Written language is one of the all-time best human inventions. One of the biggest innovations that helped it reach the broad adoption we see today was the accidental invention of vowels. Early alphabets captured mainly consonants, so a word might appear as “MLK,” and the reader supplied the vowels from context. The Greeks would change that forever after inheriting more letters than they could use.
Around the 8th century BCE, Greek traders encountered the Phoenicians and their alphabet. Greek writing had existed earlier in the form of Linear B, a syllabary used in Mycenaean palaces, but it fell out of use after the Bronze Age collapse. The Phoenician system had about 22 letters, all consonants. When Greeks adopted it, several Phoenician consonants represented sounds Greek simply did not have, such as the guttural aleph or the rough ayin, leaving spare symbols with no clear job.
Instead of discarding those unused letters, Greek scribes did something radical: they reassigned them to represent vowels, which Greek relied on heavily to distinguish words. Aleph became alpha, no longer a consonant but the vowel /a/. He became epsilon, /e/. Yodh turned into iota, /i/. Ayin became omicron, /o/. Waw split into upsilon, /u/, and later also influenced letters like digamma. For the first time, a writing system explicitly encoded vowels alongside consonants, making texts readable without prior memorization.
This small act of reuse spread far. Latin inherited Greek’s vowel system, and Latin passed it to many modern European languages. By giving vowels their own letters, writing became easier to decode and learn, making it an important step toward broader literacy.
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