ALPHABET AND PRONUNCIATION. The age of writing in Greece is unknown, although recent dis coveries have made it appear probable that some system of writing existed long before B.C. 1000. The earliest Greek inscriptions cannot be dated earlier than the seventh century B.C. The alpha bet in which these inscriptions are written, and which is the parent of all modern European al phabets, was derived from that of the Phoeni cians. The Pl2nician alphabet consisted of 22 signs, which the Greeks adapted to their own phonetic system, adding to them four new signs, T, X, although the value of the last two was not the same in all alphabets, the Eastern Greeks using the former with the value of (hard) ch, the latter with the value ps, while the Western Greeks gave to X the value of English x, and to the value of ch. One of the Phoenician signs for s was very early dropped, and in the Eastern group of alphabets and 9 fell into disuse, in consequence of the gradual loss in • the spoken language of the sounds ( w and hard lc respectively) which these symbols represented. Further than this, the Ionians, as early as B.C. 550, began to use the symbol H to represent the sound of long e, and invented a new letter 12 to represent the sound of long o. The Attic alphabet at first occupied a middle ground between the Eastern and West ern groups. It did not use p and rarely 9. It had T, (I., and X with the values given them in the Eastern alphabets, but not Z. or for which it used XZ and It retained H for h, and used E for both long and short e, as well as for the spurious diphthong EI (vide infra), and 0 for long and short o, and the spurious diphthong OT. This old_ Attic alphabet was used in official
documents at Athens until the archonship of Euclides (n.c. 403), when the Ionic alphabet, which had long been in use in private life, was adopted for the public records, and rapidly drove out the old local alphabets. The 24 signs of the Greek alphabet, as finally developed, with the corresponding English letters, are as follows: The 'rough breathing' ( ') is placed over an initial vowel and over p to that the word begins with an aspirate (h) ; so, lippa, pronounced harmer. The 'smooth breathing' (') means that the initial vowel is without the h sound.
Most of the consonants were pronounced in the fifth century B.c. like the correspond ing English letters, except that y was al ways hard (as in go) and before IC, x and had the sound of n (as in sing) ; r was pro nounced like de in adze; 0 was always pro nounced like th in thin; and x was hard, as in German ach. The vowels were pronounced: a like a in father, e like a in met, n like e in prey, t like i in machine, o like o in obey, v like French u, German u, w like o, in tone. The sounds of the diphthongs at, et, ot, au, and ta are those of the diphthongs in aisle, eight, oil, our, tee, re spectively; ov early became a simple sound as in group; ev and 77v were pronounced and In 9., D and co the t subscript was at first. distinctly pronounced, but later its sound was lost, and these diphthongs came to have the sound of simple a, and w.