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 Midas. This link may have facilitated the Greeks "borrowing" their alphabet from the Phrygians because the Phrygian letter shapes are closest to the inscriptions from Aeolis. Some scholars argue for earlier dates: Naveh (1973) for the 11th century BC, Stieglitz (1981) for the 14th century, Bernal (1990) for the 18th–13th century, some for the 9th, but none of these are widely accepted. According to legends recounted by Herodotus, the alphabet was first introduced to Greece by a Phoenician named Cadmus: Herodotus estimates that Cadmus lived sixteen hundred years earlier, or around 2000 BC. He had seen and described the Cadmean