Greek alphabet Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! === International Phonetic Alphabet === Several Greek letters are used as phonetic symbols in the [[International Phonetic Alphabet]] (IPA).<ref>{{cite book|title=Handbook of the International Phonetic Association|year=1999|place=Cambridge|publisher=University Press|pages=176–181}}</ref> Several of them denote fricative consonants; the rest stand for variants of vowel sounds. The glyph shapes used for these letters in specialized phonetic fonts is sometimes slightly different from the conventional shapes in Greek typography proper, with glyphs typically being more upright and using [[serifs]], to make them conform more with the typographical character of other, Latin-based letters in the phonetic alphabet. Nevertheless, in the Unicode encoding standard, the following three phonetic symbols are considered the same characters as the corresponding Greek letters proper:<ref>For chi and beta, separate codepoints for use in a Latin-script environment were added in Unicode versions 7.0 (2014) and 8.0 (2015) respectively: U+AB53 "Latin small letter chi" (ꭓ) and U+A7B5 "Latin small letter beta" (ꞵ). As of 2017, the International Phonetic Association still lists the original Greek codepoints as the standard representations of the IPA symbols in question [https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/ipa-chart].</ref> {|class="wikitable" |{{IPA|β}} ||beta ||U+03B2 ||[[voiced bilabial fricative]] |- |{{IPA|θ}} ||theta ||U+03B8 ||[[voiceless dental fricative]] |- |{{IPA|χ}} ||chi ||U+03C7 ||[[voiceless uvular fricative]] |} On the other hand, the following phonetic letters have Unicode representations separate from their Greek alphabetic use, either because their conventional typographic shape is too different from the original, or because they also have secondary uses as regular alphabetic characters in some Latin-based alphabets, including separate Latin uppercase letters distinct from the Greek ones. {|class="wikitable" |- !colspan="3"|Greek letter !colspan="3"|Phonetic letter !Uppercase |- |φ||phi||U+03C6||{{IPA|ɸ}} ||U+0278 ||[[Voiceless bilabial fricative]]||– |- |γ||gamma||U+03B3||{{IPA|ɣ}}||U+0263||[[Voiced velar fricative]] ||Ɣ U+0194 |- |ε||epsilon||U+03B5||{{IPA|ɛ}}||U+025B||[[Open-mid front unrounded vowel]] ||Ɛ U+0190 |- |α||alpha||U+03B1||{{IPA|ɑ}}||U+0251||[[Open back unrounded vowel]]||Ɑ U+2C6D |- |υ||upsilon||U+03C5||{{IPA|ʊ}}||U+028A||[[near-close near-back rounded vowel]] ||Ʊ U+01B1 |- |ι||iota||U+03B9||{{IPA|ɩ}}||U+0269||Obsolete for [[near-close near-front unrounded vowel]] now [[ɪ]] ||Ɩ U+0196 |} The symbol in [[Americanist phonetic notation]] for the [[voiceless alveolar lateral fricative]] is the Greek letter lambda {{angbr|{{lang|el|λ}}}}, but {{angbr IPA|ɬ}} in the IPA. The IPA symbol for the [[palatal lateral approximant]] is {{angbr IPA|ʎ}}, which looks similar to lambda, but is actually an inverted lowercase ''y''. Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! Cancel Editing help (opens in new window) Discuss this page