Greek orthography

Last updated

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 (the Greek Dark Ages) between the time Mycenaean stopped being written and the time when the Greek alphabet came into use.

Contents

Early Greek writing in the Greek alphabet was phonemic, different in each dialect. Since the adoption of the Ionic variant for Attic in 403 BC, however, Greek orthography has been largely conservative and historical.

Given the phonetic development of Greek, especially in the Hellenistic period, certain modern vowel phonemes have multiple orthographic realizations:

This affects not only lexical items but also inflectional affixes, so correct orthography requires mastery of formal grammar, e.g.η καλή/ikaˈli/ 'the good one (fem. sing.)' vs.οι καλοί/ikaˈli/ 'the good ones (masc. pl.)'; καλώ/kaˈlo/ 'I call' vs.καλό/kaˈlo/ 'good (neut. sing.)'.

Similarly, the orthography preserves ancient doubled consonants, though these are now pronounced the same as single consonants, except in Cypriot Greek.

Digraphs and diphthongs

A digraph is a pair of letters used to write one sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters in sequence. The orthography of Greek includes several digraphs, including various pairs of vowel letters that used to be pronounced as diphthongs but have been shortened to monophthongs in pronunciation. Many of these are characteristic developments of modern Greek, but some were already present in Classical Greek. None of them is regarded as a letter of the alphabet.

During the Byzantine period, it became customary to write the silent iota in digraphs as an iota subscript.

LettersAncient
Greek		Modern
Greek
Transcription Pronunciation Transcription Pronunciation
αι, αιai[ai̯]e[ e̞ ]
αι, ᾳāi[aːi̯]a[ a ]
ει, ειei[eː]i[ i ]
ηι, ῃēi[ɛːi̯]
οι, οιoi[oi̯]
υι, υιui[yː] [lower-alpha 1]
ωι, ῳōi[ɔːi̯]o[ o̞ ]
αυ, αυau[au̯]av, af[av] before vowel or voiced consonant;
[af] otherwise
Ᾱυ, ᾱυāu[aːu̯]
ευ, ευeu[eu̯]ev, ef[ev] before vowel or voiced consonant;
[ef] otherwise
ηυ, ηυēu[ɛːu̯]iv, if[iv] before vowel or voiced consonant;
[if] otherwise
ου, ουou[uː]
earlier [oː]		u[ u ]
ωυ, ωυōü[ɔːu̯] [lower-alpha 2] oi[oi]
γγ, γγŋg[ŋɡ]ng / nj, g / j, ngh / njh[ŋɡ] and [ɲɟ] in formal registers, but often reduced to [ ɡ ] and [ɟ] in informal speech;
also pronounced [ŋɣ] and [ɲʝ] in some words (e.g. εγγενής, έγγραφο, συγγραφέας) [lower-alpha 3]
γκ, γκŋk[ŋk]g / y, ng / ny[ɡ] word-initially and in some loanwords; [ŋɡ] otherwise,
often reduced to [ɡ] in informal speech [lower-alpha 3]
γξ, γξŋx[ŋks]nx[ŋks]
γχ, γχŋkh[ŋkʰ]nkh / nç[ŋx] [lower-alpha 3] and [ɲç]
μπ, μπmp[mp]b, mb, mp[ b ] word-initially and in some loanwords; [mb] otherwise,
often reduced to [b] in informal speech
ντ, ντnt[nt]d, nd[ d ] word-initially and in some loanwords; [nd] otherwise,
often reduced to [d] in informal speech
ΤΖ, τζ[absent]tz[ d͡z ]
  1. ↑ The diphthong υι [yi̯] was monophthongized to [yː] in Classical Attic Greek, but survives in some other contemporary dialects and in early Koine.
  2. ↑ The diphthong ωυ [ɔːu̯] was found in Ionic and in certain Hebrew transcriptions in the Greek Bible, but it did not occur in Attic, and was gradually lost in Koine. Where ωυ was atticized, it was often split into two separate syllables [ɔː.y], hence the Latin transcription ōy. Perhaps the clearest example of this is the Biblical Greek name Μωυσῆς[mɔːu̯.sɛ̂ːs] (Moses), which was atticized as Μωϋσῆς[mɔː.y.sɛ̂ːs], then adapted to early Christian Latin as Mōysēs, from where it became Spanish Moisés, French Moïse, etc. The modern Greek form is Μωυσής[mo̞i̯ˈsis], whereas the modern Latin Vulgate form is Mōsēs.
  3. 1 2 3 The velars [ɡ], [k], [ ɣ ], and [ x ] are palatalized to [ɟ], [c], [ ʝ ] and [ ç ] respectively before the close and mid front vowels [i] and [e̞]. It is discussed among scholars whether the velar nasal [ŋ] (ἄγμα, ágma) should be regarded as an allophone of /n/ or a phoneme in its own right in Greek.

