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
History of the Greek alphabet Phoenician values, but with different forms: as the Greek letter digamma for the consonant , and as the letter upsilon for the vowel . Upsilon was added at the end of the alphabet, perhaps to avoid upsetting the alphabetic order that was used in Greek numerals. Phoenician "hē" had been used as a "mater lectionis" for both and in addition to , but in Greek it was restricted to , following the acrophonic principle; its value was instead written with the letter "’āleph", while Greek was written with "ḥeth". All Phoenician letters had been acrophonic, and they remained so in