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
History of the Greek alphabet becoming the first 'true' alphabet. Apparently, some thirty years later, the same alphabet was introduced to Boeotia, having been adopted perhaps a little earlier in Macedonia, and went on in the course of the 4th century to displace the local alphabets throughout the whole Greek-speaking world. The Ionic alphabet included a new letter, omega, at the end of the alphabet, and standardised the representation of various sounds that had varied from one dialect to another, as follows: The absence of a letter for was of no consequence for the Ionic dialects, but sometimes led to ambiguities in Attic, which had