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When alphabetic writing began, with the early Greek alphabet, the letter forms were similar but not identical to Phoenician, and vowels were added to the consonant-only Phoenician letters. There were also distinct variants of the writing system in different parts of Greece, primarily in how those Phoenician characters that did not have an exact ...
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. [2] [3] It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, [4] and is the earliest known alphabetic script to have developed distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. [5]
Phoenician hē had been used as a mater lectionis for both [a] and [e] in addition to [h], but in Greek it was restricted to [e], following the acrophonic principle; its value [a] was instead written with the letter ʼāleph, while Greek [h] was written with ḥeth. All Phoenician letters had been acrophonic, and they remained so in Greek.
The letter eta (Η, , originally called hēta) had two different functions, both derived from the name of its Phoenician model, hēth: the majority of Greek dialects continued to use it for the consonant /h/, similar to its Phoenician value ([ħ]).
Together with Hebrew aleph, Greek alpha and Latin A, it is descended from Phoenician ʾāleph, from a reconstructed Proto-Canaanite ʾalp "ox". Alif has the highest frequency out of all 28 letters in the Arabic abjad .
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Iota (Ι), [1] Latin I and J, Cyrillic І, Coptic iauda (Ⲓ) and Gothic eis. The term yod is often used to refer to the speech sound , a palatal approximant, even in discussions of languages not written in Semitic abjads, as in phonological phenomena such as English "yod-dropping".
According to one theory, [1]: 25–27 the distribution of the sibilant letters in Greek is due to pair-wise confusion between the sounds and alphabet positions of the four Phoenician sibilant signs: Greek sigma got its shape and alphabetic position from Phoenician shin (𐤔), but its name and sound value from Phoenician samekh.
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek xi (Ξ), [3] whereas its name may also be reflected in the name of the otherwise unrelated Greek letter sigma. [4]The archaic "grid" shape of Western Greek xi was adopted in the early Etruscan alphabet (𐌎 esh), but was never included in the Latin alphabet.