What do the letters in the Greek alphabet mean?
The 24 letters of both the ancient and modern Greek alphabet are phonetic, in that one sign equals one sound or articulation, and so they do not carry meaning as pictures or symbols. However, the history of each letter indicates that at one time they did represent objects.HistoryAround the ninth century B.C.E. the Greeks fashioned an alphabet they learned from the Phoenicians, a Semitic sea-faring group of traders and colonizers. The Phoenicians were the first Western people to use a script where the signs only represented sounds.Greek ContributionGeorges Jean says in “Writing: The Story of Alphabets and Scripts” that the Greeks used letters from Phoenician system, which consisted only of signs for consonants, for which there was no corresponding sound in Greek for their vowels, such as Alpha and Epsilon.SpeculationEdward Clodd observes in “The Story of the Alphabet” that the history of some letters is clearer than others Richard A. Firmage’s “The Alphabet Abecedarium: Some Notes on Le
