Greek alphabet
Other uses
Most of the alphabets of Asia Minor, in use c. 800–300 BC to write languages like Lydian and Phrygian, were the early Greek alphabet with only slight modifications – as were the original Old Italic alphabets. It was used in some Paleo-Balkan languages, including Thracian. For other neighboring languages or dialects, such as Ancient Macedonian, isolated words are preserved in Greek texts, but no continuous texts are preserved. The Greco-Iberian alphabet was used for writing the ancient Iberian language in parts of modern Spain. Gaulish inscriptions (in modern France) used the Greek alphabet until the Roman conquest The Hebrew and Aramaic text of the Bible was written in Greek letters in Origen's Hexapla. The Bactrian language, an Iranian language spoken in what is now Afghanistan, was written in the Greek alphabet during the Kushan Empire (65–250 AD). It adds an extra letter ⟨þ⟩ for the sh sound [ʃ]. The Coptic alphabet adds eight letters derived from Demotic. It is still used today, mostly in Egypt, to write Coptic, the liturgical language of Egyptian Christians. Letters usually retain an uncial form different from the forms used for Greek today. An 8th-century Arabic fragment preserves a text in the Greek alphabet. An Old Ossetic inscription of the 10th–12th centuries found in Arxyz, the oldest known attestation of an Ossetic language. The Old Nubian language of Makuria (modern Sudan) adds three Coptic letters, two letters derived from Meroitic script, and a digraph of two Greek gammas used for the velar nasal sound. Various South Slavic dialects, similar to the modern Bulgarian and Macedonian languages, have been written in Greek script. The modern South Slavic languages now use modified Cyrillic alphabets. Turkish spoken by Orthodox Christians (Karamanlides) was often written in Greek script, and called Karamanlidika. Tosk Albanian was often written using the Greek alphabet, starting in about 1500. The printing press at Moschopolis published several Albanian texts in Greek script during the 18th century. It was only in 1908 that the Monastir conference standardized a Latin orthography for both Tosk and Gheg. Greek spelling is still occasionally used for the local Albanian dialects (Arvanitika) in Greece. Gagauz, a Turkic language of the northeast Balkans, was apparently written in Greek characters in the late 19th century. In 1957, it was standardized on Cyrillic, and in 1996, a Gagauz alphabet based on Latin characters was adopted (derived from the Turkish alphabet). Surguch, a Turkic language, was spoken by a small group of Orthodox Christians in northern Greece. It is now written in Latin or Cyrillic characters. Urum or Greek Tatar used the Greek alphabet. Judaeo-Spanish language, a Jewish dialect of Spanish, has occasionally been published in Greek characters in Greece. Greek symbols are used as symbols in mathematics, physics and other sciences. Many symbols have traditional uses, such as lower case epsilon (ε) for an arbitrarily small positive number, lower case pi (π) for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, capital sigma (Σ) for summation, and lower case sigma (σ) for standard deviation.
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