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
Greek alphabet late ninth century BC or early eighth century BC, the Greek alphabet emerged. The period between the use of the two writing systems, during which no Greek texts are attested, is known as the Greek Dark Ages. The Greeks adopted the alphabet from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, one of the closely related scripts used for the West Semitic languages. However, the Phoenician alphabet is limited to consonants. When it was adopted for writing Greek, certain consonants were adapted to express vowels. The use of both vowels and consonants makes Greek the first alphabet in the narrow sense, as distinguished from