Greek
Both in classical Ancient Greek and in Modern Greek, the letter Ξ represents the sound . In some archaic local variants of the Greek alphabet, this letter was missing. Instead, especially in the dialects of most of the Greek mainland and Euboea, the sound was represented by Χ (which in classical Greek is chi, used for /kʰ/). Because this variant of the Greek alphabet was used in Italy, the Latin alphabet borrowed Χ rather than Ξ as the Latin letter X.
Read more about this topic: Xi (letter)
Famous quotes containing the word greek:
“All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)
“The gothic is singular in this; one seems easily at home in the renaissance; one is not too strange in the Byzantine; as for the Roman, it is ourselves; and we could walk blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind; all these styles seem modern when we come close to them; but the gothic gets away.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art and poetry, in all its periods from the Heroic and Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)