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 foreshadowed the development of vowel letters with a limited use of "matres lectionis", that is, consonants that pulled double duty as vowels, which for historical reasons occurred mostly at the ends of words. For example, the two letters "wāw" and "yōdh" stood for both the approximant consonants and , and the long vowels and in Phoenician. By this point in time, Greek had lost its sound, so Phoenician "yōdh" was used only for its vocalic value, becoming the Greek vowel letter iota . However, several Greek dialects still had a sound, and here "wāw" was used for both of its