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 Greek. Since the names of the letters "’āleph" and "hē" were pronounced and by the Greeks, with initial vowels due to the silent gutturals (the disambiguation "e psilon" "narrow e" came later), the acrophonic principle was retained for vowels as well as consonants by using them for the Greek vowel sounds and . Only the letter "‘ayin" for necessitated a change of name ("o", later "o micron"). Phoenician also had an "emphatic" consonant, "ṭēth", which did not exist in Greek. However, Greek had an aspiration distinction that Phoenician lacked, and used ṭēth for the aspirated . The Phoenician consonants "kaph"