Both in Ancient and Modern Greek, the letters of the Greek alphabet have fairly stable and consistent symbol-to-sound mappings, making pronunciation of words largely predictable. Ancient Greek spelling was generally near-phonemic. For a number of letters, sound values differ considerably between Ancient and Modern Greek, because their pronunciation has followed a set of systematic phonological shifts that affected the language in its post-classical stages. Earlier the Greeks took over all of the 22 letters of Phoenician.Five of them were reassigned to denote vowel sounds: the glide consonants j (yodh) and w (waw) were used for [i] (Ι, iota) and [u] (Υ, upsilon) respectively; the glottal stop consonant ʔ ('aleph) was used for [a] (Α, alpha); the pharyngeal ʕ (ʿayin) was turned into [o] (Ο, omicron); and the letter for h (he) was turned into [e] (Ε, epsilon).
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