Greek alphabet . There is a
digamma but no
ksi or
omega. The letter
phi upright in the photograph is missing a stroke and looks like the
omicron Ο, but on the other side of the bottom it is a full Φ. writing, the beginning of the writing with the
Latin alphabet By the 8th century BC, the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet and adapted it to their own language, creating in the process the first "true" alphabet, in which vowels were accorded equal status with consonants. According to Greek legends transmitted by
Herodotus, the alphabet was brought from Phoenicia to Greece by
Cadmus. The letters of the Greek alphabet are the same as those of the Phoenician alphabet, and both alphabets are arranged in the same order. However, whereas separate letters for vowels would have actually hindered the legibility of Egyptian, Phoenician, or Hebrew, their absence was problematic for Greek, where
vowels played a much more important role. The Greeks used for vowels some of the Phoenician letters representing consonants which were not used in Greek speech. All of the names of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet started with consonants, and these consonants were what the letters represented; this is called the
acrophonic principle. However, several Phoenician consonants were absent in Greek, and thus several letter names came to be pronounced with initial vowels. Since the start of the name of a letter was expected to be the sound of the letter (the acrophonic principle), in Greek these letters came to be used for vowels. For example, the Greeks had no glottal stop or voiced pharyngeal sounds, so the Phoenician letters
’alep and
`ayin became Greek
alpha and
o (later renamed
omicron), and stood for the vowels and rather than the consonants and . As this fortunate development only provided for five or six (depending on dialect) of the twelve Greek vowels, the Greeks eventually created
digraphs and other modifications, such as
ei,
ou, and
o—which became
omega—or in some cases simply ignored the deficiency, as in long
a,
i,
u. Several varieties of the Greek alphabet developed. One, known as the
Cumae alphabet, was used west of
Athens and in
southern Italy. The other variation, known as Eastern Greek, was used in Asia Minor. The Athenians () adopted that latter variation and eventually the rest of the Greek-speaking world followed. After first writing right to left, the Greeks eventually chose to write from left to right, unlike the Phoenicians who wrote from right to left. Many Greek letters are similar to Phoenician, except the letter direction is reversed or changed, which can be the result of historical changes from right-to-left writing to
boustrophedon, then to left-to-right writing. Greek is in turn the source of all the modern scripts of Europe. The alphabet of the early western Greek dialects, where the letter
eta remained an , gave rise to the
Old Italic alphabet which in turn developed into the Old
Roman alphabet. In the eastern Greek dialects, which did not have an /h/, eta stood for a vowel, and remains a vowel in modern Greek and all other alphabets derived from the eastern variants:
Glagolitic,
Cyrillic,
Armenian,
Gothic—which used both Greek and Roman letters—and perhaps
Georgian. Although this description presents the evolution of scripts in a linear fashion, this is a simplification. For example, Georgian scripts derive from the Semitic family, but were also strongly influenced in their conception by Greek. A modified version of the Greek alphabet, using an additional half dozen
Demotic hieroglyphs, was used to write
Coptic Egyptian. Then there is
Cree syllabics (an
abugida), which is a fusion of
Devanagari and
Pitman shorthand developed by the missionary
James Evans.
Latin alphabet A tribe known as the
Latins, who became the Romans, also lived in the Italian peninsula like the Western Greeks. From the
Etruscans, a tribe living in the first millennium BC in central Italy, and the Western Greeks, the Latins adopted writing in about the 7th century BC. In adopting writing from these two groups, the Latins dropped four characters from the Western Greek alphabet. They also adapted the Etruscan letter
F, pronounced /w/, giving it the /f/ sound, and the Etruscan S, which had three zigzag lines, was curved to make the modern
S. To represent the
G sound in Greek and the
K sound in Etruscan, the
gamma was used. These changes produced the modern alphabet without the letters
G,
J,
U,
W,
Y, and
Z, as well as some other differences.
C,
K, and
Q in the Roman alphabet could all be used to write both the and sounds; the Romans soon modified the letter C to make G, inserted it in seventh place, where
Z had been, to maintain the
gematria (the numerical sequence of the alphabet). Over the few centuries after
Alexander the Great conquered the Eastern Mediterranean and other areas in the 3rd century BC, the Romans began to borrow Greek words, so they had to adapt their alphabet again to write these words. From the Eastern Greek alphabet, they borrowed
Y and
Z, which were added to the end of the alphabet because the only time they were used was to write Greek words. The
Anglo-Saxons began writing
Old English using the Latin alphabet following its introduction alongside
Augustine of Canterbury's mission to Christianise Britain in the 6th century. Because the
rune wen, which was first used to represent the /w/ sound looked like a p that is narrow and triangular, was easy to confuse with an actual p, the /w/ sound began to be written using a double U. Because the u at the time looked like a V, the double U looked like two Vs,
W was placed in the alphabet after
V.
U developed when people began to use the rounded
U when they meant the vowel U and the pointed
V when the meant the consonant
V.
J began as a variation of
I, in which a long tail was added to the final
I when there were several in a row. People began to use the
J for the consonant and the
I for the vowel by the 15th century, and it was fully accepted in the mid-17th century. == Letter names and order ==