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 ...

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 ...

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.

Since May the World Health Organization has been using letters of the Greek alphabet, in order, to name coronavirus variants. Delta was the most dominant one, followed by eight others ...

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.