Greek or Hellenic is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to the southern Balkans, the Aegean Islands, parts of Anatolia and the South Caucasus, southern Italy, Albania and Cyprus. It has the longest documented history of any single clearly-defined Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts, the Greek alphabet has been used since the 8th century BC, and was the first alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants.
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