History of the Greek alphabet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| History of the Alphabet |
|---|
|
Middle Bronze Age 19–15th c. BC
|
| Meroitic 3rd c. BC |
| Complete genealogy |
The History of the Greek alphabet starts with the adoption of Phoenician letterforms and continues to the present day. This article concentrates on the early period, before the codification of the now-standard Greek alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet was strictly speaking an abjad in other words it represented only consonants. This arrangement is much less suitable for Greek than for Semitic languages and several of the Phoenician consonants, representing sounds or distinctions not present in Greek, were adapted to represent vowels; consequently the Greek alphabet can be considered to be the world's first true alphabet.
Contents |
[edit] Chronology of adoption
Most specialists believe that the Phoenician alphabet was adopted for Greek during the 9th century BC, perhaps in Euboea. The earliest known fragmentary Greek inscriptions date from the early 8th century. The oldest substantial texts known to date are the Dipylon inscription and the text on the so-called Cup of Nestor, both dated to the late 8th century BC.
Some scholars argue for earlier dates: Naveh (1973) for the 11th century, Stieglitz (1981) for the 14th century, Bernal (1990) for the 18th–13th century, but none of these is widely accepted.
[edit] Herodotus' account
Herodotus recounts the following legend about the introduction of Phoenician letters to Greece (V, 58):
- The Phoenicians who came with Cadmus—amongst whom were the Gephyraei—introduced into Greece, after their settlement in the country, a number of accomplishments, of which the most important was writing, an art till then, I think, unknown to the Greeks. At first they used the same characters as all the other Phoenicians, but as time went on, and they changed their language, they also changed the shape of their letters. At that period most of the Greeks in the neighbourhood were Ionians; they were taught these letters by the Phoenicians and adopted them, with a few alterations, for their own use, continuing to refer to them as the Phoenician characters—as was only right, as the Phoenicians had introduced them. The Ionians also call paper 'skins'—a survival from antiquity when paper was hard to get, and they did actually use goat and sheep skins to write on. Indeed, even today many foreign peoples use this material. 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.
Other ancient Greek writers credited the legendary Palamedes of Argos with the invention of the supplementary letters not found in the original Phoenician alphabet. [1]
[edit] Restructuring of the Phoenician abjad
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Note: phonetic transcriptions below in square brackets use the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Phoenician, like the other Semitic scripts, has a range of letters commonly (if unscientifically) referred to as gutturals: ʼāleph, hē, ḥēth, and ʼayin. Of these, only ḥēth was retained in Greek as a consonant: eta, representing the [h] sound, and that in certain dialects only; ʼāleph, hē, and ʼayin became the vowels alpha [a], epsilon [e] and omicron [o] respectively.
Of the two Phoenician approximants, wāw and yōdh, yōdh became the vowel iota [i], since the [j] sound, present in earlier varieties of Greek, had disappeared; wāw was retained as the letter digamma representing [w] in those dialects which still had this sound, and seems additionally to have given rise to the letter upsilon [u] which was added at the end of the alphabet.
In addition to tāw, Phoenician had an "emphatic" version, ṭēth. This distinction did not exist in Greek, which did however have a distinction between aspirated and unaspirated versions of the voiceless plosives. So alongside tau, derived from tāw and representing [t], Greek had theta, derived from ṭēth and representing the aspirated version, [tʰ].
The Phoenician consonants kaph and qōph represented sounds which were not distinctively different in Greek — at most, they may have been allophones determined by the following vowel. The letter qoppa was used in certain Greek dialects (notably the western dialects which ultimately gave rise, via Etruscan, to the Latin alphabet) but elsewhere dropped out of general use.
Phoenician had three letters, sāmekh, ṣādē, and šin, representing three or probably four voiceless sibilant sounds, where 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. The letter now known as sigma took its name from sāmekh but its form from šin, while the letter San, which occurred in a few dialects only, took its name from šin but its place in the alphabet from ṣādē. A further letter, sampi, is found occasionally, and may represent an affricate such as [ts].
The remaining letters of the Phoenician alphabet were generally adopted into Greek with much the same sounds as in Phoenician. For the special case of zeta, see Zeta (letter).
Note: some of the names of the Greek letters given above date from a much later period: see below.
