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In both 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. Modern and Ancient Greek also use different diacritics, with modern Greek keeping only the stress accent ( acute) and the diaeresis.Īpart from its use in writing the Greek language, in both 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.įurther information: Manners of articulation Sound values and conventional transcriptions for some of the letters differ between Ancient and Modern Greek usage because the pronunciation of Greek has changed significantly between the 5th century BCE and today. Like Latin and Cyrillic, Greek originally had only a single form of each letter it developed the letter case distinction between uppercase and lowercase in parallel with Latin during the modern era. The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. The uppercase and lowercase forms of the 24 letters are: In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BCE, 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. 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. However, in place and person names (especially those from Mexico), it can be pronounced like a raspy English h, an s, or even the sh in English show.The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE.
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The equis is usually pronounced like the ks in English socks.
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A single erre at the beginning of a word is also trilled. When two erres appear together, they are trilled (the sound you make when you roll your tongue). When two eles appear together, they can be pronounced like the y in English yellow, the j in English judge, or the sh in English show, depending on what country you're in. When ce comes before hache, it's pronounced like the ch in English cheese. When ge comes before i or e, it's pronounced like a raspy English h.īefore other vowels ( a, o, u), it's pronounced like the g in English good. Let's take a look at some of the trickier combinations. While the majority of the letters in Spanish are always pronounced the same way, there are a few whose pronunciation changes depending on the letters with which they combine. How Do You Pronounce the Spanish Alphabet?
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