History of The Greek Alphabet - Restructuring of The Phoenician Abjad

Restructuring of The Phoenician Abjad

Phonetic transcriptions below (in square brackets) use the International Phonetic Alphabet.

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, which 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 which had an, while the consonants ’āleph, hē, and ‘ayin became the vowels alpha, e and o, respectively.*

Phoenician had 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 Phoenician values, but with different forms: as the Greek letter digamma for the consonant, and as the letter upsilon for the vowel . Upsilon was added at the end of the alphabet, perhaps to avoid upsetting the alphabetic order that was used in Greek numerals. Phoenician hē had been used as a mater lectionis for both and in addition to, but in Greek it was restricted to ; its value was instead written with the acrophonic letter ’āleph, while Greek was written with ḥeth.

All Phoenician letters had been acrophonic. 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 needed a change of name (o, later o micron) to maintain this principle.

Phoenician also had an "emphatic" consonant, ṭēth, which did not exist in Greek. However, Greek had an aspiration distinction which Phoenician did not, and used ṭēth for aspirated .

The Phoenician consonants kaph and qōph represented sounds which were not distinctive in Greek—at most, they may have been identified with allophones determined by the following vowel. The letter qoppa was used in certain Greek dialects (notably the western dialects which ultimately gave rise to Etruscan and eventually the Latin alphabet) but elsewhere dropped out of general use.

Phoenician had three letters, sāmekh, ṣādē, and šin, representing three or probably four voiceless sibilant sounds, where Greek only required one. The history here is complicated, but basically sāmekh dropped out in certain dialects, and was reused to represent in others, while usage for the sound varied between ṣādē and šin. The letter now known as sigma took its name from sāmekh but its form from šin, while the letter San, which occurred in a few dialects only, took its name from šin but its place in the alphabet from ṣādē. A further Greek letter of uncertain origin, sampi, is found occasionally, and may represent an affricate such as .

For the special case of zeta, see Zeta (letter).

*Note: some of the modern names of the Greek letters date from a much later period: see below.