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 Greek. Since the names of the letters "’āleph" and "hē" were pronounced and by the Greeks, with initial vowels due to the silent gutturals (the disambiguation "e psilon" "narrow e" came later), the acrophonic principle was retained for vowels as well as consonants by using them for the Greek vowel sounds and . Only the letter "‘ayin" for necessitated a change of name ("o", later "o micron"). Phoenician also had an "emphatic" consonant, "ṭēth", which did not exist in Greek. However, Greek had an aspiration distinction that Phoenician lacked, and used ṭēth for the aspirated . The Phoenician consonants "kaph"