Hyphenation rules of Standard Modern Greek

Consonant splitting

According to KEME (1983), [1] the splitting of a Modern Greek word into syllables (syllabification) is governed by the following rules:

Loanword hyphenation is governed by the same grammar rules as the rest of the Standard Modern Greek language. [2]

Vowel splitting

The prohibitive hyphenation rules regarding vowel splitting are as follows:

All of the above rules are negative in that they indicate impermissible hyphen points within particular substrings of consecutive vowels. [2]

Diacritics

Polytonic spelling uses a variety of diacritics to represent aspects of the pronunciation of ancient Greek. Polytonic, along with lowercase letters, became standard in Byzantine Greek, although the ancient distinctions had disappeared, replaced by a simple stress accent. The orthographies of modern Greek, both katharevousa and dhimotiki, used the polytonic system until 1982, when monotonic spelling was introduced. In some conservative contexts, such as the Church, polytonic spellings are still used.

Monotonic orthography, adopted in 1982, replaces the ancient diacritics with just two: the acute accent (tónos, e.g. ί), used to mark the stressed syllable in polysyllabic words, and the diaeresis (dialytiká, e.g. ϊ), which indicates that the vowel is not part of a digraph.

Punctuation

In Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek was written as scripta continua without spacing or interpuncts. Over time, a variety of symbols appeared. A system of dots credited to Aristophanes of Byzantium was developed in the 3rd century BC: a low dot ⟨.⟩ marked an occasion for a short breath after a short phrase, a middot ⟨·⟩ marked an occasion for a longer breath after a longer passage, and a high dot ⟨˙⟩ marked a full stop at the end of a completed thought. Other writers employed two dot punctuation ⟨⁚⟩ to mark the ends of sentences or changing speakers. Less often, arrangements of three ⟨⁝⟩, four ⟨⁞ or ⁘⟩, and five dots ⟨⁙⟩ appeared. Such interline punctuation could be noted or replaced by a variety of paragraphoi , long marks which trailed between lines of text; these might also mark changes of speakers. Blank lines or various coronides marked the ends of sections. (A separate coronis was used to mark contractions; its early forms looked like an apostrophe between the two elided words.) Over time, the main punctuation came to be a full stop marked by a single dot at varying heights, a partial stop marked by various forms of commas, and the hypodiastole ⟨⸒⟩ and papyrological hyphen ⟨‿⟩ or ⟨ ͜ ⟩. These served to show whether an ambiguous series of letters should be read as (respectively) a single word or as a pair of words. [4] Later Aristarchus of Samothrace modified this system (see: Aristarchian symbols).

In printing

Following the advent of printing, most Greek punctuation was gradually standardized with French: the hypodiastole was fully unified with the comma, the comma serves as the decimal point (and in this use is called the hypodiastole) and it also functions as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό,τι (ó,ti, "whatever") from ότι (óti, "that"). [4] The full stop serves as the thousands separator, and guillemets (εισαγωγικάisagoyika) and em-length quotation dashes (παύλαpavla) typically serve to indicate direct speech. [6] When quotations are nested, double and then single quotation marks are used: ⟨«…“…‘…’…”…»⟩. The right-pointing double Guillemets (ομειωματικάomiomatiká) ⟨»⟩ serve as Ditto mark. The principal difference is the Greek question mark ⟨;⟩, which developed a shape so similar to the Latinate semicolon ⟨;⟩ that Unicode decomposes its separate code point identically. [4] The ano teleia middot serves as the Greek semicolon, but is so uncommon that it has often been left off of Greek keyboards. [5]

One of the few places where ano teleia exists is on the Microsoft Windows Polytonic Greek keyboard (having the driver name KBDHEPT.DLL).

The exclamation mark (θαυμαστικόthavmastikó) is mostly used as in English. The hyphen, the brackets, the colon, the ellipsis and the slash are also in use. The slash has the additional function of forming common abbreviations like α/φοί for αδελφοί 'brothers'. The ligature kai (ϗ) is sometimes used for the same function as the English ampersand.

