In attic greek most feminine nouns of the first declension have eta throughout the singular because long alpha was usually changed to eta in this dialect except after epsilon iota or rho.
Attic greek long alpha.
If attic greek is the horse and koine greek is the donkey well septuagint greek is something of a mule.
This sound was not shown by a separate letter but by a rough breathing mark ἑ placed above the initial vowel of a word and pronounced before the vowel.
In the attic dialect of greek long alpha is somewhat rare because of a historical change of aː to ɛː when not preceded by e i or r.
Two vowels in a row.
Attic greek also had an h sound that only came at the beginning of some words.
The earliest written records in greek date from the 16th to 11th centuries bc and exist in an archaic writing system linear b belonging to the mycenaean greeks.
Actually over time the language simplified as many languages do the the later koine is simpler than earlier attic.
Alpha long father short drama.
Ancient greek speakers tended to avoid pronouncing two different vowel sounds in a row.
In the fifth century this was a true diphthong but the iota part of the sound weakened during the fourth century to a glide and then disappeared.
Having studied classical i e.
Greek is a branch of the indo european language family which includes english in historical times it already existed in several dialects see article on greek dialects one of which was attic.
The α in the second syllable of ἁμαδρυάς is not preceded by one of those sounds so i m not sure how it could be long.
If two vowels came together they preferred either to pronounce the two vowels together as one sound called a diphthong greek for double sound or to contract the two vowels to form either a single long vowel or diphthong cf.