This week we’ll be covering the Greek alphabet.
The Greek alphabet is one of the longest standing alphabets in the world. It has been used since approximately 1200BC – although in a different form of the alphabet than what is currently known today. The Modern Greek alphabet, what is used today, is a developed version of the Phoenician alphabet. Many writing systems, including Latin, Arabic and Hebrew date back to the Phoenician alphabet which was widely used across the Mediterranean for trading as early as 1000BC.
When the Greeks adopted this alphabet, they used some Phoenician letters to represent their vowels, and then developed some new letters to represent their consonant sounds. This became the first phonetic alphabet.
The Greek alphabet has been changed and modified over centuries, but it is still used today to write Greek. In the past, it also aided in the writing of Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish and others. It is also used frequently today in mathematical and scientific equations, and of course, by sororities and fraternities (!)
For your enjoyment, take a look at this list of Greek letters, and how they correlate to English letters.
References
http://www.ibiblio.org/koine/greek/lessons/alphabet.html
http://omniglot.com/writing/greek.htm