Additional Letters Of The Greek Alphabet

Note: Due to their rarity and their recent introduction in the standard Unicode (version 5.2), some of these characters are rarely included in the fonts, even the rich and well supplied. Moreover, it is common that they use to oeils "false", especially for Koppa.

The Greek alphabet as we now reads and writes is the result of centuries of evolution. It does not, however, many additional letters.

Indeed, over the centuries this alphabet was "perfected" (through the development of the Punctuation , the invention then smoothing the path of tiny ) and acquired some special features (like the existence of contextual alternates to lowercase sigma: or end of a word or many ligatures ).

In doing so, frequent letters in antiquity were discontinued when one of the -403 in Greek alphabet was adopted in Athens and has been imposed in the Hellenistic world because the language of the City, become the Koine , did not need it. Other characters (secondary plots of certain letters or ligatures typographical), used in manuscripts and in print, have been eliminated between the eighteenth ^and nineteenth ^century, when they wanted, Greece, standardize the writing.

This list of characters "widespread" in the Greek alphabet has therefore at once:

• letters old abandoned after the adoption of the model in Ionic -403 but often attested in epigraphy (whose use has continued, mutatis mutandis, in alphabetical numeration ):
  • digamma : , / w /,
  • Heta : / h /,
  • san : / s /,
  • Koppa : / k / (for the allophone before back vowels)
  • frit : / s /,
• own letter to Bactrian , Indo-Iranian language written in Greek alphabet after the conquests of Alexander the Great (after the ^fourth century BC. )
  • sho : / /,
• Side ancient handwritten glyphs (on papyrus) and medieval (in manuscripts) useful paleographer :
  • Archaic letters in their spelling digital medieval still used:
    • Stigma : (6) (confused in this graphic with the letter digamma )
    • Koppa : (90),
    • frit : (900),
• Secondary typographic glyphs, including ligatures:
  • Stigma : / st /,
  • the abbreviation : & / kai "and" (perhaps an old binding),
• free variants of certain letters (mostly tiny) sometimes learned cursive handwritten spellings (more or less old) or (allegedly) fit for the purposes of certain typographical sciences (mathematics, astronomy)
  • / beta loop (for ; used in French typography of contextual variation in the common route), / epsilon lunar / lunar reversed epsilon (for ) and / theta open (for and ), / pi Curly (for ), / kappa cursive (for ), / Rho or curly cursive (for ), , , / sigma lunar / sigma lunar reversed and (for , and) , / phi closed ()
• characters used in comparative philology and the study diachronic of Greek used to transcribe phonemes that were not written:
  • Yot : / d / (phoneme Yot Indo-European , often transcribed by * y). This letter is not of Greek origin: it is a borrowed Latin j, however, used in texts in Greek to denote the phoneme original Indo-European * y (in IPA : Related articles
    • Greek alphabet ;
    • Diacritics of the Greek alphabet ;
    • History of the Greek alphabet ;
    • Additional letters of the Latin alphabet.

    Bibliography

    • http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0370.pdf
    • http://www.tlg.uci.edu/ opoudjis ~ / unicode / nonattic.html # digamma
    • http://www.tlg.uci.edu/ opoudjis ~ / unicode / # other_ligatures.html stigma
    • http://www.tlg.uci.edu/ opoudjis ~ / unicode / unicode_aitch.html # tackheta
    • http://www.tlg.uci.edu/ opoudjis ~ / unicode / yot.html # ancient
    • http://www.tlg.uci.edu/ opoudjis ~ / unicode / nonattic.html # san
    • http://www.tlg.uci.edu/ opoudjis ~ / unicode / nonattic.html # sho
    • http://www.tlg.uci.edu/ opoudjis ~ / unicode / nonattic.html # Koppa
    • http://www.tlg.uci.edu/ opoudjis ~ / unicode / other_nonattic.html # frit

    Greek alphabet
    Classics	/ alpha beta / / beta gamma / gamma delta / Delta epsilon / ( ) epsilon zeta / zeta / eta theta / / Theta / iota kappa / / kappa lamda / lambda mu / mu / naked / xi / omicron / / ft / / rho / / / ( / ) sigma tau / tau / upsilon phi / / Phi / chi psi / psi ohms / omega
    Obsolete letters	/ digamma / san / or / Koppa / or / frit
    Other characters	/ Stigma / Heta / Sho antisigma
    See also: Ancient Greek Modern Greek Additional letters of the Greek alphabet Diacritics of the Greek alphabet

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