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
Xi (letter) dialects of most of the Greek mainland and Euboea, the sound [ks] was represented by Χ (which in classical Greek is chi, used for ). Because this variant of the Greek alphabet was used in Italy, the Latin alphabet borrowed Χ rather than Ξ as the Latin letter X. While having no Latin derivative, the Xi was adopted into the early Cyrillic alphabet, as the letter ksi (Ѯ, ѯ). The uppercase letter Ξ is used as symbol for: The lowercase letter ξ is used as a symbol for: These characters are used only as mathematical symbols. Stylized Greek text should