - is it just my end or does everyone have that problem? I have to find words that I know start rough or smooth, then copy and paste. I don't know why I bother since the end result is still ambiguous anyway. McZeus (talk) 23:33, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

YES I have the same problem McZeus! But we'll manage somehow! Respectfully Yourself in a smoother moment :)McZeus (talk) 09:22, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

I can't see which way the ball curves but I assume ἂ is smooth. Have I missed it or should I run for the next base? A legend for the given table would be convenient. Anyhow McZeus (talk) 23:25, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Ah—just let the cursor hover on a letter and it will tell you if its rough or smooth! This is a secret rite that opens the initiate's eyes to the full glory of the Greek alphabet (otherwise you must bathe a piglet in the sea). Eyeless in Gaza (talk) 06:59, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

In the text of the diacritics section, I cannot visually distinguish the rough breathing (ἁ), mark from the smooth breathing (ἀ)-- the difference is below the resolution of my screen. Geoffrey.landis (talk) 13:53, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Earliest inscriptions

A 9th century dating is supported by the following footnote:

"The date of the earliest inscribed objects; A.W. Johnston, "The alphabet", in N. Stampolidis and V. Karageorghis, eds, Sea Routes from Sidon to Huelva: Interconnections in the Mediterranean 2003:263-76, summarizes the present scholarship on the dating."

A ninth-century inscription, apparently in Johnston's article, is unusual enough to be specifically mentioned here. Can we get the example Johnston cites please?--Wetman (talk) 12:41, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Edit request from 67.82.19.52, 11 May 2011

67.82.19.52 (talk) 01:15, 11 May 2011 (UTC) the alphabets must be pronounced appropriately.

Could you be more clear, please? Is there an error in the letter pronunciation guide? ~ Matthewrbowker ^{Say hi!} 02:15, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Incorrect identification of diacritic

Hi all,

I was browsing the page and noticed under the section "Combining and letter-free diacritics", the diacritic "perispomeni" is incorrectly identified as a circumflex ( ˆ ) , when it is actually a tilde ( ˜ ).

Best,

plogue87 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Plogue87 (talk • contribs) 20:54, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

The Greek circumflex is sometimes written with the same symbol that Spanish uses for tilda. Geoffrey.landis (talk) 13:58, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Edit request from Pesplout, 28 July 2011

The letter 'T' in English is pronounced "Taf" or "Taph" not "Tau".

Pesplout (talk) 00:44, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Not done: I've heard it called 'tau' in numerous places, and a quick search in dictionary.com finds multiple entries for "tau" and none for "taf" (related to the Greek alphabet). Unless you have some very strong sources saying otherwise, this would be an incorrect change. Qwyrxian (talk) 10:08, 29 July 2011 (UTC)

24 letters

This is a detail, but why go out of our way and claim "2,400 years" of a 24-letter-alphabet (without any reference) rather than just saying the modern alphabet has 24 letters? Because stigma and qoppa were numerals, they never dropped out of the alphabet until the Greeks started using Arabic numerals. This was a few hundred years ago, I suppose. Also, stigma was actually in use in print. Yeah it was a ligature, but so is W. If it's used and it's listed in the alphabet, it must be counted as a letter, otherwise there will be no end of argument whether w (=uu) or Scandinavian þ (=th) or Gothic ƕ (=hw) are "letters".Medieval listings of the Greek alphabet will have 26 letters (or 27?). But I could also just have tagged the claim for citation instead of attempting to qualify it. --dab (𒁳) 06:50, 27 January 2012 (UTC)

(ec) : I agree that the 2,400 years thing is not very useful – simply because it sounds as if that were some peacock-worthy achievement. But I disagree about the retention of the numerals. Those listings that include them (and by the way, if they do, it's always 27, not 26, including ϛ,ϟ,ϡ) are typically Western, foreign treatments, which are just trying to combine the representation of the numeral system and that of the alphabet proper into one – something that native Greek sources rarely did, as far as I know. It's also noteworthy that in the St. Gallen listing you point to the three numerals have no letter names, and there is an explanatory note below that they serve only for expressing numerals. From Greek usage, it appears that letter names of these three items were not consistently used and known, so it seems clear they were not routinely included in reciting the alphabetic sequence. An interesting bit I happened to come across last year is the following from one of the ancient grammatical commentators, where the number 24 is explicitly discussed, and a distinction between "γράμματα" ('characters') and "στοιχεία" ('alphabetic letter') is made, where the latter explicitly excludes ϛ,ϟ,ϡ:

Διὰ τί δὲ κδʹ ἔφη εἶναι τὰ γράμματα; εἰ γὰρ γράμματά εἰσιν οἱ χαρακτῆρες καὶ οἱ ξυσμοί, γράμματα δὲ καὶ τὰ παρὰ Χαλδαίοις καὶ Αἰγυπτίοις, καί τινα ἕτερα, τὸ δίγαμμα καὶ τὸ κόππα καὶ τὸ καλούμενον παρακύϊσμα, καὶ τὰ σημεῖα, καὶ τὰ παρεγγραφόμενα τοῖς στοιχείοις, καὶ ἡ κορωνίς, καὶ εἴ τι τοιοῦτον, ἀτόπως φησὶν ὅτι κδʹ ἐστίν. Φαμὲν οὖν ὅτι, ὡς σφαλεροῦ ὄντος, ὅτι περὶ τῶν ἐν χρήσει τοῖς Ἕλλησι διαλαμβάνει, περὶ τούτων λέγει μόνον· ἐκεῖνα δὲ γράμματα μέν, οὐ μὴν δὲ στοιχεῖα [A. Hilgard, Grammatici Graeci, vol. 1.3. Leipzig: Teubner, 1901 (repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1965): 442-565]

"So why does he say the letters are 24 in number? Because if by "letter" we understand all written and scratched symbols, including the Chaldaean and Aegyptian ones, and others too, digamma and koppa and the so-called parakyisma, and the interpunctuation marks and diacritics, and the apostrophe and so forth, then he'd be wrong to say they are 24. So, to clarify, because it's open to misunderstanding: as he is dealing only with those that are in use among the Greeks, he is referring only to them; those others may be characters (γράμματα) but they aren't letters (στοιχεῖα)."

Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:27, 27 January 2012 (UTC)

(after ec): about your analogy with "w", "þ", "ƕ": "w" was a ligature in the beginning, but came to be regarded as a letter with an extra position in reciting the alphabet. "stigma" never reached that position. The other two examples are quite off the mark, as I'm sure you'll realize on a bit of reflection. I'd challenge you to show a single historic example where "stigma" (in its function as an st-ligature) was ever included in a representation of the alphabet. What gets included is not stigma, but the numeral for 6 which just happened to look the same but was, at that time, a functionally different item (the graphic identity is no more significant than that between "1" and "i" in Latin); and the sequence it was included in was not the sequence of the alphabet but only, exclusively, that of the numeral system. Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:36, 27 January 2012 (UTC)

It is as always a pleasure to press you for references, Fut.Perf. As I said, this is a minor point. But since you have brought up these excellent references, and the distinction between native and foreign treatment, there is no reason not to include this distinction of γράμματα vs. στοιχεῖα in the article. --dab (𒁳) 09:39, 27 January 2012 (UTC)

Link to Chi

Just a minor edit request. Instead of linking to the disambiguation page, can Chi simply be linked to the Greek letter, here: http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Chi_%28letter%29 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.233.149.232 (talk) 15:20, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

Clause needed in section "Greek in mathematics"

Main article: Greek letters used in mathematics, science, and engineering

Following: ... lower case pi (π) for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, ... there needs to be added the clause: capital pi for the [running total|cumulative product], which complements SIGMA for the cumulative sum. Also, this is also noted in the main article. This is a major error of omission/oversight. 198.123.52.150 (talk) 22:27, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

Epsilon is used so much in limits and calculus, but nearly as much is used the lower-case delta.

