<P> The Proto - Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, which is conventionally called "Proto - Canaanite" before ca . 1050 BC . The oldest text in Phoenician script is an inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram . This script is the parent script of all western alphabets . By the tenth century, two other forms can be distinguished, namely Canaanite and Aramaic . The Aramaic gave rise to the Hebrew script . The South Arabian alphabet, a sister script to the Phoenician alphabet, is the script from which the Ge'ez alphabet (an abugida) is descended . Vowelless alphabets, which are not true alphabets, are called abjads, currently exemplified in scripts including Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac . The omission of vowels was not always a satisfactory solution and some "weak" consonants are sometimes used to indicate the vowel quality of a syllable (matres lectionis). These letters have a dual function since they are also used as pure consonants . </P> <P> The Proto - Sinaitic or Proto - Canaanite script and the Ugaritic script were the first scripts with a limited number of signs, in contrast to the other widely used writing systems at the time, Cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Linear B . The Phoenician script was probably the first phonemic script and it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for common traders to learn . Another advantage of Phoenician was that it could be used to write down many different languages, since it recorded words phonemically . </P> <P> The script was spread by the Phoenicians across the Mediterranean . In Greece, the script was modified to add the vowels, giving rise to the ancestor of all alphabets in the West . The vowels have independent letter forms separate from the consonants, therefore it was the first true alphabet . The Greeks chose letters representing sounds that did not exist in Greek to represent the vowels . The vowels are significant in the Greek language, and the syllabical Linear B script that was used by the Mycenaean Greeks from the 16th century BC had 87 symbols including 5 vowels . In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, a situation that caused many different alphabets to evolve from it . </P> <P> The Greek alphabet, in its Euboean form, was carried over by Greek colonists to the Italian peninsula, where it gave rise to a variety of alphabets used to write the Italic languages . One of these became the Latin alphabet, which was spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their empire . Even after the fall of the Roman state, the alphabet survived in intellectual and religious works . It eventually became used for the descendant languages of Latin (the Romance languages) and then for most of the other languages of Europe . </P>

Where do the letters of the alphabet come from