History of the Greek alphabet games in honor of the Muses. The majority of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet were adopted into Greek with much the same sounds as they had had in Phoenician. However, Phoenician, like other Semitic scripts, has a range of consonants, commonly called gutturals, that did not exist in Greek: "’āleph" , "hē" , "ḥēth" , and "‘ayin" . Of these, only "ḥēth" was retained in Greek as a consonant, eta, representing the sound in those dialects that had an [h], while the consonants "’āleph, hē" and "‘ayin" became the vowels alpha , e and o , respectively. Phoenician had
Letter (alphabet) from cultures that use logograms–word symbols–to represent words take years longer to learn to read and write than children learning an alphabet. The relative ease of memorizing twenty-six letters contributed to the spread of literacy throughout the world. The first consonantal alphabet found emerged around 1800 BCE to represent the language of the Phoenicians, Semitic workers in Egypt (see Middle Bronze Age alphabets), and was derived from the alphabetic principles of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Our present Roman system derives from this Phoenician alphabet, which had twenty-two letters. Nineteen of our present letters evolved from the early Phoenician forms; letter shapes