The Invention of the Alphabet

Figure 2: From Phoenician to Greek

(Click here to see a version of this table that includes the Modern Hebrew script)

Phoenician Symbol (ca. 700 BCE)	Semitic Name	Approximate Semitic Sound	Euboean Greek Symbol (ca 700 BCE)	Ionian Greek Symbol (ca 700 BCE)	Modern Greek Symbol	Greek Name
	'aleph	glottal stop (catch in voice)				alpha
	beth	b				beta
	gimel	g in glory				gamma
	daleth	d				delta
	he	h				epsilon ("plain e")
	waw	w			---	digamma
	zayin	z				zeta
	heth					eta
	teth					theta
	yod	y in yellow				iota
	kaph	k				kappa
	lamed	l				lambda
	mem	m				mu
	nun	n				nu
	samekh	s				xi
	`ayin	pharyngeal consonant (gagging sound)				omicron ("little o')
	pe	p				pi
	tsadhe	ts			---	san
	qoph	rough k			---	qoppa
	resh	r				rho
	shin	sh				sigma
	taw	t				tau
	(waw)	w				upsilon ("plain y")
						phi
						chi
						xi (alternate)
						chi (alternate)
						psi
						omega ("big o")

The Greeks next adapted the Phoenician alphabet for their own use.  The date for this is controversial, but certainly no later than 800 BCE, although the place that this occured is unknown.    Bear in mind that while Phoenician was always written from right to left, ultimately Greek came to be written from left to right, as is our own Latin alphabet.  This explains many of the changes made to the Phoenician symbols in the Greek alphabet.  The Greeks rotated some characters, such as 'aleph  as alpha, and changed the shapes of others.   There had been many variations of the Phoenician characters in their development in any case. 

The great innovation of the Greeks was to provide letters for vowels as well as consonants, although this probably happened by accident rather than by design.   Most likely  the Greeks simply did not hear the beginning non-Greek consonants of the names for certain letters, so they assumed that the letters stood for vowels.  Thus  'aleph became alpha (a Greek word cannot end in a consonant, with few exceptions), he became e (later called epsilon, "plain e"), heth became heta, yod become iota,  and  `ayin became o (since this Semitic consonant is pronounced far back in the throat, the Greeks heard an "o";  this was later called omicron, "little o", that is "short o", in contrast to omega, "big o" that is, "long o".)   They adopted the rest of the names of the Phoenician characters with minor changes to make them more pronounceable.  Thus the Greeks invented the first true alphabet in history, the first to indicate both consonants and vowels independently and more or less completely.  

The Greeks used the Semitic waw in two places:  for digamma, which had the sound of the English consonant w, and for  upsilon, where it must have originally had the sound of oo in "moon".  Later the Greeks omitted digamma , although it had already made its way into the Latin alphabet as F.    The Greek language later changed so that the sound originally represented by upsilon changed to the vowel like German ü or French u in "du" .  They then used omicron-upsilon for the oo sound in "moon", much as French does.

San was an alternative for sigma for a while and then disappeared.  Qoppa, an alternative for kappa, also disappeared,  but not until it made its way into the Latin alphabet as Q .

To represent some sound distinctions made in Greek but not in Phoenician, the Greeks added phi, chi, psi, and later omega to the Phoenician symbols, listing these at the end.  It is not clear where they got these symbols, although omega seems to be omicron with the bottom opened. 

At the beginning there were different local versions of the Greek alphabet.  The version used in Ionia eventually became the standard one.  The version used in Euboea did not use the Phoenician symbol samekh  for xi (although it did list it), instead using the symbol like our letter X for the consonant group /ks/, and using  a symbol somewhat like psi for chi.  This is important, since it was the Euboean Greek alphabet that would  become the Latin alphabet.