It is often referred to as the ‘plain typeface’. Greek guillemets, on the other hand, have no spaces at all).Īs it can be concluded, the Greek writing font was influenced in many ways and by many western typefaces, but the root of Greece’s most common typeface is still anonymous. Most Greek typesets, however, differentiate spacing depending on the punctuation mark, and still follow the Anglo-Saxon convention and put less space in front of the semicolon than in front of the exclamation mark. In the French case, double punctuation is followed by standardized thin-width space (not the colon, though). Greek font letters follow this rule in almost every occasion, excluding dialects that abide more by French rules. Visually explained, this means that there is double blank space following full points and double punctuation so that it is easier for the eye to spot the beginning of a new sentence. Greek language fonts adopted many foreign customs during the years, and have little to do with the ancient Greek font roots.Ī good example of that is the Anglo-Saxon influence, typically seen in inter-word spacing. Long and are written using digraphs (ει and ου), while the long and short, and are never distinguished when writing. There isn’t much data concerning omega’s provenance, but the generally accepted idea is that it derives from omicron (it uses the same symbol, with an extra line drawn underneath). Nonetheless, in the 6 th century BC two more letters were developed to fill the gap: eta (not used in eastern Greek dialects where there is no ‘h’), and omega that stands for both the long vowel and the long. The Greek alphabet, for instance, has seven long and five short vowels, and only five letters to write those.įollowing the example of Phoenician writing, the difference in the vowels’ length cannot be understood from the way it was written. Greeks, the same as Phoenicians, distinguish vowels by their length. This way, all Greek syllables can be written with consonant letters in the end. Since the Greek alphabet allows only limited consonant combinations, certain letters from their special consonant clusters ( and ). Greek dialects also differ by the diverse symbols they use: Over time, certain Greek dialects created and added more letters to the original alphabet, as for instance the aspirated versions of Π and K (together with the aspirated version of T), and several combinations between Π, K, and Σ. It also reached West Greek traders and Etruscans which adapted it to suit their own language. As soon as it was first introduced in Greece, the alphabet spread to Phrygia (eastwards), that devised a very similar script. The creator of this alphabet was a Greek expert with lots of experience in contemporary Phoenician scripts. These matres lectionis, as well as a number of Phoenician consonants that are no longer used in the Greek language, are more suitable for Semitic languages and had to be adapted in line with acrophonic principles to create what are today the vowels of this alphabet. It was not before the 9 th century BC that this alphabet developed its first vowel forms, in fact, basic matres elections. Greek alphabet fonts own their existence to the Phoenician alphabet, which was at the time very explicit concerning consonants. In this article, we will concentrate on the early days of the Greek font, before today’s Greek alphabet came into place. We can trace the ancient Greek font back to the introduction of Phoenician letterforms, and yet, despite it, the Greek alphabet is still work in progress. OlympusĪ little bit of history about Roman and Greek fonts Greek fonts The composite character ti and the supralinear stroke are also included. In addition to the standard Sahidic characters, three forms of the Bohairic/Achmimic chai (corresponding to the variant forms of the glyph) are included. The font is designed to follow the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae encoding scheme to as great an extent as possible, with extra characters added that are not present in the Greek alphabet font. I hope this collection will help you select one that you will use in a design project with an ancient theme that will need a specific font like these. I said Greek font looking because the Greek fonts are not all with the Greek alphabet but instead, show a Greek influence. If you’re a subscriber you probably know that I like to make your life easier and create selections of the best resources on specific categories, like the one we have today: Free Roman and Greek looking fonts.
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