The First True Alphabet

Greek holds a specific and well documented distinction among the world's writing systems: it is the first alphabet, in the strict technical sense of a script giving vowels their own dedicated letters standing equal to the consonants, rather than treating vowels as optional marks added to a base of consonant letters the way the Phoenician abjad it descended from did. The Greek adapters repurposed several Phoenician consonant letters whose sounds did not exist in Greek, turning them into vowel signs instead of discarding them, which is how alpha, epsilon, iota, omicron and upsilon came to exist as separate vowel letters alongside the consonants.

This single innovation had consequences well beyond convenience: a script that marks vowels explicitly can represent a spoken language's sound pattern with far less ambiguity than a consonant only abjad can, and the Greek model, passed onward into Etruscan and then Latin, and separately into Cyrillic and other scripts, became the ancestor of most of the alphabets in use across Europe and much of the world today, all ultimately owing their vowel letters to this Greek adaptation.