Greek alphabet which the sequence of the alphabet could be recited and memorized. In Phoenician, each letter name was a word that began with the sound represented by that letter; thus "ʾaleph", the word for "ox", was used as the name for the glottal stop , "bet", or "house", for the sound, and so on. When the letters were adopted by the Greeks, most of the Phoenician names were maintained or modified slightly to fit Greek phonology; thus, "ʾaleph, bet, gimel" became "alpha, beta, gamma". The Greek names of the following letters are more or less straightforward continuations of their Phoenician antecedents.
History of the Greek alphabet of an upright and less ornamented style of writing more like Latin print. In 1982, the monotonic orthography was officially adopted, abandoning the rough and smooth breathings (since the sound had long since disappeared) and reducing the three types of accent mark to one (since the tone accent had been replaced by a stress accent). Greek pronunciation has also changed considerably since ancient times, but these changes have not been apparent from the orthography, which has remained conservative — see Greek alphabet for a summary of the current situation. The names of some letters were changed in order to distinguish