In Greek numerals

There are special rules for how to write Greek numerals. In modern Greek, a number of changes have been made. Instead of extending an overline over an entire number (like χξϛ), a keraia (κεραία, lit. "hornlike projection") is placed to its upper right, a development of the short marks formerly used for single numbers and fractions. The modern keraia is a symbol (ʹ) similar to the acute accent (´), but has its own Unicode character, encoded as U+0374. Alexander the Great's father Philip II of Macedon is thus known as Φίλιππος Βʹ in modern Greek. A lower left keraia (Unicode: U+0375, "Greek Lower Numeral Sign") is now standard for identifying thousands: 2015 is represented as ͵ΒΙΕʹ (2000 + 10 + 5).

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diacritic</span> Modifier mark added to a letter

A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek διακριτικός, from διακρίνω. The word diacritic is a noun, though it is sometimes used in an attributive sense, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritics, such as the acute ⟨á⟩, grave ⟨à⟩, and circumflex ⟨â⟩, are often called accents. Diacritics may appear above or below a letter or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters.

Iota is the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Yodh. Letters that arose from this letter include the Latin I and J, the Cyrillic І, Yi, and Je, and iotated letters. In the system of Greek numerals, iota has a value of 10.

Y, or y, is the twenty-fifth and penultimate letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. According to some authorities, it is the sixth vowel letter of the English alphabet. Its name in English is wye, plural wyes.

An interpunct⟨·⟩, also known as an interpoint, middle dot, middot, centered dot or centred dot, is a punctuation mark consisting of a vertically centered dot used for interword separation in Classical Latin. It appears in a variety of uses in some modern languages and is present in Unicode as U+00B7·MIDDLE DOT.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digraph (orthography)</span> Pair of characters used to write one phoneme

A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme, or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined.

The Vietnamese alphabet is the modern Latin writing script or writing system for romanized Vietnamese. It uses the Latin script based on Romance languages originally developed by Portuguese missionary Francisco de Pina (1585–1625).

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.

In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, for example in Arabic, Estonian, Finnish, Fijian, Japanese, Kannada, Kyrgyz, Latin, Malayalam, Old English, Scottish Gaelic, Tamil and Vietnamese.

Yodh is the tenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician yōd 𐤉, Hebrew yud י, Aramaic yod 𐡉, Syriac yōḏ ܝ, and Arabic yāʾ ي. Its sound value is in all languages for which it is used; in many languages, it also serves as a long vowel, representing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Iota subscript</span> Diacritic mark in the Greek alphabet

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.

Ancient Greek phonology is the reconstructed phonology or pronunciation of Ancient Greek. This article mostly deals with the pronunciation of the standard Attic dialect of the fifth century BC, used by Plato and other Classical Greek writers, and touches on other dialects spoken at the same time or earlier. The pronunciation of Ancient Greek is not known from direct observation, but determined from other types of evidence. Some details regarding the pronunciation of Attic Greek and other Ancient Greek dialects are unknown, but it is generally agreed that Attic Greek had certain features not present in English or Modern Greek, such as a three-way distinction between voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; a distinction between single and double consonants and short and long vowels in most positions in a word; and a word accent that involved pitch.

Ancient Greek has been pronounced in various ways by those studying Ancient Greek literature in various times and places. This article covers those pronunciations; the modern scholarly reconstruction of its ancient pronunciation is covered in Ancient Greek phonology.

Diacritical marks of two dots¨, placed side-by-side over or under a letter, are used in a number of 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.

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.

The tie is a symbol in the shape of an arc similar to a large breve, used in Greek, phonetic alphabets, and Z notation. It can be used between two characters with spacing as punctuation, non-spacing as a diacritic, or (underneath) as a proofreading mark. It can be above or below, and reversed. Its forms are called tie, double breve, enotikon or papyrological hyphen, ligature tie, and undertie.

The diaeresis is a diacritical mark 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.

References

  1. ↑ This book is the official grammar book of Modern Greek edited by a group of experts and it is a revised edition of Triantafillidis (1941, reprint with corrections 1978).
  2. 1 2 3 Noussia, Theodora I. (1997). "A Rule-based Hyphenator for Modern Greek". Computational Linguistics. 23 (3): 361–376.
  3. ↑ The ηυ combination is infrequently referred to in grammar books (KEME 1983), possibly because it appears in only a small number of words. However, this combination is also considered, because such words are regularly used e.g., εφηύρα [efívra] 'I invented'.
  4. 1 2 3 Nicolas, Nick (2005). "Greek Unicode Issues: Punctuation". Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. University of California, Irvine. Archived from the original on 2014-10-10. Retrieved 2014-10-07.
  5. 1 2 "The Look of Greek" . Retrieved 8 October 2014.
  6. ↑ In informal writing, English-style quotation marks have also become quite common. [5]
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.