"which the sequence of the alphabet could be recited and memorized. In Phoenician, each letter name was a word that began with the sound represented by that letter; thus ""ʾaleph"", the word for ""ox"", was used as the name for the glottal stop , ""bet"", or ""house"", for the sound, and so on. When the letters were adopted by the Greeks, most of the Phoenician names were maintained or modified slightly to fit Greek phonology; thus, ""ʾaleph, bet, gimel"" became ""alpha, beta, gamma"". The Greek names of the following letters are more or less straightforward continuations of their Phoenician antecedents."
"Alpha Alpha (uppercase , lowercase ; , ""álpha"", ""álfa"") is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 1. It was derived from the Phoenician and Hebrew letter aleph - an ox or leader. Letters that arose from alpha include the Latin A and the Cyrillic letter А. In English, the noun ""alpha"" is used as a synonym for ""beginning"", or ""first"" (in a series), reflecting its Greek roots. In Ancient Greek, alpha was pronounced and could be either phonemically long ([aː]) or short ([a]). Where there is ambiguity, long"
"Alpha and Omega Alpha (Α or α) and omega (Ω or ω) are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, and a title of Christ and God in the Book of Revelation. This pair of letters are used as Christian symbols, and are often combined with the Cross, Chi-rho, or other Christian symbols. The term ""Alpha and Omega"" comes from the phrase ""I am Alpha and Omega"" (Koiné Greek: ""ἐγὼ τὸ Α καὶ τὸ Ω""), an appellation of Jesus in the Book of Revelation (verses 1:8, 21:6, and 22:13). The first part of this phrase (""I am the"
"are: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , /ς, , , , , , and . The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. Like Latin and Cyrillic, Greek originally had only a single form of each letter; it developed the letter case distinction between uppercase and lowercase forms in parallel with Latin during the modern era. Sound values and conventional transcriptions for some of the letters differ between Ancient and Modern Greek usage, because the pronunciation of Greek has changed significantly between the fifth century"
"Greek alphabet. Thus, twice when the phrase ""I am the alpha and the omega"" appears it is further clarified with the additional phrase, ""the beginning and the end"" (Revelation 21:6, 22:13). The first and last letters of the Greek alphabet were used because the book of Revelation is in the New Testament, which was originally written in Greek. This phrase is interpreted by many Christians to mean that Jesus has existed for all eternity or that God is eternal. Though many commentators and dictionaries ascribe the title ""the alpha and the omega"" to both God and to Christ, some secular"
"first and last letters of the English alphabet, as alpha and omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. As of August 2, this was confirmed as the website has changed linking to a screen asking the following: Clicking ""No"" takes you back to the original site with the puzzles. Clicking ""Yes"" takes you to the new official Alpha Omega website. EHWR has seen much coverage online as well as coverage in USA Today, Forbes Magazine and the LA Times. While most have been unable to provide definitively new information, they have largely served to spread notice"
"late ninth century BC or early eighth century BC, the Greek alphabet emerged. The period between the use of the two writing systems, during which no Greek texts are attested, is known as the Greek Dark Ages. The Greeks adopted the alphabet from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, one of the closely related scripts used for the West Semitic languages. However, the Phoenician alphabet is limited to consonants. When it was adopted for writing Greek, certain consonants were adapted to express vowels. The use of both vowels and consonants makes Greek the first alphabet in the narrow sense, as distinguished from"
"Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late ninth or early eighth century BC. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the first alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many different local variants, but, by the end of the fourth century BC, the Eucleidean alphabet, with twenty-four letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used to write Greek today. These twenty-four letters"
"alphabet were used for the regional dialects of the Greek language during the Archaic and early Classical periods. The Attic dialect, however, used two forms. The first was the Old Attic alphabet, and the second is the Ionic alphabet, introduced to Athens around the end of the 5th century BC during the archonship of Eucleides. The last is the standard alphabet in modern editions of Ancient Greek texts, and the one used for Classical Attic, standard Koine, and Medieval Greek, finally developing into the alphabet used for Modern Greek. Most double consonants are written using double letters: represent or ."
