# Greek script

The Greek script is the graphic basis of the Greek alphabet, and is used primarily for that purpose and for scientific and mathematical symbols. It has also been adapted to write other languages, sometimes with additional letters.
The Greek script derived from the Phoenician alphabet, and is the earliest known alphabetic script to systematically write vowels as well as consonants.

## Derived scripts

The Greek script was ancestral to several others:
* The Etruscan alphabet, adopted from an archaic form of the Greek alphabet brought to Italy by Greek colonists in the late 8th century BC;
* Via Etruscan, the Latin script, together with various other ancient scripts in Italy;
* The Gothic alphabet, devised in the 4th century to write the Gothic language, based on a combination of Greek and Latin uncial models;
* The Glagolitic alphabet, devised in the 9th century for writing Old Church Slavonic;
* The Cyrillic script, which replaced the Glagolitic alphabet shortly afterwards.
* The Coptic script used for writing the Coptic language of Egypt.
The Armenian and Georgian scripts are almost certainly modeled on the Greek alphabet, but their graphic forms are quite different.

## Derived alphabets

Apart from the daughter scripts listed above, which were adapted from Greek but developed into separate writing systems, the Greek alphabet has also been adapted at various times and places to write other languages.

### Antiquity

* Most of the Iron Age alphabets of Asia Minor were also adopted around the same time, as the early Greek alphabet was adopted from the Phoenician Alphabet. The Lydian and Carian alphabets are generally believed to derive from the Greek alphabet, although it is not clear which variant is the direct ancestor. While some of these alphabets such as Phrygian had slight differences from the Greek counterpart, some like Carian alphabet had mostly different values and several other characters inherited from pre-Greek local scripts. They were in use c. 800–300 BC until all the Anatolian languages were extinct due to Hellenization.
* The original Old Italic alphabets was the early Greek alphabet with only slight modifications.
* It was used in some Paleo-Balkan languages, including Thracian. For other neighboring languages or dialects, such as Ancient Macedonian, isolated words are preserved in Greek texts, but no continuous texts are preserved.
* The Greco-Iberian alphabet was used for writing the ancient Iberian language in parts of modern Spain.
* Gaulish inscriptions (in modern France) used a Greek alphabet until the Roman conquest
* The Bactrian language, an Iranian language spoken in what is now Afghanistan, was written in a Greek alphabet during the Kushan Empire (65–250 AD). It adds an extra letter ⟨þ⟩ for the sh sound [ʃ].
* Derived from Indo-Greek coinage, the coins of Nahapana and Chastana of the Western Satraps featured an Indo-Aryan language legend written in Greek or pseudo-Greek letters. The subsequent rulers' coins had the Greek script degrade to a mere ornament that no longer represented any legible legend.
* The Coptic alphabet adds eight letters derived from Demotic. It is still used today, mostly in Egypt, to write Coptic, the liturgical language of Egyptian Christians. Letters usually retain an uncial form different from the forms used for Greek today. The alphabet of Old Nubian is an adaptation of Coptic.

### Middle Ages

* Coins from the 4th-8th centuries known as mordovkas were used as currency in Eastern Europe by Uralic peoples and were written in Moksha using Greek uncial script.
* An 8th-century Arabic fragment preserves a text in a Greek alphabet, as does a 9th- or 10th-century psalm translation fragment.
* An Old Ossetic inscription of the 10th–12th centuries found in Arxyz, the oldest known attestation of an Ossetic language.
* The Old Nubian language of Makuria (modern Sudan) adds three Coptic letters, two letters derived from Meroitic script, and a digraph of two Greek gammas used for the velar nasal sound.
* Various South Slavic dialects, similar to the modern Bulgarian and Macedonian languages, have been written in Greek script. The modern South Slavic languages now use modified Cyrillic alphabets.

### Early modern

* Turkish spoken by Orthodox Christians (Karamanlides) was often written in Greek script, and called Karamanlidika.
* Tosk Albanian was often written using a Greek alphabet, starting in about 1500. The printing press at Moschopolis published several Albanian texts in Greek script during the 18th century. It was only in 1908 that the Monastir conference standardized a Latin orthography for both Tosk and Gheg. Greek spelling is still occasionally used for the local Albanian dialects (Arvanitika) in Greece.
* Gagauz, a Turkic language of the northeast Balkans spoken by Orthodox Christians, was apparently written in a Greek alphabet in the late 19th century. In 1957, it was standardized on Cyrillic, and in 1996, a Gagauz alphabet based on Latin characters was adopted (derived from the Turkish alphabet).
* Surguch, a Turkic language, was spoken by a small group of Orthodox Christians in northern Greece. It is now written in Latin or Cyrillic characters.
* Urum or Greek Tatar, spoken by Orthodox Christians, used a Greek alphabet.
* Judaeo-Spanish or Ladino, a Jewish dialect of Spanish, has occasionally been published in Greek characters in Greece.
* The Italian humanist Giovan Giorgio Trissino tried to add some Greek letters (Ɛ ε, Ꞷ ω) to Italian orthography in 1524.