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 foreshadowed the development of vowel letters with a limited use of "matres lectionis", that is, consonants that pulled double duty as vowels, which for historical reasons occurred mostly at the ends of words. For example, the two letters "wāw" and "yōdh" stood for both the approximant consonants and , and the long vowels and in Phoenician. By this point in time, Greek had lost its sound, so Phoenician "yōdh" was used only for its vocalic value, becoming the Greek vowel letter iota . However, several Greek dialects still had a sound, and here "wāw" was used for both of its