In order to show the Greek, AVI uses Unicode. This is standard, and almost all applications on the different platforms can deal with it. Thus AVI does no longer frustrate anybody. If you would like to know which unicode combination represents which Greek character, download the relevant charts from the Unicode Organisation: (1) Greek (and Coptic) (capital and small letters), (2) Greek Extended (the letters combined with diacritics), and (3) Combining Diacritical Marks (only used if (2) lacks the relevant combination). If you would like to know more about Greek in Unicode, see, e.g., Lucius Hartmann's page (in German) or the GreekKeys site! If you have a Mac computer, you may find Popchar a handy thing.
Here is a small test: If you see a Greek small letter epsilon here [ε], then your browser knows how to deal with unicode and has access to a Modern Greek type font; you will be able to see the 'diplomatic' transcriptions of the inscriptions (without diacritics). If you see an epsilon with a smooth breathing here [ἐ], then your browser knows how to deal with the unicode 'Greek Extended' table (or at least the majority of its characters, see TLG); you will get most of the 'interpreted' transcriptions. If your browser displays an epsilon with a makron (indicating vowel length) on top of it here [ε̄], then you may congratulate yourself! Don't worry too much if some of the epsilons look different; it is because your browser, not very elegantly, takes them from different fonts!
Now, let us go back to the 8th century B.C.! That is when the Greeks borrowed the alphabet from Near-Eastern people. (Before that, Europe had been scriptless, imagine!) But who are 'the Greeks'? Since Greece was not a united country politically and economically at that time, its city-states (poleis) being completely independent from each other, the alphabet once installed for the Greek language spread very quickly over the whole Greek world, but the small local communities were free to adapt it according to their taste. Therefore even the earliest preserved inscriptions from each region or polis show quite characteristic features. Hence we speak of the local scripts of archaic Greece (according to the title of a famous book). The changes that were made in those early days include, on the one hand, addition of new signs at the end of the series, elimination of useless signs from the interior of the series, occasionally re-interpretation of a sign in order simultaneously to eliminate a useless function and gain a desired one. These were proper reforms, presupposing circles of teachers and pupils in order to be successful. On the other hand there were changes of letter-forms. These were more a matter of fashion, spreading arbitrarily, so if somebody developed a simpler but still unambiguous letter-form, it could eventually be adopted by an ever-growing number of people and local scripts in the Greek World (an example is the H sign, which originally was closed at the top and bottom by horizontal lines everywhere and was sooner or later simplified in all local scripts).
The early Athenians added two signs to the Greek 'prototype' alphabet (which had stopped at upsilon) and eliminated a few. Here is the order of the local Attic alphabet, as Athenians had to learn it down to the 5th century B.C. (what you see are the characters used today, not the Attic letter-forms, on which we will return below; in the third line, you find the approximate phonetic values):
| Α | Β | Γ | Δ | Ε | Ζ | Η | Θ | Ι | Κ | Λ | Μ | Ν | Ο | Π | Ϙ | Ρ | Σ | Τ | Υ | Χ | Φ |
| α | β | γ | δ | ε | ζ | h | θ | ι | κ | λ | μ | ν | ο | π | ϙ | ρ | σ | τ | υ | χ | φ |
| a | b | g | d | e | dz | h | th | i | k | l | m | n | o | p | k | r | s | t | ü | kh | ph |
You will have noticed a few strange things: (1) The 7th letter had the value [h], not a long [e:] as you may have expected; so we cannot use small eta <η> for it (just as the Athenians did not call this letter eta, but heta). (2) Between [p] and [r] there is the Q sign. This was eventually abolished as it meant the same as K. Both features (1) and (2) were inherited from the Near Eastern alphabet and shared by other Greek local scripts, and we (through the Romans), who ultimately have a West-Greek alphabet, have retained them. (3) You may also have wondered about the order of the two supplementary letters. Should not phi precede chi? No, not in Athens! But it does in other local alphabets (you will encounter one in a moment!). Some Greeks borrowed these supplementary letters from others without asking them in which order they learnt them, and then added them in the 'wrong' order. (4) The Athenians did not have extra letters for the consonant clusters [ks] and [ps], i.e. a letter ksi and psi; they mostly used <χσ> and <φσ> instead.
Eventually, the East Ionic local script prevailed over all other local variants and has been used for Greek ever since. In Athens, already in the 5th century B.C. and in particular on vases, i.e. in unofficial contexts, Ionic letter forms and Ionic letter functions are frequently found, sometimes mixed with Attic ones (even in one and the same word). Official Athens switched to the new standard in 403/2 B.C. Here is the Ionic alphabet, as it is called in short:
| Α | Β | Γ | Δ | Ε | Ζ | Η | Θ | Ι | Κ | Λ | Μ | Ν | Ξ | Ο | Π | Ρ | Σ | Τ | Υ | Φ | Χ | Ψ | Ω |
| α | β | γ | δ | ε | ζ | η | θ | ι | κ | λ | μ | ν | ξ | ο | π | ρ | σ | τ | υ | φ | χ | ψ | ω |
| a | b | g | d | e | dz | e: | th | i | k | l | m | n | ks | o | p | r | s | t | ü | ph | kh | ps | o: |
Now, it is important to realize that in inscriptions in the old Attic alphabet (which are the majority on Attic vases) epsilon (ε) and omicron (ο) not only stand for the short vowels [e] and [o], but often represent the respective long vowels [e:] and [o:], which would be written with eta (η) and omega (ω) in the Ionic alphabet.
In addition, epsilon and omicron were also often used for what would be written <ει> and <ου> in later texts. In this case, we call these spellings 'spurious diphthongs', as they have never been pronounced as proper diphthongs and were only written so when the old real diphthongs had changed their pronunciation to long monophthong vowels (closed [e:], almost [i:]; and closed [o:], almost [u:]). Historically, the 'spurious diphthongs' are the result of two quite different phonological changes: first, the contraction of two short vowels, mostly [e]+[e] or [o]+[o], respectively (i.e. 'epsilons' and 'omikrons'); second, the compensatory lengthening of such a short [e] or [o] when the syllable would have been shortened due to the loss of a following consonant (mostly [n]).
This is all you need to know about Attic phonology for the moment – unless you'd like to learn more about Greek phonology and pronunciation.
As far as the letter-forms are concerned, you will get to know them best by looking at the pictures. The Ionic ones occurring on later Attic vases are more or less the same as we use still now for Greek. Of the Attic ones a few are different, and others show a slight development over the two main centuries of Attic vase production. Only one sign is really tricky, the Attic gamma! It looks exactly like Ionic lambda, whereas the Attic lambda has its point at the bottom (like our 'Roman' L, though still more pointed). That is it!
Rudolf Wachter
First published 6 March 2005, last revised 23 September 2008.