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.
Greek alphabet of these letters is a matter of some debate. Three of the original Phoenician letters dropped out of use before the alphabet took its classical shape: the letter Ϻ ("san"), which had been in competition with Σ ("sigma") denoting the same phoneme /s/; the letter Ϙ ("qoppa"), which was redundant with Κ ("kappa") for /k/, and Ϝ ("digamma"), whose sound value /w/ dropped out of the spoken language before or during the classical period. Greek was originally written predominantly from right to left, just like Phoenician, but scribes could freely alternate between directions. For a time, a writing style with