History of the Greek alphabet

The history of the Greek alphabet starts with the adoption of Phoenician letter forms in the 9th–8th centuries BC during early Archaic Greece and continues to the present day.

The Phoenician alphabet was consistently explicit only about consonants, though even by the 9th century BC it had developed matres lectionis to indicate some, mostly final, vowels.

In the temple of Ismenian Apollo at Theba in Boeotia I have myself seen cauldrons with inscriptions cut on them in Cadmean characters—most of them not very different from the Ionian.

[8] On one of the tripods there was this inscription in Cadmean writing, which as he attested, resembled Ionian letters: Ἀμφιτρύων μ᾽ ἀνέθηκ᾽ ἐνάρων ἀπὸ Τηλεβοάων ("Amphitryon dedicated me from the spoils of [the battle of] Teleboae.").

A second tripod bears the inscription in hexameter verse: Σκαῖος πυγμαχέων με ἑκηβόλῳ Ἀπόλλωνι νικήσας ἀνέθηκε τεῒν περικαλλὲς ἄγαλμα.

The third tripod bears the inscription again in hexameter verse: Λαοδάμας τρίποδ᾽ αὐτὸς ἐυσκόπῳ Ἀπόλλωνι μουναρχέων ἀνέθηκε τεῒν περικαλλὲς ἄγαλμα.

As for Aristogeiton, Herodotus puts him not forth at the back door, but thrusts him directly out of the gate into Phoenicia, saying that he had his origins from the Gephyraei, and that the Gephyraei were not, as some think, Euboeans or Eretrians, but Phoenicians, as himself has learned by report.Plutarch and other ancient Greek writers credited the legendary Palamedes of Nauplion on Euboea with the invention of the supplementary letters not found in the original Phoenician alphabet.

[10] The distinction between Eta and Epsilon and between Omega and Omicron, adopted in the Ionian standard, was traditionally attributed to Simonides of Ceos (556–469).

[12] Agesilaus' decision to have text sent to Egypt is not unreasonable; it is widely accepted that Ancient Egyptians during the 4th century BC were able to translate to and from various other languages; they used three different writing systems within Egypt: hieroglyphic script, hieratic and demotic; this tradition continued during the Hellenistic period when all kinds of scripts were translated and copies were added to the library of Alexandria; one example today of a script written in three forms is the Rosetta Stone that appears in three texts: in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, in Egyptian demotic, and in ancient Greek.

And therefore, as the story goes, the Egyptian priest, having studied the script and translated it, concluded that the writing enjoined the Greeks to institute games in honor of the Muses.

However, Phoenician, like other Semitic scripts, has a range of consonants, commonly called gutturals, that did not exist in Greek: ʼāleph [ʔ], hē [h, e, a], ḥēth [ħ], and ʽayin [ʕ].

The Phoenician consonants kaph and qōph represented sounds that were not distinctive in Greek—at most, they may have been identified with allophones determined by the following vowel.

[13] Phoenician had three letters, sāmekh, ṣādē and šin, representing three or probably four voiceless sibilant sounds, whereas Greek only required one.

The history here is complicated, but basically sāmekh dropped out in certain dialects, and was reused to represent [ks] in others, while usage for the [s] sound varied between ṣādē and šin.

They are classified into three main groups, following Adolf Kirchhoff (1887): green (Cretan), red (Euboean or Western) and blue (Ionic, Attic and Corinthian).

With the exception of the early Fayum alphabet, which does not fit into the tripartite scheme, all abecedaries add Υ to the Phoenician inventory.

The green alphabets have only this; the red add Φ for [pʰ], Χ for [ks], and Ψ for [kʰ]; and the blue add Φ for [pʰ], and Χ for [kʰ], with a dark blue subgroup (Corinth and Rhodes) also having Ψ for [ps].

By the time of late antiquity and the early Byzantine period, two different styles of handwriting had developed, both suitable to the act of writing with quill and ink on soft materials (paper or parchment).

Together with the minuscule letter shapes, Greek writing also began to use word-boundary spaces and diacritics (i.e. the accent marks and breathings of polytonic orthography) more regularly.

Greek handwriting made extensive use of ligatures with letters written differently depending on their place in the word.

Early printers, such as Aldus Manutius and Claude Garamond, attempted to imitate this, basing their printing on the writing of Greek scribes, producing a style text similar to modern italics.

This led to the adoption of writing conventions for Greek such as letter case influenced by printing and developments in the Latin alphabet.

In 1708, the Palaeographia Graeca was published by Bernard de Montfaucon, who studied so thoroughly the Greek style of paleography that his book became the authority on the subject for the next two centuries.

Digamma was often replaced in numerical use by stigma (Ϛ), originally a ligature of sigma and tau, or even the sequence sigma-tau (στ').