Greek Roots · letter 7 of 24

Eta

The letter that changed jobs, and left half of itself behind as a breathing mark.

How the shape crossed the sea

Phoenician · c. 1000–800 BC

Phoenician ḥet: a courtyard wall or fence.

Archaic Greek · c. 750–500 BC

A closed box with a bar: the courtyard still fenced on all sides.

The classical capital · the New Testament's own letters

Every New Testament manuscript was written in capitals like this one: no lower case, and no spaces between the words.

The Phoenician drawing is the same one the Hebrew hall uses for that letter: at this date the two scripts were one alphabet in two neighbouring hands. The archaic Greek form is simplified from published hand-copies of the early inscriptions, not a facsimile of any single stone: early Greek scribes varied wildly, and wrote right to left as readily as left to right.

Sounds like

A long open e: roughly the vowel in “air,” held. By the New Testament era it was already drifting toward the ee of “feet,” which is where modern Greek left it.

Written ē in scholarly books.

Its number

it is letter 7, the gap is the lost letters, which kept their numbers

Its name means

courtyard (from ḥet)

in Phoenician, not in Greek

Borrowed from

Phoenician ḥet

Well established

This letter has a rare biography: it used to be a consonant. As heta it wrote the h-sound, and it still does in the western alphabets that Latin, and so English, inherited. That is why English H says “aitch” and Greek Η says “ee.”

When Ionia stopped pronouncing h, the letter was free, and it went to the long e. But the h had to be marked somehow, so scribes cut the old letter in half: the left upright became the rough breathing mark that sits over a word beginning with h. Every ῾ in a Greek New Testament is one half of this letter.

Where the New Testament uses this letter

“The day”, and which day is meant

Hēmera is an ordinary word for a day, and the New Testament keeps loading it. “The day of the Lord” arrives like a thief; “that day” is the day of reckoning; and Paul can say “now is the day of salvation” about the present moment. Same word, three distances.

Words that begin here

ἡμέρα

hēmera — day

389 occurrences, and the word behind “the day of the Lord.”

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Ἡλίας

Hēlias — Elijah

The Greek spelling of Eliyahu, and a good look at what happens to a Hebrew name in Greek clothes.

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ἡγέομαι

hēgeomai — to lead, to consider

To go in front, and so, to reckon or count something as being the case.

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