Greek Alphabet

The Greek alphabet has been around for over 10,000 years in some form. It was derived from the Phoenician alphabet somewhere around 9,000 BC and the present form (Euclidian) was codified by the 4th century BC. Before the Greek Alphabet, the people of the Aegean used a script known as Linear B, to write the Mycenaean form of the language that flourished from the 16th to 12th century BC. Besides being the first alphabet to use individual symbols for vowels as well as consonants, the Greek alphabet was the mother of Cyrillic and Latin alphabets that spawned later.

Of course the word alphabet literally comes from the first two letters: alpha (Α α) and beta (Β β). Once you learn the alphabet, both ancient and modern Greek are easy to pronounce, in the sense that pronunciations are very predictable, unlike with English where letters and their combinations can have widely different sounds. In addition, certain letters have come to be pronounced identically in the present, whereas in ancient times they indicated a slight variant in pronunciation. This trend makes it even easier to learn, as there are fewer foreign sounds and reading is unchanged between past and present.

Though ancient greek pronunciations are taught (by non-Greek scholars) quite differently than the modern language, there is little evidence that the ancients actually spoke this way, and modern Greek is probably much more similar. So if you want to learn Greek, even just for ancient research, you may as well learn learn the modern pronunciations. You will have no problem reading original Bible passages, Plato or Homer, and you will also be able to communicate with Greeks in the present.