74 THE SOURCE OF THE MODERN ENGLISH (ROMAN) ALPHABET. 
letter, Teth, becomes the Greek Theta, the two letters being very 
similar in power. This letter has no corresponding one in the 
French alphabet. The tenth Hebrew letter, Yod, the Greek Iota, 
and the French i are very similar to one another in power. The 
same remark applies to the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and 
fourteenth Hebrew letters and the corresponding letters in Greek 
and French. As regards the fifteenth Hebrew letter, Samekh, the 
Greek letter Xi has no great resemblance to it in point of power ; 
the latter letter, however, is partly sibilant. Ayin, the sixteenth 
Hebrew letter, is a pure guttural, and the Greeks treated it 
precisely in the same way as they treated the guttural aspirate n ; 
they turned it into a vowel, Omicron, the sound being made in 
just the same part of the throat as the Hebrew guttural, and the 
corresponding letter in French has the same power as the Greek 
letter. The seventeenth Hebrew letter, Pé, appears with the 
same power in Greek and French. As regards Sadeh, the 
eighteenth Hebrew letter, there is no corresponding letter either 
in Greek or French. Neither is there in Greek a letter to corre- 
spond with the nineteenth Hebrew letter, Koph. This is a guttural 
sound, very difficult of acquisition by Europeans, and it is not 
strange that the Greeks did not turn it to use, seeing they already 
had the letter Kappa. Curiously enough, though, the letter is 
represented in French by q; but this letter is not pronounced 
gutturally. The letter is redundant. The three last Hebrew 
letters are represented in Greek and French by corresponding 
letters of precisely similar power. The remaining letters of the 
Greek alphabet, after +, were added from time to time, as the 
necessity for having such symbols became apparent. : 
In conclusion, a study of early Greek history and a comparison 
of the above three alphabets would seem to put it beyond doubt 
that our modern English alphabet, which came to us from the 
Latin language, through the French, is derived from some Semitic 
language, and that this is most probably the Phcenician language. 
