The Early Greek Alphabet (850 B.C.):
How Early Greeks Solved the Vowel Problem

The lack of vowels in the original alphabet became a problem for the rest of the world that inherited it. Most languages need to have their vowels written.

Semitic languages, such as Phoenician, Hebrew, and Arabic, though spoken with vowels, do not need them written to be intelligible.

However, Phoenicians sometimes indicated vowels for clarity. To do this they used certain consonants as a type of vowel:

^{V or W () for "u" or "o"
Y () for "i"}

They thought of them as reading aids; we call them semivowels.

The Phoenicians often spelled the name David as Dvyd, instead of just Dvd, to assure correct identification. Read from right to left:

The Phoenicians taught the Greeks to read and write with their all-consonant alphabet. But since written Greek could not be understood without vowels, W and Y were used extensively.

After the Greeks had assigned Semitic consonant letters to write their own consonant sounds, they proceeded to assign the leftover consonant letters to write their vowel sounds. There were only five leftovers:

	Phoenician Consonants		Greek Vowels
	('alef)	=	A (alpha)
	(he)	=	E (epsilon)
	(yodh)	=	I (iota)
	O     ('ayin)	=	O (omicron)
	(waw)	=	U (upsilon)

Later, the Greeks realized they needed more vowel letters and added eta and omega, but this was too late to influence the Roman alphabet, which had already adopted the five-vowel Greek alphabet. That is why we write the 14 English vowel sounds with only five letters.