"All of the names of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet started with consonants, and these consonants were what the letters represented, something called the acrophonic principle. However, several Phoenician consonants were absent in Greek, and thus several letter names came to be pronounced with initial vowels. Since the start of the name of a letter was expected to be the sound of the letter (the acrophonic principle), in Greek these letters came to be used for vowels. For example, the Greeks had no glottal stop or voiced pharyngeal sounds, so the Phoenician letters ""’alep"" and ""`ayin"" became Greek ""alpha"""
"all alphabets in the West. The vowels have independent letter forms separate from those of consonants; therefore it was the first true alphabet. The Greeks chose letters representing sounds that did not exist in Greek to represent vowels. Vowels are significant in the Greek language, and the syllabical Linear B script that was used by the Mycenaean Greeks from the 16th century BC had 87 symbols, including 5 vowels. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, a situation that caused many different alphabets to evolve from it. The Greek alphabet, in its Euboean form, was"
"whether they should be considered as siblings of the latter, adopted from the Phoenician simultaneously, or rather as early descendants of the nascent Greek alphabet proper. History of the Greek alphabet The history of the Greek alphabet starts with the adoption of Phoenician letter forms and continues to the present day. The Greek alphabet postdates Linear B, the syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek, by several centuries. This article concentrates on the early period, before the codification of the now-standard Greek alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet was strictly speaking one that was consistently explicit only about consonants, though"
"approximately the 9th century BC. It was created by modifying the Phoenician alphabet, with the innovation of adopting certain letters to represent the vowels. The variant of the alphabet in use today is essentially the late Ionic variant, introduced for writing classical Attic in 403 BC. In classical Greek, as in classical Latin, only upper-case letters existed. The lower-case Greek letters were developed much later by medieval scribes to permit a faster, more convenient cursive writing style with the use of ink and quill. The Greek alphabet consists of 24 letters, each with an uppercase (majuscule) and lowercase (minuscule) form."
"Phoenician alphabet, but is considered the first true alphabet as it is the first to have explicit symbols for vowels. The Greek alphabet in turn is the parent alphabet of the Latin, Cyrillic, and several other alphabets. The earliest Greek literary works are the Homeric epics, variously dated from the 8th to the 6th century BC. Notable scientific and mathematical works include Euclid's Elements, Ptolemy's Almagest, and others. The New Testament was originally written in Koine Greek. Greek demonstrates several linguistic features that are shared with other Balkan languages, such as Albanian, Bulgarian and Eastern Romance languages (see Balkan sprachbund),"
"of Rome tells of the Docetae (viii. 10). Marcus pushes into further details his designation of the Aeons as letters of the alphabet. There are twenty-four letters in the alphabet, and twenty-four is the sum of the letters of the names of the first tetrad: Followed by those of the second tetrad: These form the Ogdoad. Again, the Greek alphabet consists of nine mutes, eight semivowels, and seven vowels. The mutes belong to Father and Truth (The Unspeakable, and Silence, of course, do not count); these being mute reveal nothing to man. The semivowels belong to Word and Life, but"
"by the first 2 letters. The final letter in the sequence changes in Greek alphabetical order after 9,000 issued plates. For example, Patras plates are codice_2, where ΑΧ represents the Achaia prefecture of which Patras is the capital. When codice_3 is reached the plates turn to codice_4 and this continues until codice_5 is finished. Only the letters from the intersection between the Latin and Greek alphabets by glyph appearance are used, namely Α, Β, Ε, Ζ, Η, Ι, Κ, Μ, Ν, Ο, Ρ, Τ, Υ, Χ (in Greek alphabetical order). This is because Greece is a contracting party to the"
"Beta Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; or ) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 2. In Ancient Greek, beta represented the voiced bilabial plosive . In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced labiodental fricative . Letters that arose from beta include the Roman letter and the Cyrillic letters and . Like the names of most other Greek letters, the name of the beta was adopted from the acrophonic name of the corresponding letter in Phoenician, which was the common Semitic word ""*bait"""
