Greeks added vowels creating a true Alphabet

By adding vowel letters, the ancient Greeks created a true Alphabet for their language.

The Greek Alphabet was adapted from the Phoenicians, but here we have a true alphabet with letters representing both consonants and vowels.  Because the Phoenician, Hebrew, and Arabic scripts have languages of words that begin with consonants, all their letters represent consonants. Greek has many words that begin with vowel sounds, so they designed their alphabet to include symbols for the vowel sounds too.  Ancient Greeks created a truly phonetic alphabet that carries all the sounds of their language.  They also abandoned the custom of associating letters with things, and simply assigned letters to sounds in the Greek language.  There was still no punctuation or spaces between words, and all the letters were uppercase, or majuscule.  The letters were very angular until smoother parchment and vellums came into use.  These made it easier to draw softer, curved forms called uncial. 

    

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In the second century, the Egyptians borrowed the Greek letters and added five of their own Demotic symbols to make the Coptic Alphabet. 

This new writing system included vowels for a total of thirty-two letters in all.   While the Egyptian language had sounds that did not match the Greek, they adapted the letter forms to their own vernacular.  The Coptic was replaced in the 1800’s with Arabic, but is still used today for religious purposes.  The Coptic script helped scholars to better understand the Egyptian language, which made it possible for them to  decipher the ancient  Egyptian Hieroglyphs.