In math, science, and engineering, so many of the Greek letters are used, excepting the ones that are the same as Roman letters:

lower case: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, eta, theta (asngles), kappa (often Boltzman's constant in thermodynamics), lambda (wavelength), mu (abbreviating 10^-6), nu, pi, rho, sigma (electric charge density), tau (torque), phi (angles), chi (in statistics), psi (in quantum mechanics), omega (radians per second).

upper case: gamma, delta (changes in values, such as delta-V), lambda, pi, sigma, upsilon, phi (magnetic fields), psi (extrasensory perception), omega (electrical resistance).

Systems with three angles {alpha, beta, gamma}

Systems with four angles {alpha, beta, gamma, delta}
98.67.170.12 (talk) 19:40, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

There are two ways to do the Greek alphabet. The Ancient Greek way, and the Modern Greek way. I personally prefer the Ancient Greek way, but many are the letters are the same, not that that matters. I have a question. I love learning to speak Greek, because I study Greek mythology (god, goddesses, etc. ) and I use Google translate to help me do it. I went to type your welcome, and got a word, but I thought, what about you're welcome? So I typed that and got the same word as the word please. Is this correct? Or is the proper way "our welcome"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.255.169.51 (talk) 12:28, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

Using machine translations is a very poor way to get things done accurately. Just face up to this fact.

I don't know any Greek other than the alphabet. However, in German, "bitte" can mean either "please" or "you're welcome". What is actually happening in the second case is that "bitte" is short for "Please don't mention it."

Also, if a German or Austrian sales clerk says "Bitte" to you, this is short for "Please, may I help you?" In other words she or he is offering to help you select something to buy.

You would NEVER find out about such things by using machine translations. Also, computers are very poor at translating statements in the subjunctive mood. Their programs just assume that the sentences are in the past tense. The sentence, "If you were a Greek," is not in the past tense, but rather it is in the subjunctive mood. Computers can't handle this and many other problems.

Likewise, "If you liked doing it like a Greek," isn't in the past tense, either. 98.67.170.12 (talk) 19:53, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

Greek letters in mathematics

The following is a salient misconception: "epsilon (ε) for an arbitrarily small positive number".

No, the whole point of the use of epsilon in proofs in mathematics - especially in limits, continuity, and calculus - is that epsilon can be ANY positive number whatsoever. You might find this hard to believe, but these proofs start off with:

Let ε greater than zero be given.
In other words, you can give me any positive number that you choose to, and if that number is one sagan (unit of measurement) (four billion), then so be it.
Someone else might choose unity, and someone else might choose 0.001.
The point is that my proof has to work for any positive number that you care to name, or else the proof is not a valid one.

Often, my goal is to find some other positive number, usually called "delta" that depends on epsilon - but it satisfies the condition of the proof. Hence, we are back into the Greek alphabet again with "delta".

D.A.W., Master of Arts in Mathematics, University of Alabama in Huntsville98.67.170.12 (talk) 18:45, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

Grammar.

In the "Obsolete Letters" section, under Sampi, there is a grammar error; "...and then remained in use as a numeral for 900." It should be until, if I am correct. 174.69.205.140 (talk) 00:19, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

No, I think "for" is correct, not "until". The figure 900 does not refer to a year or anything like that, but rather to the numerical value of the Greek letter. Cheers, Til Eulenspiegel (talk) 00:24, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

Split to Greek script

I'd like to question the creation of a seperate article Greek script and consequent removal of that information from this article. The new article on Greek script seems rather short and out of context. I think it would be much better as part of this article. Yaris678 (talk) 16:35, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

True. I quite agree. I noticed this when the article was created and meant to say something about it but then forgot. I can see where the person who made the split was coming from, in terms of systematicity and parallelism (with Latin script versus Latin alphabet), but I think the parallel is ultimately fallacious. The difference is this: With Latin, the use of the script for languages other than Latin has long surpassed the prominence of its original use, so it makes perfect sense for many readers to be interested in the script as such, without being interested in the Latin language. This is hardly true for Greek, whose use for other languages has never gone beyond an extremely marginal phenomenon. The new Greek script article is currently linked to only from the {{Unicode navigation}} box, and through it from all articles dealing with technical matters of script encoding. But I can't think of any reason why we would expect readers coming in through a link from those topics would be more interested in an article that contains info about Arvanitic and Phrygian, but neither about Greek itself nor about its second prominent use, in scientific symbols. Fut.Perf. ☼ 17:35, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

I've invited Indiana State (talk · contribs), who implemented the split, to comment here, but for the moment I'm reverting the split. Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:03, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

I reverted AGF these two edits. Not especially the languages using the script/alphabet are decisive (although there are different languages using different subsets of the whole Greek script), but the subsets of alphabets. E.g. ancient Greek and modern Greek use different sets. There is also math-symbols, IPA-signs and diacritics that are used only in specific writings ("languages"), while still being a Greek character. This is the same with Latin and Cyrillic letters. So "Greek script" is the collection of all these signs, while "ancient Greek alphabet" can be only just a subset (say the capitals). The fact that these subsets are not defined or named, does not say they do not exist. Also there can be overlaps in between (and with otherscripts like Latin, in IPA). This was the main line for differentiating "script" from "alphabet". This is done in all writing stystems regarding "script" and "alphabet", such as indeed Latin and Cyrillic.

As a sidenote, Unicode (which is not decisive in this) solved this way. Unicode researched "alphabets" before encoding, and sweeps them together in a "script". So there are characters in the scripts "Greek", "Coptic", "Latin", "Common" (i.e. used in multiple scripts), etc. When the glyph is the same, the character is the same says Unicode. This is how this article was structured too: "Greek script" containing multiple (possibly undefined) "Foo Greek alphabet"s. -DePiep (talk) 13:14, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

This is all nice and logical and systematic, I agree, but: in this case, it just doesn't lead to an efficient packaging of pages that meet readers' expectations. And that's what matters here. Sure, in theory, we can conceive of a a notion of "Greek character" in the abstract, without thinking of the Greek language – but what is there about those characters that people would want to read an article about? The Greek script article currently is a bizarre hodgepodge of marginalities. I cannot imagine any reader coming to it through one of the Unicode template links who would be left with the feeling of having found what they were looking for. (By the way, you are aware that article has only existed for a week or so, and was just a copy-paste job of something that has been in this article for years? Incidentally, it also has all its references broken, it has an unsuitable infobox, it doesn't properly define either its own topic or its relation to this sister article in any way that a reader could follow – which of them is the main article and which the sub-article? Which of the two topics is defined in terms of which other? Frankly, it's all a big mess. Fut.Perf. ☼ 13:51, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

A quick re for now: if that isunclear, we should improve the article. We cannot sail on "what the reader expects". The Unoiicode links should link to "Greek script" since that is what they are (as explained above). Still: Unicode is not defining for these two pages. I'll add a hatnote. -DePiep (talk) 15:27, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, but I disagree with this whole approach. Let's not first create a hatchet job of a copy-paste article and then start racking our brains on how to improve it so that it might some day begin to make some sense. If somebody wants to split out a new article from here, let him please first come here and present a sketch of what new content that new article should actually contain, so we can discuss it. First things first. Give us not just a conceptual definition of the abstract entity it is meant to be about, but a concrete outline of what info should be in it. How will duplication of content be avoided between the two articles? How much overlap should there be? How will we decide, in other articles, whether to link to this article or the new one? How will the definition of the two articles' scopes be communicated to the reader? If and when we have a clear picture and a consensus about that, then, next thing, write that new article. Then, last step, remove stuff from here. Until we have a viable plan for a new article, I will redirect that page back here. Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:55, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Just a brief addition, as you said above that this kind of split "is done in all writing stystems regarding "script" and "alphabet", such as indeed Latin and Cyrillic." This is not quite true. As far as I can see, it is in fact only done with these two, plus Arabic. All other alphabetic scripts, including for instance Hebrew or Armenian along with many others, have a single page. Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic are indeed the three alphabetic scripts for which such a division makes sense, because they are international scripts that have long transcended the use for the single language they were originally designed for, and which have very rich internal variation in functions and forms between one language and the next. On the other hand, Hebrew and Armenian are much more comparable to Greek in this respect (note that both Hebrew and Armenian actually also have some uses for different languages, and at least in the case of Hebrew quite a bit more notable ones than in the case of Greek – see Ladino and Yiddish – but these are all treated in a single article.) Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:56, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

