Origins of the Greek Alphabet

The Greek alphabet is thought to be the ancestor of all major European alphabets today. Although the script was adapted from the Semites around the tenth or ninth century B.C., it included significant improvements, which were directly responsible for its influence. Among the improvements were the transformation of certain Semitic letters into vowels, and the invention of new letters for sounds absent from Semitic languages. Originally, just like the Semitic scripts, Greek was written from right to left but following the sixth century BCE, it was already written from left to right and top to bottom.

The early script had many variations depending on the geographical region; the two major subdivisions were the eastern and western ones. But in spite of the local diversities, it gradually moved towards uniformity. A major event in this process was when the Ionic alphabet of Miletus was officially adopted in Athens in 403 BCE. Shortly after this, the rest of the mainland followed Athens's example and by the middle of the fourth century BCE almost all local alphabets were unified, establishing the classical twenty-four letter Greek script. In the middle of the third century BCE, Aristophanes of Byzantium introduced the three accents, acute, grave, and circumflex, in order to mark the tone or pitch of Greek words.

The Greeks adapted the Phoenician variant of the Semitic alphabet, expanding its 22 consonant symbols to 24 (even more in some dialects), and setting apart some of the original consonant symbols to serve exclusively as vowels (see Greek Language). After about 500 bc, Greek was regularly written from left to right. The Greek alphabet spread throughout the Mediterranean world, giving rise to various modified forms, including the Etruscan, Oscan, Umbrian, and Roman alphabets. Because of Roman conquests and the spread of the Latin language, that language's Roman alphabet became the basic alphabet of all the languages of Western Europe.