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 As in Phoenician, the difference in length was not originally made in writing.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
History of the Greek alphabet of an upright and less ornamented style of writing more like Latin print. In 1982, the monotonic orthography was officially adopted, abandoning the rough and smooth breathings (since the sound had long since disappeared) and reducing the three types of accent mark to one (since the tone accent had been replaced by a stress accent). Greek pronunciation has also changed considerably since ancient times, but these changes have not been apparent from the orthography, which has remained conservative — see Greek alphabet for a summary of the current situation. The names of some letters were changed in order to distinguish