First I just reverted your edits. One cannot talk and rv, in this. See WP:BRD, and not that the "R" was mine. I could not differentiate between possibly keepable edits, but that can be corrected. Will take time to read the new comments here later. -DePiep (talk) 22:20, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

You made me angry now. First: you are mistaken about the BRD: the "B" was the bold and undiscussed initiative by Indiana State who split the article off last week; the "R" was my first revert back to the stable consensus version of many years. Second, it was highly inappropriate for you to blanket revert my intervening unrelated edits, when it would have been extremely easy to just remove your split-off material again if that's what you felt you had to do. Third, your contributions to this discussion above are unsubstantial, and, to be frank, barely logically coherent. You are edit-warring and you are being very unreasonable and very unconstructive here, and if you wish to continue being taken seriously as a bona fide participant in this discussion, you will at least restore my intervening edits before you can expect we continue talking. Fut.Perf. ☼ 22:31, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

I agree with Fut.Perf. I'm the author of almost all of the content of the section of Greek alphabet that has been split off into Greek script, and also the author of the main published source for this section. I don't see any reason to make this a separate article, unless Greek alphabet has become too big, which I don't think it has; or if there were a lot of additional detailed material (historical, linguistic, cultural) on the topic (which may well happen at some point...).

The clumsiness of the split is reflected by the clumsiness of the language used in the dabnote ("For the alphabet to write the Greek language, see Greek alphabet.") and the lead ("The Greek script originally contained the Greek alphabet, ..."). These just don't make sense. Also, the footnotes no longer reference the sources fully. These things could be fixed, but the original sin was the unnecessary split. --Macrakis (talk) 10:17, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

I agree on the current, pre-split situation (all content in Greek alphabet, Greek script a redirect. Split-proposals to be discussed here indeed. Sorry to take your time this much & this way. -DePiep (talk) 11:19, 12 July 2012 (UTC) (moved here, for legibility, as the originally intended place after a sort of (edit conflict)) -DePiep (talk) 09:54, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

Questions

Thanks, Stavro. DePiep has indicated [11] he wants to give a fuller argument later. Well, fine. DePiep, if you wish to pursue this split further, then please answer the following questions:

• Which parts of the material originally contained in this article do you think belong primarily within the scope of Greek alphabet but not of Greek script?
• Conversely, which parts belong in Greek script but not in Greek alphabet?
• Which parts do you think belong primarily in Greek alphabet but may have to be duplicated in Greek script as background information to make that article understood well?
• Conversely, which parts belong primarily to Greek script but may also need to be duplicated in Greek alphabet?
• In consequence, imagining a reader who has read through Greek alphabet and then finds a link to Greek script: how much new information is that reader going to find in the new article, and how much will be redundant to what he has already read?
• Ditto, conversely for a reader who has first read Greek script and then follows a link to Greek alphabet.
• Given the following facts:
  1. that the Greek script redirect only has about two dozen incoming mainspace links except those from the {{Unicode navigation}} box;
  2. that the Greek script redirect was getting fewer than ten page hits per day on average prior to December 2011 [12];
  3. that these page hits rose only to about 16 per day after the link in {{Unicode navigation}} was tweaked to pipe through it in December [13] [14], and to about 30 per day after 30 June, when the article was actually split off [15];
  4. that, in contrast, Greek alphabet gets around 10,000 page hits per day, making it one of the top 600 articles in the whole of the English Wikipedia ranked by page traffic:

  Which parts of the information currently in this article do you believe is of interest specifically to those twenty readers per day, but not to the 10,000 per day?

Looking forward to your answers. (And until this discussion moves somewhere, I'm redirecting the other page back here again to the stable status quo ante, in the obvious absence of a consensus for a change.) Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:06, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

These are my thoughts for now. Please refrain from this aggressive attitude. You requesting me to respond account, and within hours or else ...' (in a change that is around for some seven days), is way too negative. In fact, I did not take the time to read your "questions" here for now, because they are not from an open or inviting situation. I wrote I understood your anger (what's wrong with that?), but you abuse that as an argument pro/con here. Well, next time I will still write such a thing, because I want to be able to say so. That you might abuse my openness will not withhold me from being so. -DePiep (talk) 20:21, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

I have no problem with having a nice calm discussion and with everybody taking their time about it. What angered me the other day was just the unconstructive reverting. But the questions above are real questions, not rhetorical ones, and I do think they are pertinent and that anybody who wishes to argue for a split ought to answer them. Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:16, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

Proposal: split that huge table

Since we're discussing this article, here's a rather radical idea I've been toying with. For years, people have gotten used to the idea that the core of this article must be that huge "main table" that tries to combine almost everything about each letter in one place: Phoenician descent, shapes, sound values in multiple versions, letter names and their pronunciation in multiple versions, transliteration in multiple versions, numeric values.

This seems to be a leftover from the time when people wanted to submit this article as a "list article" to the "Featured Lists" process (which failed back in 2005). No other major alphabet article has a similar approach (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Cyrillic). On the other hand, the normative power of en-Wikipedia is so great that almost all other Wikipedias, from Furlan to Telugu, now have a copy of this thing.

Problems with this approach:

• The table is simply too big, making it difficult to read and difficult to gather the most crucial information at one glance.
• The table is too far down in the article, making it inefficient for those readers who come to the page simply to find a convenient list of the sequence of letters.
• The table is too far away from those sections of the article where the detailed background information about each issue (history, pronunciation etc.) is discussed, making it inefficient in supporting those sections.
• The table tries to do too many things at once, causing it to do several of them in a suboptimal way. This is a problem of scope: the set of items about which it makes sense to discuss the mapping between Phoenician and Greek is not the same as the set of items about which it makes sense to compare Ancient Greek and Modern Greek pronunciations or transliterations; and neither of these is identical with the set of items that should be listed for the numeral system. It is also a problem of space: in order to provide a proper treatment of, for instance, transliteration, one would need a good deal more than the two columns we currently reserve for it.

So, my proposal:

• Get rid of the "main table", splitting it up into several much more compact topic-specific tables divided into different sections of the text.
• Include a brief summary table listing only the modern letter shapes, English names and basic sound values, near the top of the article, for those readers who come mainly for a quick overview. (sandbox draft)
• Include a specialized table comparing Phoenician and Greek somewhere at the beginning of the history section (sandbox draft)
• Divide up the treatment of letter names and their pronunciations into several small tables treating different case groups, placed directly in the section discussing these issues (sandbox draft)
• Similar for a discussion of sound-symbol mappings (sandbox draft)
• Further detail tables might be added for: transliteration systems; an overview of glyph developments across script types (with glyph graphics for each letter: archaic vs. classical monumental vs. uncial vs. ancient cursive vs. minuscule vs. early printed lowercase and uppercase)

Thoughts? – Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:43, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

You might want to look into Special:ArticleFeedbackv5/Greek_alphabet/284622. IP is unahppy about some of the changes. From what I can see, the structure of the tables before the ToC is not inline with MOSLEAD. I think I might float those back to the right as the version before your revision had in the template. --Izno (talk) 23:59, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

Hmmm. The IP at Special:ArticleFeedbackv5/Greek_alphabet/284622 said they were missing some information that was lost in the rewrite, but as long as they won't say what that information was that's hardly actionable, is it? In fact, I'm pretty certain nothing was lost; it's just restructured. What you were seeing floating on the right in the old version [16] was a mere navbox containing the list of letters, together with some other entries of marginal notability, and without any further information about them (sound values etc). The table you're now seeing is not a navbox but part of the actual article; that's why it's not floating.