[edit] Additional consonants
In some but not all Greek dialects, additional letters were created, to represent aspirated versions of Κ and Π (an aspirated version of Τ already existed as described above) and combinations of Κ and Π with Σ. There was some variation between dialects as to the symbols used:
- [kʰ] could be Κ, ΚΗ, Ψ, or Χ
- [pʰ] could be Π, ΠΗ, or Φ
- [ks] could be ΚΣ, ΧΣ, Χ, or Ξ
- [ps] could be ΠΣ, ΦΣ, or Ψ
[edit] Standardization — the Ionic alphabet
From 450 BC onwards, the Ionic version of the alphabet was adopted in most Greek cities. This included a new letter omega at the end of the alphabet, and standardised the representation of various sounds which had varied from one dialect to another, as follows:
| Sound | Old Attic | Ionic |
|---|---|---|
| [h] | Η | (no symbol) |
| [ɛ:] | E | Η (eta) |
| [e:] | Ε or ΕΙ | ΕΙ |
| [ɔ:] | Ο | Ω (omega) |
| [o:] | Ο or ΟΥ | ΟΥ |
| [kʰ] | Χ | Χ (chi) |
| [pʰ] | Φ | Φ (phi) |
| [ks] | ΧΣ | Ξ (xi) |
| [ps] | ΦΣ | Ψ (psi) |
The absence of a letter for [h] was of no consequence for the Ionic dialects, but sometimes led to ambiguities in Attic which had retained the sound. A symbol based on the left-hand half ( ├ ) of the letter Η was therefore sometimes used to indicate the presence of [h] where necessary.
During the classical period, ΕΙ came to be pronounced [i:] and ΟΥ came to be pronounced [u:], Υ having meanwhile moved to [y].
By about 200 BC a system of diacritical marks was invented, representing the tone accents in use in Ancient Greek. This also helped to indicate the length of the vowels Α, Ι, and Υ in certain cases (for instance a circumflex can only occur on a long vowel) but Greek orthography has never had a comprehensive way of indicating vowel length, and this distinction has in any case been lost in Modern Greek.
[edit] Later developments
By the 9th century AD a number of further developments had taken place:
- use of upper and lower case letters
- systematic use of accent marks and breathings (see polytonic orthography)
- some punctuation.
By the 13th century the iota subscript was employed in "long diphthongs".
In 1982 the monotonic orthography was officially adopted, abandoning the rough and smooth breathings (since the [h] sound had long since disappeared) and reducing the three types of accent mark to one (since the tone accent had been replaced by a stress accent).
The pronunciation of Greek has also changed considerably since ancient times, but these changes have not been apparent from the orthography, which has remained conservative — see Greek alphabet for a summary of the current situation.
[edit] The names of the letters
Some of the letters changed their names, when phonetic changes made the original names no longer distinctive, as follows:
| Letter | Original name | Later name | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ε | ei | epsilon | "plain e" |
| Ο | o or ou | omicron | "small o" |
| Υ | u | upsilon | "plain u" |
| Ω | ō | omega | "large o" |
The letter F was probably originally called wau, but in classical times was called digamma, reflecting its shape rather than its sound. Similarly the name sampi means "like pi" suggesting that its phonetic use had been forgotten.
Some alternative theories claim that the names of the letters are intended to form words when the alphabet is conjured.
[edit] Greek numerals
The letters of the alphabet were used in the system of Greek numerals. For this purpose the letters digamma and qoppa (but not san) were retained although they had gone out of general use, and the obscure letter sampi was added at the end of the alphabet. Digamma was often replaced in numerical use by stigma (Ϛ), originally a ligature of sigma and tau, or even the sequence sigma-tau (στ').
[edit] Diffusion
The Old Italic and Anatolian alphabets are, like the Greek alphabet, attested from the 8th century. It is unclear 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.
[edit] See also
[edit] Bibliography
- Martin Bernal, Cadmean Letters: The Transmission of the Alphabet to the Aegean and Further West Before 1400 B.C., Eisenbrauns, 1990. ISBN 0-931464-47-1.
- Peter T Daniels and William Bright, The World's Writing Systems, Oxford University Press, 1996, ISBN 0-19-507993-0, especially Section 21 "Transmission of the Phoenician Script to the West" (Pierre Swiggers) and Section 22 "The Greek Alphabet" (Leslie Threatte).
- Lillian Hamilton Jeffrey, The local scripts of archaic Greece: a study of the origin of the Greek alphabet and its development from the eighth to the fifth centuries B.C., Oxford, 1961, ISBN 0-19-814061-4. The standard reference.
- P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., The antiquity of the Greek alphabet and the early Phoenician scripts, Harvard Semitic monographs, 1975. ISBN 0-89130-066-X.
- P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., "The Early Diffusion of the Greek Alphabet", in Michael S. Macrakis, ed., Greek letters: from tablets to pixels, proceedings of a conference sponsored by the Greek Font Society, Oak Knoll Press, 1996, ISBN 1-884718-27-2.
- P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., "Who Invented the Alphabet: A Different View" Archaeological Odyssey 1:01 (Winter 1998) online
- Joseph Naveh, "Some Semitic epigraphical considerations in the antiquity of the Greek alphabet", American journal of archaeology 77: 1-8 (1973). Argues for an earlier date of transmission.
- Joseph Naveh, "The origin of the Greek alphabet" in Derrick de Kerckhove, Charles J. Lumsden, eds., The alphabet and the brain: The lateralization of writing (p 84-91), 1988.
- Robert R. Stieglitz, "The Letters of Kadmos: Mythology, Archaeology, and Eteocretan", Pepragmena tou Diethnous Kretologikou Synedriou (Herakleio, 29 August – 3 September 1976), Athens, 1981.
