Greek is hard, but the last big change to the written language happened as recently as 1982, which makes me believe that it hasn't quite settled in yet. This is my experiment with some ideas I've had about what could make the next revision really awesome.
What Changed
- αι = ε
αι already sounds identical to ε in Modern Greek, so the digraph is dropped. - ει, οι, υι, η, υ = ι
all these spellings produce the same /i/ sound. This does however remove spelling distinctions that currently encode grammatical information like gender, number, and verb conjugation. - ου = Ȣ ȣ
the common digraph gets its own single character. The historic ligature ou. - ντ = D d
the digraph that produces /d/ becomes a single letter. - μπ = Б b
the digraph that produces /b/ becomes a single letter. The uppercase uses cyrillic Б to avoid confusion with Β (Vita). - γκ = γγ = G g
the digraphs that produce /ɡ/ become a single letter. - σ, ς = ϲ
all lowercase sigmas are unified into the lunate sigma ϲ, eliminating positional variants. - ω = ο
lowercase omega merges with omicron. They already share the same /o/ sound in Modern Greek, so the distinction is dropped.
UPDATE 2025-04-16
This was a fun experiment but after playing around with it and getting a lot of
feedback from native Greek speakers, I've come to the conclusion that Greek is
not needlessly complex or "in need of another revision".
This comment on HackerNews brilliantly summarizes exactly what value the things I tried to remove bring
and perfectly illustrate what is lost when a language is over-simplified.