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
Romic alphabet their English "short" sounds when written singly, and their "long" sounds when doubled: Sweet adopted from Ellis and earlier philologists a method creating new letters by rotating existing ones, as in this way no new type would need to be cast: The IPA letter acquired its modern pronunciation and first use with this alphabet. He resurrected three Anglo-Saxon letters, ash , eth and thorn , the first two of which had the pronunciations they retain in the IPA. The consonants were as follows by 1892: The vowels were as follows by 1892. In "wide" vowels, the tongue is described as