Greek alphabet from which the later standard Greek alphabet emerged. Athens used a local form of the "light blue" alphabet type until the end of the fifth century BC, which lacked the letters Ξ and Ψ as well as the vowel symbols Η and Ω. In the Old Attic alphabet, stood for and for . was used for all three sounds (correspondinɡ to classical respectively), and was used for all of (corresponding to classical respectively). The letter (heta) was used for the consonant . Some variant local letter forms were also characteristic of Athenian writing, some of which were shared with the
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