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.
Esh (letter) Esh (letter) Esh (majuscule: Ʃ Unicode U+01A9, minuscule: ʃ Unicode U+0283) is a character used in conjunction with the Latin script. Its lowercase form ʃ is similar to a long s ſ or an integral sign ∫; in 1928 the Africa Alphabet borrowed the Greek letter Sigma for the uppercase form Ʃ, but more recently the African reference alphabet discontinued it, using the lowercase esh only. The lowercase form was introduced by Isaac Pitman in his 1847 Phonotypic Alphabet to represent the voiceless postalveolar fricative (English "sh"). It is today used in the International Phonetic Alphabet, as well as in