Greek language

===Greek alphabet===
{{Main|Greek alphabet|Greek orthography}}
[[File:Greek alphabet variants.png|thumb|Ancient epichoric variants of the Greek alphabet from [[Euboea]], [[Ionia]], Athens, and [[Ancient Corinth|Corinth]] comparing to modern Greek]]
Greek has been written in the Greek alphabet since approximately the 9th century BC. It was created by modifying the [[Phoenician alphabet]], with the innovation of adopting certain letters to represent the vowels. The variant of the alphabet in use today is essentially the late [[Ionic Greek|Ionic]] variant, introduced for writing classical [[Attic Greek|Attic]] in 403&nbsp;BC. In classical Greek, as in classical Latin, only upper-case letters existed. The lower-case Greek letters were developed much later by medieval scribes to permit a faster, more convenient cursive writing style with the use of [[ink]] and [[quill]].

The Greek alphabet consists of 24 letters, each with an uppercase ([[capital letter|majuscule]]) and lowercase ([[lower case|minuscule]]) form. The letter [[sigma]] has an additional lowercase form (ς) used in the final position of a word:
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"
|-
! colspan="33" | [[upper case]]
|-
|[[Alpha|Α]]||[[Beta|Β]]||[[Gamma|Γ]]||[[Delta (letter)|Δ]]||[[Epsilon|Ε]]||[[Zeta|Ζ]]||[[Eta|Η]]||[[Theta|Θ]]||[[Iota|Ι]]||[[Kappa|Κ]]||[[Lambda|Λ]]||[[Mu (letter)|Μ]]||[[Nu (letter)|Ν]]||[[Xi (letter)|Ξ]]||[[Omicron|Ο]]||[[Pi (letter)|Π]]||[[Rho|Ρ]]||[[Sigma|Σ]]||[[Tau|Τ]]||[[Upsilon|Υ]]||[[Phi|Φ]]||[[Chi (letter)|Χ]]||[[Psi (letter)|Ψ]]||[[Omega|Ω]]
|-
! colspan="33" | [[lower case]]
|-
|α||β||γ||δ||ε||ζ||η||θ||ι||κ||λ||μ||ν||ξ||ο||π||ρ||σ<br />ς||τ||υ||φ||χ||ψ||ω
|}

====Diacritics====
{{main|Greek diacritics}}
In addition to the letters, the Greek alphabet features a number of [[diacritic|diacritical signs]]: three different accent marks ([[acute accent|acute]], [[grave accent|grave]], and [[circumflex]]), originally denoting different shapes of [[pitch accent]] on the stressed vowel; the so-called breathing marks ([[rough breathing|rough]] and [[smooth breathing]]), originally used to signal presence or absence of word-initial /h/; and the [[trema (diacritic)|diaeresis]], used to mark the full syllabic value of a vowel that would otherwise be read as part of a diphthong. These marks were introduced during the course of the Hellenistic period. Actual usage of the grave in [[penmanship|handwriting]] saw a rapid decline in favor of uniform usage of the acute during the late 20th century, and it has only been retained in [[typography]].

After the writing reform of 1982, most diacritics are no longer used. Since then, Greek has been written mostly in the simplified [[Greek diacritics|monotonic orthography]] (or monotonic system), which employs only the acute accent and the diaeresis. The traditional system, now called the polytonic orthography (or polytonic system), is still used internationally for the writing of [[Ancient Greek]].

====Punctuation====
In Greek, the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point (•), known as the ''[[Interpunct#Ano teleia|ano teleia]]'' ({{lang|grc|άνω τελεία}}). In Greek the [[comma]] also functions as a [[silent letter]] in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing {{lang|el|{{linktext|ό,τι}}}} (''ó,ti'', 'whatever') from {{lang|el|ότι}} (''óti'', 'that').<ref>{{cite web |last=Nicolas |first=Nick |title=Greek Unicode Issues: Punctuation |year=2005 |url=http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/punctuation.html |access-date=7 October 2014 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://archive.today/20120806003722/http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/punctuation.html |archive-date=6 August 2012 }}</ref>

Ancient Greek texts often used ''scriptio continua'' ('continuous writing'), which means that ancient authors and scribes would write word after word with no spaces or punctuation between words to differentiate or mark boundaries.<ref>{{Cite book|title=The concise Oxford dictionary of linguistics|last=Hugoe|first=Matthews Peter|date=March 2014|others=Oxford University Press.|isbn=978-0-19-967512-8|edition=Third|location=Oxford|oclc=881847972 |publisher=Oxford University Press}}</ref> [[Boustrophedon]], or bi-directional text, was also used in Ancient Greek.