History of the Greek alphabet consonant letter, rather than seemingly have two exceptions in spelling. Greek, like Phoenician, made a distinction for vowel length; indeed, Greek had five short vowels and seven long vowels, but only five vowel letters. As in Phoenician, the difference in length was not originally made in writing. However, by the 6th century BC the letter eta (not needed for a consonant in eastern dialects of Greek, which lacked ) came to stand for the long vowel , and a new letter, omega, was developed for long . The provenance of omega is not known, but it is generally assumed to
History of the Greek alphabet Often, in medieval manuscripts, old uncial letter forms were mixed in with the normal minuscule letters for writing titles or for emphasizing the initial letter of a word or sentence. Like in Latin, this became the root of the modern innovation of letter case, the systematic distinction between uppercase and lowercase letters in orthography. The uppercase letters of modern orthography are derived from the uncial script, while the lowercase letters are derived from minuscules. The invention of printing saw the codification of a more fixed set of letter structures. Greek handwriting made extensive use of ligatures with letters written differently