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
Alphabet a new letter ՈՒ ու (which was a digraph before). The Armenian word for "alphabet" is "" (), named after the first two letters of the Armenian alphabet Ա այբ ayb and Բ բեն ben. The Armenian script's directionality is horizontal left-to-right, like the Latin and Greek alphabets. Alphabets often come to be associated with a standard ordering of their letters, which can then be used for purposes of collation—namely for the listing of words and other items in what is called "alphabetical order". The basic ordering of the Latin alphabet (A B C D E F G H I