Greek Calligraphy

The Greek writing system was developed in Greece in 1000 BCE. It finds its roots directly or indirectly in all modern European alphabets. The Greek alphabet was modified in order to make it more efficient. The Greek alphabet was modified and made more accurate for writing a non-Semitic language by the addition of several new letters and the modification or dropping of several others. The Greek alphabet was derived from the North Semitic alphabet via that of the Phoenicians, however, under its modification some of the symbols of the Semitic alphabet, which represented only consonants, were made to represent vowels: the Semitic consonants ʾalef, he, yod, ʿayin, and vav became the Greek letters alpha, epsilon, iota, omicron, and upsilon, representing the vowels a, e, i, o, and u, respectively. This addition of symbols for the vowel sounds increased the accuracy, efficiency and legibility of the writing system for non-Semitic languages by a large margin. [if !supportLineBreakNewLine] [endif]

Before the onset of the 5th century BCE, the Greek alphabet could be divided into two fundamental branches, the Ionic (eastern) and the Chalcidian (western). However, there were only minor differences between the two branches. The Chalcidian alphabet gave birth to the the Etruscan alphabet of Italy in the 8th century BCE and hence indirectly the other Italic alphabets also found their shape in it. Latin alphabet being one of them, which is now used for most European languages. Athens in 403 BCE officially adopted the Ionic alphabet as written in Miletus. Following the next 50 years almost all local Greek alphabets were replaced by the Ionic script, even the Chalcidian, including the Chalcidian, and thus became the classical Greek alphabet. [if !supportLineBreakNewLine] [endif]

The early Greek alphabet which was written, like its Semitic forebears, from right to left, gradually gave way to the boustrophedon style. Post 500 BCE Greek was always written from left to right. The classical alphabet had 24 letters, 7 of which were vowels, and consisted of capital letters, ideal for monuments and inscriptions. There were three scripts derived from it which were better suited to handwriting: uncial, which was essentially the classical capitals adapted to writing with a pen on paper and similar to hand printing; and cursive and minuscule, which were running scripts similar to modern handwriting forms, with joined letters and considerable modification in letter shape. Uncial went out of use in the 9th century CE with minuscule, replacing it, which later developed into the modern Greek handwriting form.