"history. Ancient Greek had distinctive vowel length: five short vowels, , and seven long vowels, . When the Phoenician alphabet was adapted to Greek, the names of five letters were pronounced by the Greeks with initial consonants made silent, and were then used acrophonically to represent vowels. These were ""alpha"", ""e"" (later called ""e psilon""), ""iota"", ""o"" (later called ""o micron""), and ""u"" (later called ""u psilon"") – <> – five letters for twelve vowel sounds. Later the [h] dropped from the Eastern Greek dialects, and the letter ""heta"" (now pronounced ""eta"") became available; it was used for . About"
"the same time the Greeks created an additional letter, ""o mega"", probably by writing ""o micron"" with an underline, that was used for . Digraphs ""ei"" and ""ou"" were adopted for and Thus Greek entered its classical era with seven letters and two digraphs – <> – for twelve vowel sounds. Long were never distinguished from short , even though the distinction was meaningful. Although the Greek alphabet was a good match to the consonants of the language, it was defective when it came to some vowels. Other ancient scripts were also defective. Egyptian hieroglyphs had no vowel representation at"
"Instead of the rich vowel system of Ancient Greek, with its four vowel-height levels, length distinction, and multiple diphthongs, Modern Greek has a simple system of five vowels. This came about through a series of mergers, especially towards (iotacism). Modern Greek consonants are plain (voiceless unaspirated) stops, voiced stops, or voiced and unvoiced fricatives. Modern Greek has not preserved length in vowels or consonants. Modern Greek is written in the Greek alphabet, which has 24 letters, each with a capital and lowercase (small) form. The letter sigma additionally has a special final form. There are two diacritical symbols, the acute"
"Asia Minor (also called Asian Greece i.e. present-day aegean Turkey). The Athenians (c. 400 BCE) adopted that latter variation and eventually the rest of the Greek-speaking world followed. After first writing right to left, the Greeks eventually chose to write from left to right, unlike the Phoenicians who wrote from right to left. Many Greek letters are similar to Phoenician, except the letter direction is reversed or changed, which can be the result of historical changes from right-to-left writing to boustrophedon to left-to-right writing. Greek is in turn the source of all the modern scripts of Europe. The alphabet of"
"can be combined on a single vowel to indicate a stressed vowel after a hiatus, as in the verb (, ""to feed""). Although it is not a diacritic, the hypodiastole (comma) has in a similar way the function of a sound-changing diacritic in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing (, ""whatever"") from (, ""that""). The original Greek alphabet did not have diacritics. The Greek alphabet is attested since the 8th century BC, and until 403 BC, variations of the Greek alphabet—which exclusively used what is now known as capitals—were used in different cities and areas. From 403 on, the"
"Н, О, П, Р, С, Т, У, Ф, Х, Ц, Ч, Ш, Щ, Ъ, Ы, Ь, Ю, Я. Georgian script: ა, ბ, გ, დ, ე, ვ, ზ, თ, ი, კ, ლ, მ, ნ, ო, პ, ჟ, რ, ს, ტ, უ, ფ, ქ, ღ, ყ, შ, ჩ, ც, ძ, წ, ჭ, ხ, ჯ, ჰ Greek alphabet: Α, Β, Γ, Δ, Ε, Ζ, Η, Θ, Ι, Κ, Λ, Μ, Ν, Ξ, Ο, Π, Ρ, Σ, Τ, Υ, Φ, Χ, Ψ, Ω. Hebrew alphabet: (Alphabetical from right to left) א, ב, ג, ד, ה, ו, ז, ח, ט, י, כ, ל, מ, נ,"
"Archaic Greek alphabets Many local variants of the Greek alphabet were employed in ancient Greece during the archaic and early classical periods, until they were replaced by the classical 24-letter alphabet that is the standard today, around 400 BC. All forms of the Greek alphabet were originally based on the shared inventory of the 22 symbols of the Phoenician alphabet, with the exception of the letter Samekh, whose Greek counterpart Xi () was used only in a sub-group of Greek alphabets, and with the common addition of Upsilon () for the vowel . The local, so-called ""epichoric"", alphabets differed in"
"simply ""o"". As the last letter of the Greek alphabet, Omega is often used to denote the last, the end, or the ultimate limit of a set, in contrast to alpha, the first letter of the Greek alphabet. Ω was not part of the early (8th century BC) Greek alphabets. It was introduced in the late 7th century BC in the Ionian cities of Asia Minor to denote the long half-open [ɔː]. It is a variant of omicron (Ο), broken up at the side (), with the edges subsequently turned outward (, , , ). The Dorian city of Knidos"
