Eta ( ; uppercase ', lowercase '; ē̂ta or ita ) is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the close front unrounded vowel, . Originally denoting the voiceless glottal fricative, , in most dialects of Ancient Greek, its sound value in the classical Attic dialect was a long open-mid front unrounded vowel, , which was raised to in Hellenistic Greek, a process known as iotacism or itacism.
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Eta is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet, originally used to represent a consonant sound but later used for vowel sounds that varied across different Greek dialects and time periods. It matters as a fundamental component of the Greek writing system and as an example of how letter pronunciations can shift significantly over centuries of linguistic change.
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Article
13 sectionsContents
- History
- Consonant h
- Long e
- Itacism
- Cyrillic script
- Uses
- Letter
- Symbol
- Upper case
- Lower case
- Unicode
- See also
- References
Eta ( ; uppercase ', lowercase '; ē̂ta or ita ) is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the close front unrounded vowel, . Originally denoting the voiceless glottal fricative, , in most dialects of Ancient Greek, its sound value in the classical Attic dialect was a long open-mid front unrounded vowel, , which was raised to in Hellenistic Greek, a process known as iotacism or itacism.
In the ancient Attic number system (Herodianic or acrophonic numbers), the number 100 was represented by "", because it was the initial of , the ancient spelling of = "one hundred". In the later system of (Classical) Greek numerals eta represents 8.