Alphabet all alphabets in the West. The vowels have independent letter forms separate from those of consonants; therefore it was the first true alphabet. The Greeks chose letters representing sounds that did not exist in Greek to represent vowels. Vowels are significant in the Greek language, and the syllabical Linear B script that was used by the Mycenaean Greeks from the 16th century BC had 87 symbols, including 5 vowels. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, a situation that caused many different alphabets to evolve from it. The Greek alphabet, in its Euboean form, was
English words without vowels the nth degree", is in fairly common usage. Another mathematical term without vowel letters is "rng" , derived from "ring" by deleting the letter . A more obscure example is "ln". Vowelless proper names from other languages, such as the surname Ng, may retain their original spelling, even if they are pronounced with vowels. In the Middle English period, there were no standard spellings, but was sometimes used to represent either a vowel or a consonant sound in the same way that Modern English does with , particularly during the 14th and 15th centuries. This vocalic generally represented , as