As for your point about WP:MOSLEAD, I can't see anything there prohibiting tables in lead sections. What I do see in MOSLEAD is that the lead "should briefly summarize the most important points covered in an article in such a way that it can stand on its own as a concise version of the article". That's why, in an article about an alphabet, the lead needs a list of the letters, with the most basic information about each. Fut.Perf. ☼ 06:37, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

Use of "〈---〉"

Is there a reason that left and right angle brackets (“<” and “>”) in the form of Unicode characters “〈” “〉” (Hex-3008 and 3009) are used instead of either direct “<” “>” or “&#0060” “&#0062” (or, for that matter——unless there is some sort of coding conflict——just regular quote marks)? ~Kaimbridge~ (talk) 13:16, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

It's because chevrons are the official punctuation marks used to encircle an example of the orthography of a language (as opposed to the phonology, which is encircled by slashes, or the phonetics, which is encircled by square brackets). Why the chevrons are used rather than less-than and greater-than signs, though, I don't know. — Eru·tuon 18:46, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Well, I chose them because in my understanding they are actually the typographically correct representation of the "pointed bracket" grapheme character, and look a lot better. Less-than and greater-than characters are just that, mathematical operators, not brackets, and their use as grapheme brackets is just an ugly Ascii cludge. In most fonts they are far too wide to look good as brackets, and they also have the wrong vertical orientation. Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:01, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Well, how about ⟨&lang;,&rang;⟩? This allows one’s computer system/font availability to determine the numerical character code to use (I have at least the basic font sets and “〈”,“〉” doesn’t display in either FireFox, Internet Explorer or Opera!). ~Kaimbridge~ (talk) 16:03, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Really? Ouch. I had no idea browsers still use such a non-Unicode lookup system for these kinds of character entities. "&lang;/&rang;" are obviously supposed to be the same characters as 〈 〉. So, your browser can find them in a font and display them when they are expressed as character entities, but not if they are expressed directly in Unicode? Odd. I mean, by all means, feel free to replace them in the article, if that improves the display for you. Fut.Perf. ☼ 16:40, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

BTW, it seems that on my system the font that provides these at their Unicode positions is "OpenSymbol", which apparently comes with OpenOffice.org. Perhaps your browser uses the non-Unicode codepoints of the "Symbol" font. Maybe we ought to have a template for this, so we could say "{{ang|XYZ}} and it would come out as "&lang;XYZ&rang;"? Fut.Perf. ☼ 16:49, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Actually, if you look at the Encoding section of the Bracket article, the different possibilities are presented in a chart (abbreviated here), with a footnote explanation:

Usage	Unicode		SGML/HTML/XML entities	Sample
Technical/mathematical (common)	U+003C	Less-than sign	&#60; &lt;	<a, b>
	U+003E	Greater-than sign	&#62; &gt;
Technical/mathematical (specialized)	U+27E8	Mathematical left angle bracket	&#10216; &lang;*	⟨a, b⟩
	U+27E9	Mathematical right angle bracket	&#10217; &rang;*
Quotation (halfwidth East-Asian texts)	U+2329	Left pointing angle bracket	&#9001; &lang;*	〈deprecated〉
	U+232A	Right pointing angle bracket	&#9002; &rang;*
Quotation (fullwidth East-Asian texts)	U+3008	Left angle bracket	&#12296;	〈a, b〉
	U+3009	Right angle bracket	&#12297;

^*&lang; and &rang; were tied to the deprecated symbols U+2329 and U+232A in HTML4 and MathML2, but are being migrated to U+27E8 and U+27E9 for HTML5 and MathML3.

The angle brackets or chevrons at U+27E8 and U+27E9 are for mathematical use and Western languages, while U+3008 and U+3009 are for East Asian languages. The chevrons at U+2329 and U+232A are deprecated in favour of the U+3008 and U+3009 East Asian angle brackets. Unicode discourages their use for mathematics and in Western texts because they are canonically equivalent to the CJK code points U+300x and thus likely to render as double-width symbols. The less-than and greater-than symbols are often used as replacements for chevrons.

 ~Kaimbridge~ (talk) 18:23, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Interesting, thanks. Never noticed that duplication between U+27E* and U+232* sets. Would the U+27E* codepoints display better in your browser? Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:45, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Yup, both the 27E_ and 232_ versions show okay, it is just the other East-Asian (300_) version that fails (as does all of the other E-As in the full Bracket article chart). And, as stated, 27E_ is the designated technical/math symbol (232_ and 300_ are meant as quotations....Hmmm, I wonder if “&lang;”, “&rang;” are placed with the 232_s in error?). ~Kaimbridge~ (talk) 21:13, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Ok, good to know, I'll put those 27E_ thingies in then. Must update my keyboard layout too, to produce those instead of the 232_ ones. The trouble with 232_ seems to be that Mediawiki follows Unicode's "canonical equivalence" rules and silently normalizes the 232_ ones to the 300_ ones in its internal text representation. Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:25, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Recent edits about case distinction

Some recent edits to the lead [17][[18]] have changed the description of the history of the uppercase/lowercase distinction, from saying that it developed in the modern era, to saying that it developed "around the third or fourth century". I don't think this is correct. If editors were thinking of the development of minuscule letter forms, those arose much later, in the 9th century or thereabouts. If they were thinking of the use of cursive letter forms that look partly similar to minuscules, those (if I'm not quite mistaken) are even older than the third and fourth century. But neither the medieval minuscule script nor the ancient cursive constitute what that sentence was talking about, a letter case distinction. "Minuscule" and "lower case" are not the same thing. A case distinction exists only when minuscule and majuscule letter forms are used in a functionally complementary way, side by side with each other in the same texts, and the distinction is employed systematically as an orthographical device. What you find in medieval writing is different: you either have texts written entirely in minuscule, or you have a few majuscule letters mixed in for decorative purposes, in titles or marginal initials. But then, these majuscule elements really stand outside the main text; their use is a stylistic decoration but not an orthographical device. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I'm aware, an orthographic case distinction really developed in Greek only after the Renaissance. Fut.Perf. ☼ 06:54, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

Combined letter OU missing

In Greece there is also an unofficial letter which is in widespread handwritten usage, it is a letter combining the letters "O" and "U" for the "ou" diphthong, and this letter is usually written in all-capital words. It looks like an omicron ("Ο") with an ypsilon ("Υ") above it. Can we find sources for this Greek letter? Cogiati (talk) 12:51, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

It should be covered under Greek ligatures. Fut.Perf. ☼ 13:00, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Are you sure you do not mean this letter (Ȣ, ȣ)? It is not Greek, but rather Latin: a combination of the Latin letters "O" and "U" (not the Greek "Ο" and "Υ"). — |J~Pæst|  23:30, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, it does exist in Greek, and the Latin usage was inspired by it. There's a bit about its present-day status here [19]. Fut.Perf. ☼ 05:42, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

24 or 27 letters

The Greek alphabet consists of three sets of nine letters representing the numbers 1-9, 10-90, and 100-900. So, 27 letters all together (3 X 9 = 27).

As such, omega is not the last letter of the Greek alphabet because it represents the number 800.

Other letters frequently omitted are digamma/ F = (6) and koppa (similar to Q) = 90.

