Expert: Maria - 9/20/2005

Question
hi, i would like to paint a picture, and its supposed to be a word to discribe myself and i'd liek it to say Aphrodite, but i would like it to be in ancient lettering or an ancient symbol that stands for Aphrodite. it would be great if you could help me out. thanks for your time


Answer
Hi,

First of all I must tell you that the letters we use still today in English as well as in almost all languages in Western civilization are the same used by the Romans in Latin.
Therefore the name Aphrodite ( capitalized APHRODITE ) is  in Latin characters  the same as in English.

As for the Greek  name Aphrodite, i.e. the goddess of Love and Beauty, whose counterpart was Venus in Latin, cannot be written in Greek letters as the system does not allow  the use of the Greek characters and diacritic marks and then I'm obliged to  write each word  into corresponding letters of Latin alphabet.

So, the only thing I can do is to wrote in brackets the name of each Greek letter:
"Aphrodite" [i.e. alpha-phi-rho-omicron-delta-iota with an acute accent-tau-eta].

This way you can copy each letter after  seeing  the Greek alphabet  at:
http://www.ibiblio.org/koine/greek/lessons/alphabet.html
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~fisher/gnt/trlit.html

Finally with regard to a symbol which stood for the goddess Aphrodite in Greek mythology her attributes were  the dolphin, the dove, the swan, the pomegranate and the lime tree.

Best regards,
Maria