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 Greek. Since the names of the letters "’āleph" and "hē" were pronounced and by the Greeks, with initial vowels due to the silent gutturals (the disambiguation "e psilon" "narrow e" came later), the acrophonic principle was retained for vowels as well as consonants by using them for the Greek vowel sounds and . Only the letter "‘ayin" for necessitated a change of name ("o", later "o micron"). Phoenician also had an "emphatic" consonant, "ṭēth", which did not exist in Greek. However, Greek had an aspiration distinction that Phoenician lacked, and used ṭēth for the aspirated . The Phoenician consonants "kaph"