I think Wikipedia should post the 27 letters of the Greek alphabet and their numeric equivalents. (A numeric equivalency chart is available at www.GreekAlphabeta.com) GreekAlphabeta (talk) 22:02, 14 November 2013 (UTC)GreekAlphabeta

The 27 Letters of the Greek Alphabet and their Numeric Equivalents

Α α Β β Γ γ Δ δ Ε ε Ϝ ϝ Ζ ζ Η η Θ θ
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Ι ι Κ κ Λ λ Μ μ Ν ν Ξ ξ Ο ο Π π Ϟ ϟ
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90

Ρ ρ Σ σ Τ τ Υ υ Φ φ Χ χ Ψ ψ Ω ω Ϡ ϡ
100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900

GreekAlphabeta (talk) 13:14, 15 November 2013 (UTC)GreekAlphabeta

Uhm, no. What you have here is not the Greek alphabet, but the Greek numeral system. Which is based on the Greek alphabet (i.e. some archaic versions of it), but isn't the alphabet proper. As our article rightly says, and will continue to say based on all reliable sources, the alphabet proper in its classical form has 24 letters. Digamma, Koppa and Sampi are extra-alphabetic signs ("episema"), which are not part of the alphabet itself. The numeral system is of course also treated in this article, quite appropriately, in its own section (Greek alphabet#Use as numerals). Fut.Perf. ☼ 13:21, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Letter name pronunciation

Do you think that I should add a column alongside the names of the letters showing IPA pronunciation of the names (Romanized)? 77.127.225.235 (talk) 22:04, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

That would again open up the old can of worms: which pronunciation? The modern English pronunciation, a reconstructed classical Greek pronunciation, or the modern Greek one? Or all of them together? If you are referring to the summary table in the intro section, then no, we should not overburden it with such things. Fut.Perf. ☼ 23:22, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

I would think that the modern English should take priority, as that is the way an English speaker would communicate the letter intended. If you feel that it doesn't belong in the main table (adjacent to the "name" column, I could make a separate table and incorporate all three. Where would you put it? (Basically, one who wants to get a quick feel for the Greek alphabet has to run around to each letter's article and try to memorize the pronunciation then go back to the main list, repeat.) אפונה (talk) 06:53, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

I just found a page devoted to pronunciations, and I've updated all the IPAs to IPAc-en. Perhaps a link could be added to the page (English pronunciation of Greek letters) or the table could be incorporated into this article. אפונה (talk) 22:14, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Merger Proposal

I suggest merging English pronunciation of Greek letters into this article under a new heading. Other languages have such a subsection too: e.g. Hebrew alphabet. Please comment! —&naaabsp;Preceding unsigned comment added by אפונה (talk • contribs) 10:07, 16 March 2014 אפונה (talk) 04:54, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

User:Lfdder completed the merge, and added the information to the History section. I think that it would be more appropriate to have it a separate heading before the History section, especially because the history section is broken up into a few tables. Also, the lead paragraph in the old article had some information now missing (because it doesn't belong in the History section). Admittedly, it may make a long article even longer. אפונה (talk) 04:54, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

I don't think we need yet another table. Are the English pronunciation transcriptions really that important to the encyclopedia? — Lfdder (talk) 08:50, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

I think I'm with Lfdder here. The natural place for the info on name pronunciation is, obviously, the section on "letter names", and the English stuff fits in with the existing tables without problem, as they are now. I don't see how the Hebrew alphabet example points us into any other direction either; it too treats the English pronunciations together with the native ones. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:38, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

@Fut. Perf. - I agree that the English pronunciation belongs with the native one - it just doesn't belong in the "History" section together with the Phoenician origins. That's not where I'd look for them. @Lfdder - I think the transcriptions are very important. If you want to learn about the Greek alphabet, you'd want to know how to pronounce the names properly.

Also the article is still missing the information contained in the "original" lead paragraph - check the edit history to see. It's not *very* important, but it is informative.

All being said, another paragraph would be cumbersome. — Preceding unsigned comment added by אפונה (talk • contribs) 11:45, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Recent edits

I'm afraid I disagree with many of the recent edits by User:LlywelynII [20], and intend to partially revert them. In particular:

1. The lede is now making it appear as if the meaning of the term "Greek alphabet", and thus the topic of this article, was only the classical post-Euclidian 24-letter system, excluding the pre-classical forms. This does not match common usage out there. Everywhere, both in technical linguistic and historical terminology and in everyday use, the term "Greek alphabet" comprises all the historical forms including the archaic ones, and consequently so does this article.
2. There are several elements of quite unnecessary detail introduced in the lede, including the thing about (h)eta, the "Cumaean" variant, the uncial and minuscule script types, and so on. The lede should present just the most crucial overview at a glance.
3. Some of the new elements of the lede also seem factually wrong. I cannot find confirmation that the development of the "rough breathing" can be attributed to Aristophanes of Byzantium; the digraphs "μπ, ντ, γκ" are certainly not used only for writing foreign words in Modern Greek, and I also doubt their introduction is the single most notable difference between the ancient and the modern orthographies, as it is currently suggested. I'm also not sure what is meant by the "series of simplifications over the course of the 20th century" that are said to have predated the introduction of the monotonic orthography.
4. I don't like the addition of the "meaning" column to the introductory table. This table was intentionally kept as brief and simple as possible, containing only the absolutely basic skeleton of information about each letter. Everything else is treated in the sections below. The column is also quite confusing, if not outright wrong: the whole point about the original Phoenician-derived names, such as "alpha" and "beta", is that these simply do not have any meaning at all, in Greek (unlike in the Phoenician model, where they did). Phoenician "aleph" is the origin of Greek "alpha", but calling it its "meaning" is seriously misleading. (Not surprisingly, this has in the meantime given rise to further confusion [21], based on the ambiguity between the derivation of the names and the derivation of the letters themselves).
5. The lede mixes up the concept of using Greek to "transcribe" other languages, with that of the wholesale borrowing and extension of the alphabet to form new derived alphabets for previously unwritten languages, such as Latin or Cyrillic, in a way I find quite confusing. The traditional terminology, describing alphabets as "ancestors" and "descendants" of each other, is far preferable in this kind of overview.
6. Likewise, the passage on Romanization mixes up the topic of actual Romanization (the rendering of Greek words in Latin, at the time when the Latin alphabet had long become an independent, established alphabet in its own right) with that of the original derivation of the Latin alphabet from the Greek one, in a very confusing way.
7. As a detail, the sentence about the derivation of Latin also seems to imply a difference between a "Cumaean alphabet" and an "Euboean script" from which it derives. That's wrong: Cumaean and Euboean alphabets are precisely the same thing. The following wording "[w]hen this script was used to write the classical Greek alphabet…", is also wrong, and it is linguistically imprecise to mix up the term "rough breathing" (i.e. the word-initial consonantal phoneme /h/) with the phonological feature of aspiration present in /pʰ, tʰ, kʰ/. I'm also not convinced that the clause "[b]ecause English orthography has changed so much from the original Greek" correctly describes the reason why we have Latin "k" side by side with "c" in modern Romanization of kappa, and so on.
8. The Romanization section also now downplays the existence of multiple diverging transcription systems for Modern Greek, making it appear as if they had been only a matter of the "19th and 20th centuries". Just because some of the officially codified transliteration systems for international rendering of names have recently converged doesn't mean there isn't still a huge lot of heterogeneity (for example, besides those official systems for names, there is the whole world of actual linguistic, mostly phonologically-based, transcriptions, which are often entirely different.)

Sorry for this whole long list of criticism, but I'm afraid I really feel this needs to be reverted. Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:56, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads-up link. It's fine that you feel this way, but I'll eventually revert at least some of your reversions and we'll have to let the community see whom they agree with more. Or if we can find some sort of compromise: =)

