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 Arabic alphabet History of the Arabic alphabet The history of the Arabic alphabet concerns the origins and the evolution of the Arabic script. It is thought that the Arabic alphabet is a derivative of the Nabataean variation of the Aramaic alphabet, which descended from the Phoenician alphabet, which, among others, gave rise to the Hebrew alphabet and the Greek alphabet (and therefore the Cyrillic and Roman alphabets). The Arabic alphabet evolved either from the Nabataean, or (less widely believed) directly from the Syriac. This table shows changes undergone by the shapes of the letters from the Aramaic original to the Nabataean and