![]() ![]() On the podcast: How the Greeks changed the world – Roderick Beaton explores 4,000 years of Greek history, from the glories of Mycenae to the life of a modern European nation The very names of the first two Greek letters are a bit of a clue to alien origins: in Greek alpha and beta mean nothing, but that’s because they are in fact Hellenised versions of Semitic words – aleph ‘ox-head’ and beth ‘house’ – which were so called because schematically that’s what those two letters look like in the original, Semitic alphabets. Read more | Who were the most famous Greeks? Meet 14 influential figures from the classical world.But in this exceptional case they acknowledged the immediate source of their borrowing: for they called their alphabets ‘Phoenician letters’ after the ancient people that then occupied what is today Lebanon, and parts of Syria and Israel. Usually, the ancient Greeks were less than keen to credit non-Greeks – ‘barbarians’ as they sometimes derogatorily called them – with anything positive. Or rather, their alphabets, plural: for there were several, local or regional versions of the ancient Greek alphabet, with differing numbers of letters ranging from 24 to 28. Thereby their alphabet is the world’s first fully phonetic alphabetic script, which emerged sometime around 800 BC. The ancient Greeks didn’t invent the alphabet, though they may be credited with inventing an alphabet – a new form of alphabetic writing, one that added signs for vowels to signs for consonants. Did the ancient Greeks invent the alphabet?
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