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Day: September 23, 2015

Why do the names of many Greek letters end in “a”?

By: | Post date: 2015-09-23 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Writing Systems

The following is intelligent guesswork. In ancient Greek, words were constrained to end in a vowel, /n/ or /s/.The Phoenecian letter names did not fit that pattern, so they were adapted to end in vowels. Of the available vowels, nouns most frequently ended in alpha (neuters or feminines) or eta (feminines). Omega, iota and upsilon […]

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