The Greek alphabet should look suspiciously familiar to any English speaker. Originally borrowed from the Phoenicians, two-and-a-half thousand years of use and the spelling needs of the western European languages transformed the Greek alphabet into the Greco-Roman one (note the Greco-) we use today.
Plato would take a big red pen to most modern editions of his Republic. Even the untranslated versions: the spelling used in most latter-day representations of ancient Greek is a slightly more modern version of the Greek alphabet, with a full complement of lowercase letters and accents which would have been unfamiliar to Plato, and some letters which were adopted by the Athenians in Plato’s lifetime.
Greek has seventeen consonants and seven vowels: twenty-four letters total. Read More »
