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
Regional accents of English pronunciation of "pearl" in some variants of Scottish English can sound like the entirely unrelated word "petal" to an American ear. For a summary of the differences between accents, see International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects. English dialects differ greatly in their pronunciation of open vowels. In Received Pronunciation, there are four open back vowels, , but in General American there are only three, , and in most dialects of Canadian English only two, . In addition, which words have which vowel varies between dialects. Words like "bath" and "cloth" have the vowels in Received Pronunciation, but in General