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
Mandaic alphabet the alphabet. Rather than the ancient Semitic names for the letters ("aleph", "beth", "gimel"), the letters are known as "a", "ba", "ga" and so on. It is written from right to left in horizontal lines. It is a cursive script, but not all letters connect within a word. Spaces separate individual words. The Mandaic alphabet contains 22 letters (in the same order as the Aramaic alphabet) and the digraph "adu". The alphabet is formally closed by repeating the first letter, "a", so that it has a symbolic count of 24 letters: Unlike most other Semitic alphabets, vowels are usually written