Why is the Greek Alphabet So Special?

The Greek Alphabet is like ours (The Latin Alphabet) but not. Well let's took a look at its, and the our, history.

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Dhaka - Kevin MacLeod
River of Io - Kevin MacLeod
Tabuk - Kevin MacLeod
Dub Feral - Kevin MacLeod

#Greek #Ελληνικά #AncientGreece

[moshpitjo]

The Greeks did have a writing system called Linear B in the Bronze Age but it was lost during the period of political turmoil known as the Greek dark age

[paranoid_android]

A Greek guy living in Netherlands, watching a video created by a Dutch guy about the Greek alphabet ...

[Themistocles]

One fun anecdote I've heard is that late Carthaginian merchants sometimes used the Greek script on their amphorae in order to be able to sell their wine at a higher price.

[matthewlee]

That awkward moment when you try to order a churro and end up with a gyro instead.

[IRonMan-kwjp]

The map seriously needs to be more easily recognizable.

[PATRICKJLM]

Ancient Greek isn't a dead language as modern Greeks can read it and understand it. It is still Greek.
The English language has changed more from the era of Shakespeare, than the Greek from the era of the Gospels.

[ethanrepublic]

0:40 for some reason it took me a long time to figure out what a map of this was.

[Eburon]

Ι λικε θε γρεεκ αλφαμπετ μορε θαν θε λατιν ονε

[luuchoo]

Did anyone else stare at the map forever trying to understand it, before realizing it was the Mediterranean? 😐

[thanosxe.]

The best thing about being Greek is that you can read almost directly ancient texts, marbles, ...

[auadisian]

the apostrophe of 'o' is like the Arabic letter ع or the Hebrew ע, which comes from deep inside the throat

[SchmulKrieger]

Wasn't the first writing system the mykenian syllable script?

[Blaqjaqshellaq]

Greek writing also spun off the Cyrillic alphabet, used for the Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian languages.

[zzing]

I loved the video. But the contrast on some of the parts was terrible. It took me thirty seconds to figure out the map was Europe.

[leolinguini]

You start this video with the question why is the Greek alphabet so different in the present, you should have included the fact that it was preserved by the Romans even after their conquest of the Greek world.

The Romans had an infinite amount of respect for Old stuff, they either actively preserved or allowed them to exist. And as a result for this respect of theirs toward the Greek language the patrician class taught it to their youth, and never actively sought to replace it with latin in the Greek heartland (in contrast to Gaul, Iberia, North Africa etc.). An argument can be made that many client nations to the Romans were not really big on script before their conquest, yet we also see provinces like North Africa abandoning the phoenecian script for latin.
As a result Greek was largely still in use by 550AD, in the Eastern Roman Empire, it was made into the Official language of the state by Justinian, and it stayed as the official language up into the late middle ages. Afterwards Greece was in Ottoman control, who as a state were very allowing of their various subjects maintaining their culture and language.

Long story short, it was a relatively long series of flukes that allowed the Greek language to survive into the modern day and still be used in a day-to-day basis.

[ΘεοχάρηςΒαδιβούλης]

Very good video overall
You show us some very intresting facts about the greek alphabet and it 's history
But you missed the fact that greek language was written since the 16th or 15th century BC with the linear B script which was a syllabary (every letter represented a syllable)

[manovohaitis]

History. Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, or possibly earlier. The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language.

[tjduck]

Another fun bit of trivia that went unmentioned in this video: "Alphabet" comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, "Alpha" and "Beta." But these names for the letters are essentially nonsense words that lack any real meaning in Greek apart from being names for the letters. But these names are phonetic borrowings from the Canaanite script, where the first two letters are "Aleph" and "Beyt, " which respectively mean "Ox" and "House" in West Semitic languages.

[calamusgladiofortior]

1:20 A language with no vowels? You mean Welsh? ;)

[Toxic.Banana]

The odyssey was written in the sixth century BC, that is two centuries after the creation of the Greek alphabet as you say. Αs we know so far no more perfect book has been written than this and the Iliad. I ask now as an ordinary person: how is it possible in two centuries of the existence of an alphabet to write the best books that have ever existed?