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Ancient Greek letters appear to be everywhere. Most of us have probably heard of the Nile delta, even if we don\u2019t automatically associate that geographical designation with the shape of the fourth letter of the ancient Greek<\/a> (and modern Greek, as it happens) alphabet.<\/p>\n Any film set in an American college is almost certain to feature \u2018frat boys\u2019 and \u2018sorority sisters\u2019 (though some fraternities now welcome girls), aka \u2018Greeks\u2019, whose fraternities and sororities are named after letters of the ancient Greek alphabet.<\/p>\n These ancient Greek letters appear in other fields too, including mathematics (most famously perhaps, pi) and astronomy (where Greek letters are used to designate the brightest stars in a constellation). Sadly, we\u2019re probably all nowadays familiar with the use of Greek letters to denote variants of the coronavirus, the latest of which is the still rather mysterious strand named omicron.<\/p>\n The ancient Greeks didn\u2019t invent the alphabet, though they may be credited with inventing an<\/em> alphabet \u2013 a new form of alphabetic writing, one that added signs for vowels to signs for consonants. Thereby their alphabet is the world\u2019s first fully phonetic alphabetic script, which emerged sometime around 800 BC.<\/p>\n Or rather, their alphabets<\/em>, plural: for there were several, local or regional versions of the ancient Greek alphabet, with differing numbers of letters ranging from 24 to 28.<\/p>\n Usually, the ancient Greeks were less than keen to credit non-Greeks \u2013 \u2018barbarians\u2019 as they sometimes derogatorily called them \u2013 with anything positive. But in this exceptional case they acknowledged the immediate source of their borrowing: for they called their alphabets \u2018Phoenician letters\u2019 after the ancient people that then occupied what is today Lebanon, and parts of Syria and Israel.<\/p>\nDid the ancient Greeks invent the alphabet?<\/strong><\/h3>\n