"have corresponded closely to the Hebrew or Arabic aleph. When the ancient Greeks adopted the alphabet, they had no use for a letter to represent the glottal stop—the consonant sound that the letter denoted in Phoenician and other Semitic languages, and that was the first phoneme of the Phoenician pronunciation of the letter—so they used their version of the sign to represent the vowel , and called it by the similar name of alpha. In the earliest Greek inscriptions after the Greek Dark Ages, dating to the 8th century BC, the letter rests upon its side, but in the Greek"
"History of the Greek alphabet The history of the Greek alphabet starts with the adoption of Phoenician letter forms and continues to the present day. The Greek alphabet postdates Linear B, the syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek, by several centuries. This article concentrates on the early period, before the codification of the now-standard Greek alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet was strictly speaking one that was consistently explicit only about consonants, though even by the 9th century BC it had developed ""matres lectionis"" to indicate some, mostly final, vowels. This arrangement is much less suitable for Greek than"
"A A (named , plural ""As"", ""A's"", ""a""s, ""a's"" or ""aes"") is the first letter and the first vowel of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter alpha, from which it derives. The uppercase version consists of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by a horizontal bar. The lowercase version can be written in two forms: the double-storey a and single-storey ɑ. The latter is commonly used in handwriting and fonts based on it, especially fonts intended to be read by children, and is"
"with no Greek equivalents still remain in this block (U+03E2 to U+03EF). To write polytonic Greek, one may use combining diacritical marks or the precomposed characters in the ""Greek Extended"" block (U+1F00 to U+1FFF). Combining and spacing (letter-free) diacritical marks pertaining to Greek language: IBM code pages 437, 860, 861, 862, 863, and 865 contain the letters ΓΘΣΦΩαδεπστφ (plus β as an alternate interpretation for ß). Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late ninth or early eighth century BC. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the first"
"these two, there are three alphabets used primarily for a single language, although they are occasionally applied to minority languages in the states from which they originate. The oldest of these alphabets is the Greek alphabet, which could be considered the progenitor of all the surviving alphabets of Europe, with the earliest recorded inscriptions appearing in the 9th century BC. The other two are both found in the Caucasus, both originating in the 5th century. The Georgian alphabet is used primarily to write Georgian, though it is also used to write the other Kartvelian languages, Svan, Mingrelian and Laz, all"
"be rendered identically to the uppercase Latin A. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the letter ɑ, which looks similar to the lower-case alpha, represents the open back unrounded vowel. Alpha was derived from ""aleph"", which in Phoenician means ""ox"". Plutarch, in ""Moralia"", presents a discussion on why the letter alpha stands first in the alphabet. Ammonius asks Plutarch what he, being a Boeotian, has to say for Cadmus, the Phoenician who reputedly settled in Thebes and introduced the alphabet to Greece, placing ""alpha"" first because it is the Phoenician name for ox—which, unlike Hesiod, the Phoenicians considered not the second"
"consonant letter, rather than seemingly have two exceptions in spelling. Greek, like Phoenician, made a distinction for vowel length; indeed, Greek had five short vowels and seven long vowels, but only five vowel letters. As in Phoenician, the difference in length was not originally made in writing. However, by the 6th century BC the letter eta (not needed for a consonant in eastern dialects of Greek, which lacked ) came to stand for the long vowel , and a new letter, omega, was developed for long . The provenance of omega is not known, but it is generally assumed to"
"alphabet, in which vowels were accorded equal status with consonants. According to Greek legends transmitted by Herodotus, the alphabet was brought from Phoenicia to Greece by Cadmos. The letters of the Greek alphabet are the same as those of the Phoenician alphabet, and both alphabets are arranged in the same order. However, whereas separate letters for vowels would have actually hindered the legibility of Egyptian, Phoenician, or Hebrew, their absence was problematic for Greek, where vowels played a much more important role. The Greeks used for vowels some of the Phoenician letters representing consonants which weren't used in Greek speech."