1. You are confusing the namespace Greek alphabet with Greek alphabets or script. (They redirect here, which may or may not be a mistake,—for comparison, Roman alphabet redirects to Latin alphabet but Latin script is a separate article,—but that's a separate issue.) It is simply untrue that the WP:COMMON WP:ENGLISH usage of "Greek alphabet" includes digamma, let alone sampi or an H that really means /h/. Fraternity members, e.g., are not spanked if they forget to mention "koppa" during initiation: they are spanked if they include it. A list at the top of this page which included it would simply be wrong.
   Similarly, it is untrue that this article dwells at length on them. We have an entirely different article dealing with pre- and non-Euclidean Greek alphabets and the WP:SCOPE of this article is only the Classical Athenian (i.e., Euclidean) alphabet and the Byzantine and modern Greek alphabets derived from them. The other alphabets are only dealt with in reference to their place in the development of that alphabet.
   Possible compromise: Move this article to Greek alphabets and merge archaic Greek alphabets to it to permit a greater focus on the lesser and non-Euclidean alphabets. [Personally, I think this is a terrible idea.]
   Better solution: What answer do you really think knowledgable (even scholarly) English-speaking people give when asked how many letters are in the "Greek alphabet"? "Indeterminate"? or "24"? If this article is not about the Greek alphabet, what namespace do you really believe is? It's better if you realize you're just overthinking this. This article is (/should/must be) about the classic and modern Greek alphabet; the others deserve some mention, but only in the context of the main and modern one; they are are dealt with elsewhere and should not be unhelpfully over-conflated or confused here.
2. You're right that the WP:LEADSECTION should present an overview. Some of the more detailed points could be moved to a history section, but I think we just have a good-faith disagreement about what constitutes important. I think it is very important to explain how the Latin script developed out of something that (on its surface) is so obviously different. Similarly, I think it is helpful to link to the discussion about the development of this alphabet over time.
3. (a) It's very hard to see how this comment is in good faith. Aristophanes of Byzantium's development of the breathing marks is mentioned on his page and on the Greek diacritics page. Two possibilities: you misread and thought I meant he invented the sound (possibly my poor wording) or you have other sources that credit an earlier development of the breathing marks before his development of the tone and punctuation system. Let me know and, if it's the second one, cool. Kindly make the appropriate edits to the linked pages as well as my repetition of it here but do provide some sources (preferably online) when you do. (b) There are internal μπ &c. but a great many of the ones that include them in their new function are foreign words. Wiktionary's Greek coverage is spotty, but of the 30 lemmas they have for word-initial γκ, only 4 are even potentially native terms and all of the rest are words like Γκαμπόν (Gabon), γκαρσονιέρα (servant's quarters, from Fr.), γκρι & γκριζάρω (gray), and γκρέιπφρουτ (grapefruit); further, it is absolutely a major difference that needs attention drawn to it. Uninformed readers do assume that the b-looking letter sounds like "b" and should know (when it turns out it's really "v") what modern Greek does with words like "Bush" and "Blair". Those unwieldy digrams are the principle reason that mandating ELOT 743 was found to violate human rights (see the Greek-language court decisions linked in my edits to romanization of Greek). It's a big, big feature of modern Greek... at least with regard to the alphabet, which is the subject of this article. (c) Exactly what it said. We're in an WP:LEADSECTION and shouldn't be excessively detailed or even overloaded with sourcing, but the adoption of a completely monotonal system in 1982 was the last of a series of simplifications (again all mentioned on Greek diacritics, which is the target page of the redirect at polytonic Greek) which progressively merged the grave accent with the acute and removed the iota subscript and breathing marks over ρs. Some of these were informal and directed by public and academic usage and others (as in the '60s) were official pronouncements.
4. This one, I can absolutely see where you're coming from. I don't think it was too cluttered and I added them because I really wanted to draw attention to the vowels that people don't realize are named "big O" or "simple U"... but, even though your specific complaints are off, it is a perfectly valid complaint that we shouldn't be needlessly repetitive. As long as the same information is provided somewhere, the only question is which place is the better place to mention it. You're right that the historical development is probably the better choice.
5. No one is talking about languages that Greek just transcribes. That would be a scholarly project applied by Greeks to every language on Earth and not particularly notable. We're only talking about the wholesale use of Greek alphabets to write other languages for extended periods. That said, if my phrasing seems unhelpful, we can find some other way to get the point across without creating an artificial division between Latin and Cyrillic and the other languages which also employed Greek letters as their native alphabets.
6. Again, I disagree but concede that if you found the phrasing unhelpful there may be a better way to get the important points across.
7. First point, you're right and this was a mistake on my part. Second point, you're wrong and I'm not sure what you think the problem could be. Third point, probably an issue of phrasing: "rough breathing" is a precise term that does not apply to /pʰ, tʰ, kʰ/ at all but each of them is simply a letter denoting an aspirated, breathy form of the sounds otherwise written /p, t, k/. Fourth point, again an issue of phrasing. It's valid and important: what most English speakers think they are looking at with "theta" and "phi" in a Classical setting is actually quite far off. You're welcome to rephrase it, though, or include more details or links to how it was connected to changes in Latin, though which these Greek aspects entered English. I was providing a quick gloss, but you're right we don't want to be misleading.
8. Nope. Not at all. The previous form of this was entirely incorrect and misleading. There is an almost universal agreement of formal official romanization systems with the force of Greek and international law and the continuing existence of a variety of ad hoc and in house systems should not be given WP:UNDUE importance. Even given the Greek court cases, it really is just an issue of the 19th and 20th century and it will take quite a lot to get ELOT, the ISO, the UN, and the US and UK boards on geographic names to go back and change everything now.

Again, thank you for the link and the time that you took to write out your explanations. I think there are some errors on both sides: sorry for mine but good job helping to make this a better article. — LlywelynII 02:40, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the constructive response. I'm afraid I stand by most of my points.

1. Most importantly, the scope of the article, on which I will most certainly not compromise. Of course you are right that if you ask somebody how many letters there are "in the Greek alphabet", they will answer in terms of the classical 24-letter alphabet. That's obvious and just as it should be, because that's the classical and prototypical form of this alphabet, and the article was rightly presenting it as such, right up there in the lede (we earlier had versions of this article that gave quite exaggerated undue weight to the archaic extra letters). But at the same time, when you ask people (including experts in the technical literature) what alphabet the inscription on Nestor's Cup is in, or what alphabet this is, or which alphabet Cadmus was traditionally credited with inventing, or which alphabet was the first to have separate phoneme-level symbols for vowels, they will just as obviously all answer it was the "Greek alphabet". I challenge you to find a single reliable source supporting the claim that "the Greek alphabet" didn't exist before 403 BC, as your version presented it. That really flies in the face of every single source in the field I've ever seen. Nobody out in the literature makes any such terminological distinction as you suggest, between "the alphabet" and "alphabets", or "scripts". There is a single alphabet, the Greek one, which had variants, one of them the classical one, others archaic; that alphabet was invented some time around the 8th century or so, from Phoenician, and this article deals with that whole story, from the beginning (of course giving predominant weight to the most important, classical form). The Archaic Greek alphabets article is a sub-topic of this one.

2. About the amount of detail in the lede: let's again just take the example of the details of the Greek-to-Latin borrowing. A prime example of overblown detail. What the passage in the lede is actually about is just the historical significance of Greek – the fact that it occupies that central position in the history of the transmission of alphabetic writing across Europe. To make that point, all it takes is the bare fact of transmission to Latin etc., not the historical details of what happened to individual letters in the process. If you find the story of Latin "c" or "s" so important in the lede, then why not expend the same amount of space to the details of how individual Cyrillic letters were adapted, or what happened between Phoenician and Greek? All of these things can be, and are, treated further down.

3a. About Aristophanes of Byzantium: The statement in Greek diacritics is unsourced. What Aristophanes is traditionally credited with is the invention of the accent system. While that of the breathings has often been thrown in together with the accents in older treatments, current literature stresses that it quite probably happened independently [22][23].

3b. μπάζω, μπαίνω, μπαλλώνω, μπαμπάς, μπας, μπερδεύω, μπήγω, μπλέκω, μπορώ, μπόχα, μπροστά; ντόπιος, ντρέπομαι, ντροπή, ντύνω; γκαμήλα, γκαρδιακός, γκαστρώνω, γκλίτσα, γκρεμίζω, γκρεμός are all words of purely Greek stock. Innumerable others are of Italian or Turkish etymology but have been in the language for centuries; the correct term for such items is not "foreign words" but "loanwords". – More to the point, if you really insist on explaining the actual differences between the ancient and modern sound-symbol correspondences, then I'd guess the far more immediately noticeable change is that in the vowels (multiple symbols falling together in the sound value /i/. And before you deal with the introduction of <μπ, ντ, γκ>, it would be important to first explain the change that actually triggered this (the fricativization of <β, δ, γ>.

3c. About the pre-history of the introduction of monotonic: again, context. The sole point of mentioning the accents in the lede is to prepare the reader for the fact that there are those two different diacritic styles today. Details are extraneous to that.

