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All of the names of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet started with consonants, and these consonants were what the letters represented; this is called the acrophonic principle. However, several Phoenician consonants were absent in Greek, and thus several letter names came to be pronounced with initial vowels.
The phonetic values of some letters changed, some letters were lost and gained, and several writing styles ("hands") developed. Two such styles, the minuscule and majuscule hands, were combined into one script with alternate forms for the lower and upper case letters. Modern uppercase letters differ only slightly from their classical ...
For the Latin sounds represented by the various letters see Latin spelling and pronunciation; for the names of the letters in English see English alphabet. Diacritics were not regularly used, but they did occur sometimes, the most common being the apex used to mark long vowels, which had previously
Phoenician used a system of acrophony to name letters: a word was chosen with each initial consonant sound, and became the name of the letter for that sound. These names were not arbitrary: each Phoenician letter was based on an Egyptian hieroglyph representing an Egyptian word; this word was translated into Phoenician (or a closely related ...
The ll and ch were also formerly considered single letters and sorted separately after l and c, but in 1994, the tenth congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies changed the collating order so that ll came to be sorted between lk and lm in the dictionary and ch came to be sorted between cg and ci; those digraphs were still ...
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In some, but not all, Greek dialects, additional letters were created to represent aspirated versions of Κ and Π (an aspirated version of Τ already existed as described above) and combinations of Κ and Π with Σ. There was some variation between dialects as to the symbols used: [kʰ] could be Κ, ΚΗ, Ψ, or Χ [pʰ] could be Π, ΠΗ, or Φ
The letters u and j, as distinct from v and i, were introduced in the 16th century, and w assumed the status of an independent letter. The variant lowercase form long s (ſ) lasted into early modern English, and was used in non-final position up to the early 19th century. Today, the English alphabet is considered to consist of the following 26 ...