These four types are often conventionally labelled as "green", "red", "light blue" and "dark blue" types, based on a colour-coded map in a seminal 19th-century work on the topic, Studien zur Geschichte des griechischen Alphabets by Adolf Kirchhoff (1867). It was officially adopted in Athens in 403 BC and in most of the rest of the Greek world by the middle of the 4th century BC.Īspirate and consonant cluster symbols Ī basic division into four major types of epichoric alphabets is commonly made according to their different treatment of additional consonant letters for the aspirated consonants ( /pʰ, kʰ/) and consonant clusters ( /ks, ps/) of Greek. The system now familiar as the standard 24-letter Greek alphabet was originally the regional variant of the Ionian cities in Anatolia. The local, so-called epichoric, alphabets differed in many ways: in the use of the consonant symbols Χ, Φ and Ψ in the use of the innovative long vowel letters ( Ω and Η), in the absence or presence of Η in its original consonant function ( /h/) in the use or non-use of certain archaic letters ( Ϝ = /w/, Ϙ = /k/, Ϻ = /s/) and in many details of the individual shapes of each letter. All forms of the Greek alphabet were originally based on the shared inventory of the 22 symbols of the Phoenician alphabet, with the exception of the letter Samekh, whose Greek counterpart Xi ( Ξ) was used only in a sub-group of Greek alphabets, and with the common addition of Upsilon ( Υ) for the vowel /u, ū/.
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