6. Again, you are overlooking the fact that the domain for which those official schemes have converged is exclusively that of official transcriptions of personal and geographical names. As you yourself notice, actual (reversible) transliteration schemes remain different (and the differences between the ELOT, UN and ALA-LC columns in that part of your romanization table are by no means "minor"). And you have again overlooked the fact that in addition to either of these domains, there's the whole area of how, for example, a whole sentence of Greek would be transcribed (on a phonological basis) in a language guide for foreigners or a linguistic discussion. I still think the most important point to present here to the reader, up front, is that they have to be prepared to see Greek rendered in many different ways, in different contexts and for different purposes.

Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:14, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

I agree with all of FP's edits and comments. The lead should be concise and basic. The coverage of the various forms of the alphabet makes sense as is (and it is bizarre to bring up fraternity hazing as a reference). The digraphs μπ etc. are found in many native words and assimilated borrowings, and should not be described as being used primarily for "foreign words". WP should not confuse official actions with facts on the ground. --Macrakis (talk) 14:19, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

Alphabet vs. abjad issue

I'm afraid I disagree with the recent edit by @Piledhighandeep: [24], introducing the distinction of Greek as a true "alphabet" as opposed to the Phoenician "abjad" in the intro. As far as I am aware, the terminology that wants to restrict the term "alphabet" to those of the Greek (consonant + vowels) type and strictly distinguishes the latter from "abjads" is not a commonly employed one in the literature. While certainly influential, it is essentially just a personal invention of one author, Peter Daniels (in The World's Writing Systems). Most other authors continue to call scripts of the Phoenician type "alphabets" as a matter of course. This terminology should therefore not be allowed to monopolize our treatment like this. The distinction is already present in the article, properly contextualized and hedged, in the "history" section ("According to a definition used by some modern authors, this feature makes Greek the first "alphabet" in the narrow sense,] as distinguished from the purely consonantal alphabets of the Semitic type, which according to this terminology are called "abjads".) That's about as much coverage as we should give it here. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:02, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

What does it mean to represent vowels and consonants equally? This should be put in simpler terms, e.g. the first alphabet with distinct letters for vowels. Also, why was the overview table pushed below the ToC? 213.7.56.181 (talk) 15:26, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 7 February 2015

In the table with the heading "Letters" the Greek letter 'M' is named in English as 'mu'. This is incorrect as the second letter 'u' is actually pronounced 'i' in Greek, as the name of the Greek letter 'u' is pronounced 'ipsilon'. Hence the Greek letter 'Y' or 'u' in the table is incorrectly named as 'upsilon'. Think of the letter as an English Y as used in the words tally, rally, funny or sunny, rather than the English letter 'U'. This can be confusing because the upper case ipsilon 'Y' and the lower case ipsilon 'u' represent different sounds in the English language. This also applies to the Greek letter 'N' or 'v'. The correct pronunciation of these letters is therefore 'Mi' and 'Ni' rather than 'Mu' and 'Nu'. Most monosyllabic Greek letters are pronounced with a short 'i' sound such as in the word 'Si', the Italian or Spanish word for 'Yes'. For example: 'M' (Mi), 'N' (Ni), 'Ξ' (Xi) or (Ksi), 'Π' (Pi), 'Φ' (Phi), 'Χ' (Chi) and 'Ψ' (Psi). The exceptions are 'P' (Rho) or (Ro) and 'T', which brings me to my next point. The English pronunciation of the Greek letter 'T' in the table is written as 'Tau'. This is incorrect as the Greek ipsilon (u) is also used to make other sounds when combined with other letters. For example, when it is preceded by an 'o' as in 'ou' it represents the short sound 'oo' as in book, look and took. Greek examples are φρouto, pronounced 'frooto' (fruit) and τou, pronounced 'tu' (his). When preceded by an 'a', as is the case here 'au', the sound it represents is 'aph' or 'af' as in the words 'tough', 'enough' and 'gruff'. Greek examples include 'aυτo', pronounced 'afto' (that) or 'aυτoκιvιτo', pronounsed 'aftokinito' (automobile). Hence the Greek letter 'T' or 'τ' in the table should be pronounced 'taf', exactly like the English word 'tough' not 'tau'. The confusion probably lies in the fact that there are three lettters that make the 'i' sound in the Greek alphabet: 'Η' or 'η', 'Ι' or 'ι' and 'Y' or 'u'. Combinations of 'oι' and 'ει' also make the 'i' sound (confusing even for a Greek, trust me). The pronunciations are correctly labelled in the tables in the section below titled "Letter names" so I thought the inconsistency could be rectified to more accurately reflect the Modern Greek pronunciations. Cheers. Dorothy Dixer (talk) 23:24, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

 Not done. These are the names of the letters in English. The letters' pronunciation in Modern Greek is not relevant. Alakzi (talk) 23:34, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

IPA Usage

When I saw that the article claimed that chi represented a velar fricative in IPA, I changed it to say that it represented a uvular one. My edit was promptly reverted. As per Voiceless velar fricative and Voiceless uvular fricative, I believe that the Latin letter x represents a velar fricative, and the Greek letter chi represents a uvular one, and that my edit was correct, unless there is something major that I'm missing. If there is something I'm missing, please mention it here, but for the time being I'm going to change it back. Thanks. 44Dume (talk) 18:36, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

You were quite right, of course: in IPA, "χ" is uvular, "x" is velar. Thanks for spotting that error in the article. Maybe the editor who reverted you misread your diff and missed its context, thinking that you were trying to say that the sound denoted by the letter chi in Greek was uvular rather than velar. Probably just a misunderstanding. Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:42, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

That is exactly what happened. Apologies. Alakzi (talk) 18:48, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Textcritical signs of Aristarchus of Samothrace and other ancient greek writers and Philologists

Does anyone have the time and knowledge to write something about it? Aristarchus of Samothrace and other ancient greek Philologists and their textcritical signs.

I have found some sources, see:

Brill's Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship, 2015 (2 Vols.) pp. 549-562 and: The ambiguity of signs: critical σημεῖα from Zenodotus to Origenes. Author, Francesca Schironi — Preceding unsigned comment added by Informationskampagne (talk • contribs) 22:45, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

There are also "pictures" of these signs in this book.

Informationskampagne (talk) 14:29, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

Minor request concerning ϑ / θ

I am not an expert at all, and so I hesitate just changing things, but I was trying to translate words and could not find the symbol ϑ on this page in the table. Apparently it is a variation of θ; 'theta', see http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Theta. Could it be added into the table or perhaps even as a footnote? (Like the two forms of Sigma). I leave the decision to the editors most active on this page. It will help people (beginners, like me) just trying to decipher symbols. Thank you! Jelle1975 (talk) 06:30, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

It's covered in the Greek alphabet#Glyph variants section. —Largo Plazo (talk) 11:39, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request: "Comma" should not be capitalized

A simple copy-edit: In the last paragraph of the Greek alphabet#Diacritics section, the text "Although it is not a diacritic the Comma has" should be replaced with "Although it is not a diacritic, the comma has". That is, insert a comma and down-case Comma. Thank you!71.41.210.146 (talk) 14:33, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

 Done and I also rearranged the wording after it - Arjayay (talk) 17:52, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

Greek alphabet

Shouldn't an article with this title start with the Greek alphabet? Keith-264 (talk) 14:40, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

Well, it does, doesn't it? There is an overview table right at the top of the first section. Although I have to say, I personally liked it better at an earlier stage when that table was still in the intro paragraph, above the table of contents, and was also a bit leaner [25]. Is that more in line with what you would have expected? This was the way it was until 2015, then somebody felt the table should be in a section of its own, and people kept adding more details to it too. Fut.Perf. ☼ 17:13, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

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Missing digraphs?

