History of the alphabet the early western Greek dialects, where the letter eta remained an , gave rise to the Old Italic alphabet which in turn developed into the Old Roman alphabet. In the eastern Greek dialects, which did not have an /h/, eta stood for a vowel, and remains a vowel in modern Greek and all other alphabets derived from the eastern variants: Glagolitic, Cyrillic, Armenian, Gothic (which used both Greek and Roman letters), and perhaps Georgian. Although this description presents the evolution of scripts in a linear fashion, this is a simplification. For example, the Manchu alphabet, descended from the abjads of
Greek alphabet of these letters is a matter of some debate. Three of the original Phoenician letters dropped out of use before the alphabet took its classical shape: the letter Ϻ ("san"), which had been in competition with Σ ("sigma") denoting the same phoneme /s/; the letter Ϙ ("qoppa"), which was redundant with Κ ("kappa") for /k/, and Ϝ ("digamma"), whose sound value /w/ dropped out of the spoken language before or during the classical period. Greek was originally written predominantly from right to left, just like Phoenician, but scribes could freely alternate between directions. For a time, a writing style with