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
History of the Greek alphabet of the same name, he would have lived at the time of Oedipus. The third tripod bears the inscription again in hexameter verse: . (""Laodamas, while he reigned, dedicated this cauldron to Apollo, the sure of aim, as a lovely offering""). Hyginus recounts the following legend about the introduction of Phoenician letters to Greece: Some ancient Greek scholars argued that the Greek alphabet should not be attributed to the Phoenician alphabet. Diodorus Siculus in his Historical Library, Book 5, suggests that the Phoenicians merely changed the form and shape of earlier letters: In his book On the malice of Herodotus,