Zeta


Zeta is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 7. It was derived from the Phoenician letter zayin. Letters that arose from zeta include the Roman Z and Cyrillic З.

Name

Unlike the other Greek letters, this letter did not take its name from the Phoenician letter from which it was derived; it was given a new name on the pattern of beta, eta and theta.
The word zeta is the ancestor of zed, the name of the Latin letter Z in Commonwealth English. Swedish and many Romanic languages do not distinguish between the Greek and Roman forms of the letter; "zeta" is used to refer to the Roman letter Z as well as the Greek letter.

Uses

Letter

The letter ζ represents the voiced alveolar fricative in Modern Greek.
The sound represented by zeta in Greek before 400 BCE is disputed. See Ancient Greek phonology and Pronunciation of Ancient Greek in teaching.
Most handbooks agree on attributing to it the pronunciation , but some scholars believe that it was an affricate . The modern pronunciation was, in all likelihood, established in the Hellenistic age and may have already been a common practice in Classical Attic; for example, it could count as one or two consonants metrically in Attic drama.

Arguments for

  1. PIE *zd becomes ζ in Greek. Contra: these words are rare and it is therefore more probable that *zd was absorbed by *dz ; further, a change from the cluster /zd/ to the affricate /dz/ is typologically more likely than the other way around.
  2. Without there would be an empty space between and in the Greek sound system words with and are rare, and exceptions in phonological and there was in ὅσδε, εἰσδέχται etc.; and c) there was in fact a voiceless correspondent in Archaic Greek.
  3. Persian names with zd and z are transcribed with ζ and σ respectively in Classical Greek ka- = Σαράγγαι. Similarly, the Philistine city Ashdod was transcribed as Ἄζωτος.
  4. Some inscriptions have -ζ- written for a combination -ς + δ- resulting from separate words, e.g. θεοζοτος for θεος δοτος "god-given".
  5. Some Attic inscriptions have -σζ- for -σδ- or -ζ-, which is thought to parallel -σστ- for -στ- and therefore to imply a pronunciation.
  6. ν disappears before ζ like before σ, στ: e.g. *πλάνζω > πλᾰ́ζω, *σύνζυγος > σύζυγος, *συνστέλλω > σῠστέλλω. Contra: ν may have disappeared before /dz/ if one accepts that it had the allophone in that position like /ts/ had the allophone : cf. Cretan ἴαττα ~ ἀποδίδονσα.
  7. Verbs beginning with ζ have ἐ- in the perfect reduplication like the verbs beginning with στ The most prominent example of a verb beginning with στ has in fact ἑ- < *se-'' in the perfect reduplication the words with /ts/ > σ also have ἐ-: Homer ἔσσυμαι, -ται, Ion. ἐσσημένῳ.
  8. Alcman, Sappho, Alcaeus and Theocritus have σδ for Attic-Ionic ζ. Contra: The tradition would not have invented this special digraph for these poets if was the normal pronunciation in all Greek. Furthermore, this convention is not found in contemporary inscriptions, and the orthography of the manuscripts and papyri is Alexandrine rather than historical. Thus, σδ indicates only a different pronunciation from Hellenistic Greek, i.e. either or.
  9. The grammarians Dionysius Thrax and Dionysius of Halicarnassus class ζ with the "double" letters ψ, ξ and analyse it as σ + δ. Contra: The Roman grammarian Verrius Flaccus believed in the opposite sequence, δ + σ, and Aristotle says that it was a matter of dispute . It is even possible that the letter sometimes and for some speakers varied in pronunciation depending upon word position, i.e., like the letter X in English, which is pronounced initially but or elsewhere.
  10. Some Attic transcriptions of Asia Minor toponyms show a -ζζ- for ζ; assuming that Attic value was, it may be an attempt to transcribe a dialectal pronunciation; the reverse cannot be ruled completely, but a -σδ- transcription would have been more likely in this case. This suggests that different dialects had different pronunciations.

    Arguments for dz

  11. The Greek inscriptions almost never write ζ in words like ὅσδε, τούσδε or εἰσδέχται, so there must have been a difference between this sound and the sound of ἵζω, Ἀθήναζε. Contra: a few inscriptions do seem to suggest that ζ was pronounced like σδ; furthermore, all words with written σδ are morphologically transparent, and written σδ may simply be echoing the morphology.
  12. It seems improbable that Greek would invent a special symbol for the bisegmental combination, which could be represented by σδ without any problems., on the other hand, would have the same sequence of plosive and sibilant as the double letters of the Ionic alphabet ψ and ξ, thereby avoiding a written plosive at the end of a syllable. Contra: the use of a special symbol for is no more or no less improbable than the use of ψ for and ξ for, or, for that matter, the later invention ϛ for, which happens to be the voiceless counterpart of. Furthermore, it is not clear that ζ was pronounced when it was originally invented. Mycenean Greek had a special symbol to denote some sort of affricate or palatal consonant; ζ may have been invented for this sound, which later developed into.
  13. Boeotian, Elean, Laconian and Cretan δδ are more easily explained as a direct development from *dz than through an intermediary *zd. Contra: a) the sound development dz > dd is improbable ν has disappeared before ζ > δδ in Laconian πλαδδιῆν and Boeotian σαλπίδδω, which suggests that these dialects have had a phase of metathesis.
  14. Greek in South Italy has preserved until modern times. Contra: a) this may be a later development from or under the influence of Italian; b) even if it is derived from an ancient, it may be a dialectal pronunciation.
  15. Vulgar Latin inscriptions use the Greek letter Z for indigenous affricates, and the Greek ζ is continued by a Romance affricate in the ending -ίζω > Italian. -eggiare, French -oyer. Italian, similarly, has consistently used Z for and . Contra: whether the pronunciation of ζ was, or, di would probably still have been the closest native Latin sound; furthermore, the inscriptions are centuries later than the time for which is assumed.

    Summary

Zeta has the numerical value 7 rather than 6 because the letter digamma was originally in the sixth position in the alphabet.

Mathematics and science

The uppercase zeta is not used, because it is normally identical to Latin Z. The lower case letter can be used to represent:
These characters are used only as mathematical symbols. Stylized Greek text should be encoded using the normal Greek letters, with markup and formatting to indicate text style.