That’s because many of our letters began as Egyptian hieroglyph symbols 4,000 years ago, with a hodgepodge of Semitic, Phoenician, Greek and Roman influences thrown in. It would take centuries ...

But the world is now getting a lesson in Greek, one unpleasant coronavirus variant at a time. The same letters used by Plato and Aristotle are turning into symbols of a global plague, and knowing ...

Why is “A” the first letter of our alphabet ... an isosceles triangle. This symbol became the Phoenician letter “daleth” (door), which became the Greek letter “delta,” and eventually ...

Letters are symbols, just like emojis or crosswalk signs ... the Greeks adopted vowels. The Greek alphabet looks a lot like ours, but our letters took their final form in Italy.

Today, the Greek alphabet serves as a source of international symbols in maths ... name the various strains of the virus by using Greek letters, to avoid naming any strains after countries ...

Like Roman numerals, their system borrowed letters; like the Arabic numerals we still use, it only needed one symbol for each decimal place. In the 6th century BCE, the Greek alphabet used 24 letters.