The Alphabet and Handwriting

Greek has 24 letters. You already know more of them than you think, because the Romans borrowed the alphabet, and English got its letters from the Romans. Alpha and beta gave us the word "alphabet." Some Greek letters look exactly like ours and sound the same. A few look like ours and sound completely different. Those few cause most of the trouble in the first week, so this lesson spends real time on them.

The alphabet in this course is the Ionic alphabet, the one used in the cities of Ionia on the coast of what is now Turkey. Athens adopted it officially in 403 BC (Smyth, section 2). Before that, Athenian public inscriptions used an older local alphabet in which E did the work of three different sounds and H stood for the sound h. Everything you read in this course, from Homer to Plato, is printed today in the Ionic letters, with small letters and accent marks that were added by later scribes.

The 24 letters

Read the table across. The bracketed guide shows how to say each letter name in the restored Attic pronunciation that this course teaches (lesson 2 explains it fully). Capital letters in a guide mark the syllable that carries the accent. A line over a vowel, as in ā or ē, means it is held long.

A few sounds in the guide need a word now. In this course th, ph and kh stand for t, p and k said with a strong puff of air, as in "top," "pot" and "kit." They are not the th of "thin" or the f of "phone." That is how Athenians of Plato's day said θ, φ and χ (Smyth, section 26). The letter ü means the French u in "tu," a sound made by saying "ee" with rounded lips. And oo is the vowel in "food."

The names in the "later" column are the ones most English speakers know: epsilon, omicron, upsilon, omega. They are late. Smyth (section 1 b) notes that some were given as late as the Middle Ages. Epsilon means "plain e" and upsilon "plain u," names coined after αι and οι had come to sound like ε and υ and people needed to tell the spellings apart. Omicron is "little o" and omega is "big o." Classical Athenians called these letters simply εἶ, οὖ, ὖ and ὦ. You can use either set of names. Every teacher and dictionary will understand you.

Vowels, consonants and the three double letters

Seven letters are vowels: α, ε, η, ι, ο, υ, ω (Smyth, section 4). Two of them are always short (ε, ο), two are always long (η, ω), and three can be either (α, ι, υ). Length matters in Greek. Lesson 2 shows how.

The other seventeen are consonants. Three of them are "double" letters that pack two sounds into one sign: ξ is ks, ψ is ps, and ζ was zd in classical Attic (Smyth, section 26). So the word ξένος starts with a ks sound, not a z sound as the English word xenophobia does.

Where the letters came from

Smyth (section 2) says the letters from alpha through tau came from the Phoenician alphabet and have Semitic names, while the letters from upsilon to omega were Greek additions. Alpha and beta come from the Phoenician letter names that also gave Hebrew aleph and beth. Older Greek also had two letters that dropped out of the Attic alphabet: digamma Ϝ, a w sound, and koppa Ϙ, a k sound used before o and u (Smyth, section 3). You will meet digamma again when you read Homer, because it explains some odd features of his meter, and both letters live on as number signs.

Letters that look English but are not

This is where beginners lose points. Your eye sees a familiar shape, your mouth says the English sound, and the word comes out wrong. Learn this table cold.

The capitals are a trap of their own. Capital eta Η looks like an English H but is a vowel. Capital rho Ρ is an English P shape. Capital chi Χ is an X shape. Capital nu Ν is fine, a plain N, but small nu ν looks like a v. Read a sign in capitals slowly the first few times.

Sigma's two shapes

Sigma has a small form σ and a word-final form ς. The rule is simple: ς only at the very end of a word, σ everywhere else, including the first letter (Smyth, section 1 a). The word for earthquake shows both: σεισμός. The capital is Σ in all positions.

Some modern editions print a third shape, the "lunate sigma" ϲ, shaped like a c, in every position. Scribes used that shape from the Hellenistic period onward, and you will see it in some editions of papyri and inscriptions. This course uses σ and ς, the standard in nearly all school texts and dictionaries.

Capitals, small letters and the small mark under some vowels

The Greeks of Plato's time wrote only capitals (Smyth, section 2). The small letters, called minuscules, became a regular book hand around the ninth century AD. Modern printed editions use small letters for nearly everything. Capitals appear only at the start of a proper name (Σωκράτης, Socrates), at the start of a paragraph, and in many editions at the start of a quotation. Most editions do not capitalize the first word of every sentence. That surprises English readers, so do not be alarmed when a sentence starts with a small letter.

You will also see a tiny iota written under some long vowels: ᾳ, ῃ, ῳ. This is the iota subscript. It marks a diphthong (two vowels in one syllable) whose iota later faded from speech. In the ζῷον example above, the ω carries one. Smyth (section 5) says the iota stopped being written at all around 100 BC and that the habit of writing it underneath dates from no earlier than about the eleventh century AD. With a capital, the iota is written beside the letter instead: Ὠιδή or ᾨδή for ᾠδή (song). Never leave it out when you copy a word. It often marks a grammatical ending, and it changes what the word means.

Handwriting: stroke by stroke

Writing by hand is the fastest way to learn the letters. People who type Greek from day one tend to read it slowly for months. Use lined paper. The guide below assumes a simple print hand, the kind taught in most beginning classes, written without joining letters.

Print hands differ a little from one book to another, so treat these as one sensible way, not the only way. The important thing is that each letter stays clearly distinct from the letters it could be mistaken for.

Make descenders long, at least half the height of a middle-zone letter, so η never turns into n and ρ never turns into an o. And make ν sharp and υ round. If your ν and υ look alike, every verb ending later in the course becomes a guessing game.

Transliteration: from Greek letters to English letters

English writes most Greek words in the Latin spelling the Romans used. That is why you see philosophy, not filosofia, and why some letters change in ways that seem odd until you know the pattern.

Scholars today often prefer a closer, letter-for-letter style: Sōkratēs, Aiskhylos, Oidipous. You will see both. Neither one tells you exactly how to pronounce the word. They are spelling conventions. The bracketed guides in this course are there for pronunciation.

Writing your own name in Greek

Greek has no letters for several English sounds: sh, ch as in "church," j, v, w, and h in the middle of a word. Ancient writers met the same problem with Latin names, and their solutions are the ones to copy.

• W and Latin V: written with ου. Plutarch spells the Roman name Valerius as Οὐαλλέριος, with a double λ (Life of Publicola 1.1). So William could be Οὐίλλιαμ.
• J: Latin had no j sound, and Greek writers used ι for Latin I: Ἰούλιος for Iulius. For an English j there is no good ancient match. Modern Greek uses τζ (Τζον for John), which is fine for your own name as long as you know it is a modern spelling.
• H at the start: not a letter but a breathing mark, the rough breathing ῾, written over the first vowel. Henry becomes Ἕνρι. Lesson 3 covers breathings.
• Endings: Greeks often gave foreign names Greek endings. The Latin Marcus became Μάρκος. If your name ends in a consonant Greek allows at the end of a word (ν, ρ, ς, or the double letters ξ and ψ), you can leave it alone. Otherwise adding -ος for a man or -α or -η for a woman makes it decline like a Greek noun (Smyth, section 133, on which consonants can end a word).

For now, put an acute accent mark (´) over the vowel you stress in English, and a breathing mark over a first vowel. Lesson 3 explains the marks properly. Your teacher in Athens would have accepted any sensible spelling. The goal is that a Greek reader can sound it out.