Digamma or wau is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It originally stood for the sound but it has remained in use principally as a Greek numeral for 6. Whereas it was originally called waw or wau, its most common appellation in classical Greek is digamma; as a numeral, it was called episēmon during the Byzantine era and is now known as stigma after the Byzantine ligature combining σ-τ as ϛ.
Greek numerals, also known as Ionic, Ionian, Milesian, or Alexandrian numerals, is a system of writing numbers using the letters of the Greek alphabet. In modern Greece, they are still used for ordinal numbers and in contexts similar to those in which Roman numerals are still used in the Western world. For ordinary cardinal numbers, however, modern Greece uses Arabic numerals.
Koppa or qoppa is a letter that was used in early forms of the Greek alphabet, derived from Phoenician qoph (𐤒). It was originally used to denote the sound, but dropped out of use as an alphabetic character and replaced by Kappa (Κ). It has remained in use as a numeral symbol (90) in the system of Greek numerals, although with a modified shape. Koppa is the source of Latin Q, as well as the Cyrillic numeral sign of the same name (Koppa).
Sampi is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It was used as an addition to the classical 24-letter alphabet in some eastern Ionic dialects of ancient Greek in the 6th and 5th centuries BC, to denote some type of a sibilant sound, probably or, and was abandoned when the sound disappeared from Greek.
Omicron is the fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. This letter is derived from the Phoenician letter ayin: . In classical Greek, omicron represented the close-mid back rounded vowel IPA:[o] in contrast to omega which represented the open-mid back rounded vowel IPA:[ɔː] and the digraph ου which represented the long close-mid back rounded vowel IPA:[oː]. In modern Greek, both omicron and omega represent the mid back rounded vowel IPA:[o̞] or IPA:[ɔ̝]. Letters that arose from omicron include Roman O and Cyrillic O. The word literally means "little O" as opposed to "great O". In the system of Greek numerals, omicron has a value of 70.
In the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, the rough breathing character is a diacritical mark used to indicate the presence of an sound before a vowel, diphthong, or after rho. It remained in the polytonic orthography even after the Hellenistic period, when the sound disappeared from the Greek language. In the monotonic orthography of Modern Greek phonology, in use since 1982, it is not used at all.
The smooth breathing is a diacritical mark used in polytonic orthography. In Ancient Greek, it marks the absence of the voiceless glottal fricative from the beginning of a word.
San (Ϻ) was an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. Its shape was similar to modern M or Mu, or to a modern Greek Sigma (Σ) turned sideways, and it was used as an alternative to Sigma to denote the sound. Unlike Sigma, whose position in the alphabet is between Rho and Tau, San appeared between Pi and Qoppa in alphabetic order. In addition to denoting this separate archaic character, the name San was also used as an alternative name to denote the standard letter Sigma.
Sigma is the eighteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 200. In general mathematics, uppercase Σ is used as an operator for summation. When used at the end of a letter-case word, the final form (ς) is used. In Ὀδυσσεύς (Odysseus), for example, the two lowercase sigmas (σ) in the center of the name are distinct from the word-final sigma (ς) at the end. The Latin letter S derives from sigma while the Cyrillic letter Es derives from a lunate form of this letter.
The European ordering rules define an ordering for strings written in languages that are written with the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets. The standard covers languages used by the European Union, the European Free Trade Association, and parts of the former Soviet Union. It is a tailoring of the Common Tailorable Template of ISO/IEC 14651. EOR can in turn be tailored for different (European) languages. But in inter-European contexts, EOR can be used without further tailoring.
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BC, the Euclidean alphabet, with 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used for Greek writing today.
Izhitsa is a letter of the early Cyrillic alphabet and several later alphabets, usually the last in the row. It originates from the Greek letter upsilon and was used in words and names derived from or via the Greek language, such as кѵрилъ or флаѵии. It represented the sounds or as normal letters и and в, respectively. The Glagolitic alphabet has a corresponding letter with the name izhitsa as well. Also, izhitsa in its standard form or, most often, in a tailed variant was part of a digraph оѵ/оу representing the sound. The digraph is known as Cyrillic "uk", and today's Cyrillic letter u originates from its simplified form.
The iota subscript is a diacritic mark in the Greek alphabet shaped like a small vertical stroke or miniature iota ⟨ι⟩ placed below the letter. It can occur with the vowel letters eta ⟨η⟩, omega ⟨ω⟩, and alpha ⟨α⟩. It represents the former presence of an offglide after the vowel, forming a so‐called "long diphthong". Such diphthongs —phonologically distinct from the corresponding normal or "short" diphthongs —were a feature of ancient Greek in the pre-classical and classical eras.
Romanization of Greek is the transliteration (letter-mapping) or transcription (sound-mapping) of text from the Greek alphabet into the Latin alphabet.
Unicode has a certain amount of duplication of characters. These are pairs of single Unicode code points that are canonically equivalent. The reason for this are compatibility issues with legacy systems.
Diacritical marks of two dots¨, placed side-by-side over or under a letter, are used in several languages for several different purposes. The most familiar to English-language speakers are the diaeresis and the umlaut, though there are numerous others. For example, in Albanian, ë represents a schwa. Such diacritics are also sometimes used for stylistic reasons.
The orthography of the Greek language ultimately has its roots in the adoption of the Greek alphabet in the 9th century BC. Some time prior to that, one early form of Greek, Mycenaean, was written in Linear B, although there was a lapse of several centuries between the time Mycenaean stopped being written and the time when the Greek alphabet came into use.
Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period. The more complex polytonic orthography, which includes five diacritics, notates Ancient Greek phonology. The simpler monotonic orthography, introduced in 1982, corresponds to Modern Greek phonology, and requires only two diacritics.
Greek Extended is a Unicode block containing the accented vowels necessary for writing polytonic Greek. The regular, unaccented Greek characters as well as the characters with tonos and diaeresis can be found in the Greek and Coptic block. Greek Extended was encoded in version 1.1 of the Unicode Standard. As an alternative to Greek Extended, combining characters can be used to represent the tones and breath marks of polytonic Greek.
Diaeresis is a name for the two dots diacritical mark as used to indicate the separation of two distinct vowel letters in adjacent syllables when an instance of diaeresis occurs, so as to distinguish from a digraph or diphthong.
