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I wonder why lunate sigma is shown in the table. Other letters also have glyph variants, for example, β/ϐ, ε/ϵ, θ/ϑ, φ/ɸ, ω/ɷ and that's just some of the ones with Unicode code points, and of course there are many archaic, cursive, uncial, and other variants, as documented in this and other articles. So why include lunate sigma in the master table? --Macrakis (talk) 15:13, 3 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree, as so often. Let's remove it. (I still can't help thinking that whole big "master table" isn't a good idea in the first place.) Fut.Perf.☼16:48, 3 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I personally believe that some mention of the lunate sigma might have been important(?); at least the information in the note, if it is not included in the table. The lunate sigma has a special position in the greek alphabet, despite being now officially out of use. It has been widely used for centuries throughout antiquity and the middle ages (perhaps at times even more than the standard sigma Σ σ). It also varies significantly from the standard sigma; modern people might not even know that C c was at some point a common letter of the Greek alphabet and many might see it as an exclusively Latin letter, which is not the case. Piccco (talk) 22:27, 5 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Would it be worth splitting this into two articles, for the ancient and modern alphabets?
Discussion of the letters wau/digamma, san and qoppa or ancient dialect boundaries isn't really relevant to people who want to know about the modern Greek alphabet, while people who want to know about the ancient Greek alphabet probably don't care overly much about things like the Hellenistic and Byzantine changes to the vowel names (other than a brief mention that modern practice calls the vowels the ancients knew as εἶ, οὖ, ὖ and ὦ by their modernised names epsilon, omicron, upsilon and omega). TWinwood (talk) 22:32, 28 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Assuming that's true (I don't think it necessarily is) I don't think this would be wise; it would result in two short-ish, poorly weighted articles instead of one comprehensive article of average length. I do think the historical information could be refactored to make the structure clearer for each of those reader types.
The topic is pretty coherent as is; the Greek alphabet was more conservative between 500 BC and 1500 AD than almost any other script I can think of. Remsense ‥ 论22:45, 28 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, Remsense is right; such splitting wouldn't make sense and would be completely arbitrary, because where do we draw the line between modern and ancient alphabet. The Greek alphabet is one and the article will obviously include its history. Also, Remsense comment is accurate; the standardized 24 letters version of the Greek alphabet, known as Euclidean, on which the modern alphabet is based, has essentially been the same since the 4th century BC. Piccco (talk) 17:25, 14 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Readership spike
I notice a big spike in readership for this article recently – over a million views. It's not clear what has triggered this.
@Andrew Davidson I was curious about this as well. I couldn't find any particular reason for the readership spike, except for this article that was published yesterday. Though it does not seem like big enough news (if it is news at all) to warrant the spike.
I was also interested in this, but I'm seeing mobile viewership was at <1%, which makes me think that this was probably bots. There was also only a spike on October 5. October 4 and 6 had normal viewership levels
@Piccco, apologies if it seemed I immediately redoubled efforts in the face of your concerns, but I'm not really sure what issues there are with the edits I've made, if any, so I'm having trouble defending them as if they were potentially controversial. My only guess is the headings still, but I thought it would be an unalloyed improvement to make even clearer than before in the heading that the Greek alphabet did not descend from Linear B, which I feel is worth doing since it's being touched on in the § History section, which puts a thumb on the scale for misinterpretation despite the clear prose. Other than that, it was just straightforward MoS and diction fixes. Could you please be a bit more specific? Remsense ‥ 论12:35, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Oh don't worry @Remsense, I know you are a good-faith editor. I left a longer message to the editor's talkpage after you. There wasn't really anything too wrong with your edits either; just as I said there, Linear B or the Phonecian alphabet are not really the main focus of this section, which discusses the early inscriptions and formation of the Greek alphabet (how and when it originated). The word 'precursors' that the user introduced wasn't really an improvement, because the section doesn't have as its main focus the precursors of the alphabet, but the alphabet itself. Linear B is just mentioned as an introduction, it's not really the focus of the first paragraph. Piccco (talk) 12:55, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Alright, btw sorry if this made it seem as if I found your edits controversial. I just restored the stable version because I was a bit frustrated with the other user refusing to cooperate. My only minor 'concern' is what the optimal title for the 1st paragraph would be, because as I said, besides mentioning Linear B, I feel like another focus of the paragraph is also the date of introduction, since this is where it eventually concludes having previously discussed the dates of the earliest inscriptions. Piccco (talk) 13:35, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
level-3 vital article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
