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 12th to 13th centuries. Additionally, modern manuscripts often distinguish between a velar and palatal and with diacritic dots above the putative palatals: , (cf. the Maltese alphabet). The "wynn" symbol is usually replaced by . Many scholarly works use only and not (the sounds were allophones in Old English and the symbols were used somewhat interchangeably). Macrons are usually found in modern editions to indicate putative long vowels, while they are usually lacking in the originals. In older printed editions of Old English works, an acute accent mark was used to maintain cohesion between Old English and Old Norse printing.