Greek alphabet with no Greek equivalents still remain in this block (U+03E2 to U+03EF). To write polytonic Greek, one may use combining diacritical marks or the precomposed characters in the "Greek Extended" block (U+1F00 to U+1FFF). Combining and spacing (letter-free) diacritical marks pertaining to Greek language: IBM code pages 437, 860, 861, 862, 863, and 865 contain the letters ΓΘΣΦΩαδεπστφ (plus β as an alternate interpretation for ß). Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late ninth or early eighth century BC. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the first
History of the Greek alphabet depending on their place in the word. Early printers, such as Aldus Manutius and Claude Garamond, attempted to imitate this, basing their printing on the writing of Greek scribes, producing a style text similar to modern italics. As Greece was occupied by the Ottoman Empire until the nineteenth century, early printers of (mostly ancient) Greek were mostly based in western Europe; few were Greek. This led to the adoption of writing conventions for Greek such as letter case influenced by printing and developments in the Latin alphabet. Cursive-inspired Greek print slowly disappeared during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in favour