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
Phoenician alphabet corrupt Egyptian. This latter notion is reminiscent of the eventual discovery that the proto-Sinaitic alphabet was inspired by the model of hieroglyphs. The Phoenician letter forms shown here are idealized: actual Phoenician writing was cruder and more variable in appearance. There were also significant variations in Phoenician letter forms by era and region. When alphabetic writing began in Greece, the letter forms used were similar but not identical to the Phoenician ones and vowels were added because the Phoenician alphabet did not contain any vowels. There were also distinct variants of the writing system in different parts of Greece, primarily