likely represented the consonant cluster , phonetically . For metrical purposes it was treated as a double consonant, thus forming a heavy syllable. In Archaic Greek, when the letter was adopted from Phoenician zayin, the sound was probably an affricate . In Koine Greek, represented . It is more likely that this developed from rather than from Attic . Ζεύς ('Zeus') — Archaic , Attic , late Koine in the clusters were somewhat aspirated, as and , but in this case the aspiration of the first element was not phonologically contrastive: no words distinguish , for example (see below for explanation). Nasals Ancient Greek has two nasals: the bilabial nasal , written and the alveolar nasal , written . Depending on the phonetic environment, the phoneme was pronounced as ; see below. On occasion, the phoneme participates in true gemination without any assimilation in place of articulation, as for example in the word . Artificial gemination for metrical purposes is also found occasionally, as in the form , occurring in the first verse of Homer's Odyssey. Liquids Ancient Greek has the liquids and , written and respectively. The letter lambda probably represented a lateral ("clear") as in Modern Greek and most European languages, rather than a velarized ("dark") as in English in coda position. The letter rho was pronounced as an alveolar trill , as in Italian or Modern Greek rather than as in standard varieties of English or French. At the beginning of a word, it was pronounced as a voiceless alveolar trill . In some cases, initial in poetry was pronounced as a geminate (phonemically , phonetically ), shown by the fact that the previous syllable is counted as heavy: for instance must be pronounced as in Euripides, Electra 772, as w/ Aristophanes in his play The Frogs 1059, and as in Iliad 12.159. Semivowels The semivowels were not present in standard Attic Greek at the beginnings of words. However, diphthongs ending in were usually pronounced with a double semivowel or before a vowel. Allen suggests that these were simply semivocalic allophones of the vowels, although in some cases they developed from earlier semivowels. The labio-velar approximant at the beginning of a syllable survived in some non-Attic dialects, such as Arcadian and Aeolic; a voiceless labio-velar approximant probably also occurred in Pamphylian and Boeotian. is sometimes written with the letter digamma , and later with and , and