In addition to the three mentioned above (⟨ει, αι, οι⟩) there is also ⟨ου⟩ = /u/.
Among them are several digraphs of vowel letters that formerly represented diphthongs but are now monophthongized. Several letter combinations have special conventional sound values different from those of their single components. In other countries, students of Ancient Greek may use a variety of conventional approximations of the historical sound system in pronouncing Ancient Greek. Modern Greek speakers typically use the same, modern, sound-symbol mappings in reading Greek of all historical stages. The following vowel letters and digraphs are involved in the mergers: As a consequence, the spellings of words in Modern Greek are often not predictable from the pronunciation alone, while the reverse mapping, from spelling to pronunciation, is usually regular and predictable.
Modern Greek orthography remains true to the historical spellings in most of these cases. This leads to several groups of vowel letters denoting identical sounds today. The correspondences are as follows:Īmong the vowel symbols, Modern Greek sound values reflect the fact that the vowel system of post-classical Greek was radically simplified, merging multiple formerly distinct vowel phonemes into a much smaller number. Īmong consonant letters, all letters that denoted voiced plosive consonants (/b, d, g/) and aspirated plosives (/pʰ, tʰ, kʰ/) in Ancient Greek stand for corresponding fricative sounds in Modern Greek. For a number of letters, sound values differ considerably between Ancient and Modern Greek, because their pronunciation has followed a set of systematic phonological shifts that affected the language in its post-classical stages. Ancient Greek spelling was generally near-phonemic. In common present-day usage for Modern Greek since the 1980s, this system has been simplified to a so-called "monotonic" convention.īoth in Ancient and Modern Greek, the letters of the Greek alphabet have fairly stable and consistent symbol-to-sound mappings, making pronunciation of words largely predictable. In traditional ("polytonic") Greek orthography, vowel letters can be combined with several diacritics, including accent marks, so-called "breathing" marks, and the iota subscript. Sound values and conventional transcriptions for some of the letters differ between Ancient Greek and Modern Greek usage, owing to phonological changes in the language. Like Latin and Cyrillic, Greek originally had only a single form of each letter it developed the letter case distinction between upper-case and lower-case forms in parallel with Latin during the modern era. In its classical and modern form, the alphabet has 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega. Apart from its use in writing the Greek language, both in its ancient and its modern forms, the Greek alphabet today also serves as a source of technical symbols and labels in many domains of mathematics, science and other fields. It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was in turn the ancestor of numerous other European and Middle Eastern scripts, including Cyrillic and Latin. The Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since the 8th century BC.
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