Vowels
The Greeks take the Phoenician alphabet and add signs for the sounds between consonants.
- When
- Known to
- ± 50 years
- Era
- Iron Age, Holocene
Adopting Phoenician letters around 800 BCE, Greek speakers repurpose signs for Semitic consonants their language lacked as vowels — aleph becomes alpha, he becomes epsilon. The result is the first alphabet to represent both consonants and vowels systematically, which makes a text unambiguous without knowing the language in advance. Every European alphabet descends from it, and the earliest surviving Greek inscriptions are graffiti and a line of verse on a wine jug.