WEEKLY DIGITAL LINKS

GEOGRAPHY BEE

THE GREEK ALPHABET

The Ancient Greeks developed an alphabet for writing. Their common language and writing was one of the things that bound the Greeks together. The Greek alphabet is still used today. It is even used in the United States where Greek letters are popular as mathematical symbols and are used in college fraternities and sororities.

The Greeks learned about writing and the alphabet from the Phoenicians. They took much of their alphabet from the Phoenician alphabet, but they added a few new letters. They also assigned some of the letters to vowel sounds. The Greek alphabet was the first alphabet to use vowels.

From an historical point of view, "alphabet" and "Greek alphabet" are one and the same. The Greek alphabet was the first writing that informed the reader what the words sounded like, whether or not he knew what the words meant. The word "alphabet" itself is Greek, formed from the Greek names of the first two signs in the series [alpha and beta]. Earlier writings, including such West Semitic writings as Phoenician and Hebrew, were in this sense not alphabets. All later alphabets, the Latin or Cyrillic or the International Phonetic Alphabet, are modifications of the Greek alphabet, having the same internal structure.

From the 8th century BCE onwards, the Greek alphabet was used to produce all of the famous works of the civilization on topics ranging from astronomy and astrology to botany, biology, creative writing, literary criticism, history, the medical arts, philosophy, science, sociology, veterinary medicine, and zoology, among many others, standardizing knowledge and allowing for further developments. The Greek alphabet was adopted by the Etruscans and transmitted by them to the Romans who used it to develop the Latin script, which became the basis for modern alphabetic scripts.

Study Hall Tunes

 "Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is 

  Just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any 

    excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things."

-Phil. 4:8