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
Old English Latin alphabet (also known as "Caroline") replaced the insular. The letter ðæt (called "eth" or "edh" in modern English) was an alteration of Latin , and the runic letters thorn and wynn are borrowings from futhorc. Also used was a symbol for the conjunction "and", a character similar to the number seven (, called a Tironian et or "ond"), and a symbol for the relative pronoun "þæt", a thorn with a crossbar through the ascender (). Macrons over vowels were rarely used to indicate long vowels. Also used occasionally were abbreviations for following "m"s or "n"s. A number of changes are traditionally