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 As in Phoenician, the difference in length was not originally made in writing.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
Letter (alphabet) ⵕ, ⵙ, ⵚ, ⵜ, ⵟ, ⵡ, ⵢ, ⵣ, ⵥ. International Phonetic Alphabet - used to represent exact pronunciation. example, ʔ named Glottal Stop For other writing systems and their letters, see List of writing systems. Some writing systems have two major forms for each letter: an "uppercase" form (also called "capital" or "majuscule") and a "lowercase" form (also called "minuscule"). Only three Roman letters, "a", "g" and "t" , have more than one standard lowercase form. Upper- and lowercase letters represent the same sound, but serve different functions in writing. Capital letters are most often used at the beginning of