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 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