Isn't the table in the digraphs section missing a few of the digraphs/combinations? The preceding text mentions several that are not included in the table (e.g. "there is also ⟨ου⟩, pronounced /u/"). Mortenpi (talk) 01:24, 26 December 2017 (UTC)

Isopsephy

In the section of Use as Numerals, there should be a reference to isopsephy. It's highly important to the entire structure of the ancient to modern Greek language. Isopsephy influenced Hebrew Gematria, Arabic Abjad numerals, and simple English Gematria. 73.204.120.223 (talk) 14:09, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Table bloat

I appreciate the efforts that have lately gone into developing this article, especially the many edits by User:Katolophyromai. Yet, I'm afraid I'm not quite happy with the overall direction of some of this editing, especially with the enormous expansion of the table of letters in the first section. I remember the time, back before 2012, when the whole article was structured around a gigantic "main table" that tried to do everything at once: letter names in multiple versions, glyph variants, pronunciations in multiple versions, transliteration in multiple versions, and so on. I then proposed to split this up to make it more readable. This involved the creation of a very small summary table, listing only the bare letters, their English names, and two columns with the most representative sound values in Ancient and Modern Greek respectively [26]. The idea was to offer only a very quick overview, just making the reader familiar with the basic shapes, identities and ordering of the letters. Something that could be taken in at a glance. All the gory details were to be covered further down in specialized sections.

Ever since then, that table has tended to grow. First, somebody moved it out of the lead section to below the TOC, making it less visible for the reader in search of a quick overview (so that, more recently, somebody else felt the need to duplicate it with yet another list of letters in the lead paragraph). Then, people started adding: the native spellings of the letter names in addition to the Latin ones; a Latin transliteration column; large amounts of phonological detail (such as up to four positional realization variants for Modern Greek gamma and iota), and so on. With the new "approximate equivalent" columns for pronunciation, the table is now approaching the dimensions of that old pre-2012 "main table" again. Now it's even got esoteric details quite extraneous to its purported function as part of a "sound values" section, such as the historic variants of the letter name "lambda" (but why not also those of "omicron" or "epsilon" and all the others?) or the obsolete historic glyph variant of "lunate sigma". There's so much in this table that is in need of extra illustration, disclaimers or explanation that it even needs its own footnote sections (not just one but two sections, actually), plus massive numbers of regular footnotes (such that the reader wanting to follow the links to the notes will end up being directed to three different lists.)

Sorry, folks, but I don't think this is reader-friendly. I hate to say this now, when people have already invested so much work in this expansion, but personally I'd much rather see the whole thing returned to something a lot more similar to what we had back here: [27]. Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:29, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

I personally prefer the large table because I think it is much more helpful to have more information in one table, rather than spread out throughout the article. The way I see it, having lots of useful information in one place is kind of the purpose of an encyclopedia. Nonetheless, I know you have been curating this article for many years and that you are strongly opposed to large tables, as evidenced by your comments in this section and in the sections above this one. I have therefore decided to acquiesce to your desires and have begun working on splitting the big table in the first section into separate ones. This may take a while, though, so please be patient.

On a related note, I definitely do not think we should have a table in the lead because the lead is supposed to be a summary of the article without the extremely finite details and the inherent purpose of a table is to convey those extremely finite details that would be too tedious to convey in prose. Also, having a table in the lead would be really bizarre, since I do not know of a single other article that has a table in the lead, let alone "Good" or "Featured" ones. In my view, simply listing the letters of the alphabet is probably sufficient for the lead. --Katolophyromai (talk) 05:15, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

About the note on omega

The table has 5 notes at the bottom; one is about omega. Is a similar statement true about eta?? (For clarification, this question is about the statement that eta is introduced to English speakers as the sound of ay in hay.) Georgia guy (talk) 02:13, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

@Georgia guy: In classical Attic Greek, the letter eta was pronounced as a long epsilon, meaning it made the same sound as epsilon, but was held for roughly twice as long. An excellent source if you are looking for further information about how Classical Attic Greek was pronounced is the book Vox Graeca: The Pronunciation of Classical Greek: Third Edition by W. Sydney Allen, which talks about the pronunciation of the letter eta on pages sixty-nine through seventy-five. –Katolophyromai (talk) 20:43, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

To clarify what I'm saying, read the note under the table that talks about omega. I understand what you're saying correctly, and what I'm asking for is a similar note about eta. That is, one that says that eta is introduced to English speakers as the sound of ay in hay. Georgia guy (talk) 20:49, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

I tried to add the note by putting the same note on eta, but it was tough. The note says:

The letter omega ⟨ω⟩ is normally taught to English speakers as [oʊ], the long o as in English go, in order to more clearly distinguish it from omicron ⟨ο⟩.[22][15] This is not the sound it actually made in classical Attic Greek.[22][15]

I was trying to add it to eta by changing it to:

The letters eta and omega ⟨ω⟩ are normally taught to English speakers as [ei] and [oʊ], the long a o as in English hay and go, in order to more clearly distinguish it from epsilon and omicron ⟨ο⟩.[22][15] These are not the sounds it actually made in classical Attic Greek.[22][15] Georgia guy (talk) 14:56, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

But is that statement true? I'm not convinced it's covered by the citations given even for omega, less so for eta. Of the two footnotes, #22 (Mastronarde) clearly describes and advocates proper half-open, non-diphthongal pronunciations for both letters, and merely notes that "you will also hear it pronounced like English long o". That doesn't really support the claim that it is "normally" taught like that. For eta it makes no such allowance at all. What does the other of the two cited works say? I don't have access to it. What makes you think it would support an analogous statement for eta, if the editors who first introduced it here cited it only about omega? Fut.Perf. ☼ 16:08, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

Check this article's history to see who put the omega note at the bottom of the table. Georgia guy (talk) 19:19, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

I know who added it. But you didn't answer my question. Fut.Perf. ☼ 19:29, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

My experience with differences between the table and how the alphabet is normally taught to anglophones. Georgia guy (talk) 19:56, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

@Future Perfect at Sunrise: The second source cited to support this statement, the one I assume you are most likely referring to (i.e. "Keller & Russell 2012"), lists the pronunciation for omega as "as the aw of saw or as the o of hope," but has a footnote which states, "The alternate pronunciation given for the vowel omega does not represent the sound of original Attic Greek but is a common substitute used by English speakers because it makes a clearer distinction between the sounds of omicron and omega." –Katolophyromai (talk) 20:56, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

And I'm quite sure eta has properties that parallel what you wrote about omega, Katolophyromai. (Read what I wrote above.) Georgia guy (talk) 21:06, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

Sound values of epsilon and eta

This article gives the vowel sound in "pet" as an approximation for epsilon. However, the article for that vowel sound gives "may" as the example for most dialects, except for Australian, the example for the latter being "bed". The article for Open-mid front unrounded vowel, which this article gives as the ancient value for eta, has "bed" as the example for General American, Received Pronunciation, Northern English, and Scottish. The way I pronounce the words (I think my dialect is General American), "pet" and "bed" have the same vowel. Therefore I think that it should be made more explicit which specific dialect the English examples in the "Approximate western European equivalent" column are from. ZFT (talk) 22:59, 30 March 2019 (UTC)

The way I see it, this confusion only goes to demonstrate why it was never a good idea to overload that table with this kind of phonetic information to begin with. To answer your question: The Greek "e" in Modern Greek is not really a close-mid vowel, but just "mid" or even open-mid; it is conventionally transcribed with the simpler phonetic symbol "e" in a broad transcription because there is no other e-like sound to contrast it with. The English "pet"/"bed" vowel is a fairly good approximation, because it too can vary within much the same range, from mid to open-mid. In Ancient Greek, epsilon may have been distinctively close-mid, contrasting with open-mid eta; a close-mid but short "e" sound doesn't really have a good equivalent in most English accents, although Australian "bed" might work. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:10, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

Please remove the "Approximate western European equivalent" column for Ancient Greek

It is more harmful than helpful. The number of people who speak western European languages (esp. English) outside western Europe (Eg. India, Pakistan, Phillipines) far exceeds the population of western Europeans. They are left wondering : "WTF are they talking about? Is this how Ancient Greek is supposed to be spoken? Or was I wrong about how that western European/ English word is pronounced all along??" Example: Δ δ = d as in English delete. That's retroflex here in India, not alveolar. The IPA clears it up. Similarly with Θ θ = "t as in English top". This table column might help some Anglo Saxons, but it frustrates and confuses LOT more people. विश्वासो वासुकेयः (talk) 03:19, 17 November 2019 (UTC)