History of the Greek alphabet consonant letter, rather than seemingly have two exceptions in spelling. Greek, like Phoenician, made a distinction for vowel length; indeed, Greek had five short vowels and seven long vowels, but only five vowel letters. As in Phoenician, the difference in length was not originally made in writing. However, by the 6th century BC the letter eta (not needed for a consonant in eastern dialects of Greek, which lacked ) came to stand for the long vowel , and a new letter, omega, was developed for long . The provenance of omega is not known, but it is generally assumed to
History of the alphabet added in the Arabic alphabet include these (except for , which survives as a separate phoneme in Ge'ez ሠ): One modern national alphabet that has not been graphically traced back to the Canaanite alphabet is the Maldivian script, which is unique in that, although it is clearly modeled after Arabic and perhaps other existing alphabets, it derives its letter forms from numerals. Another is the Korean Hangul, which was created independently in 1443. The Osmanya alphabet was devised for Somali in the 1920s by Osman Yusuf Kenadid, and the forms of its consonants appear to be complete innovations. Among alphabets