The different ways in which these adaptations were carried out allow the two main branches of the early Greek alphabet-the eastern and the western-to be distinguished. The Greek addition of vowels to the alphabet to make it an analogue of the sound pattern produced a writing system that was both manageable and accurate.
In Greek, /kat/, /kit/, and /kot/ are entirely different words, while in Semitic languages they would be the same word in different grammatically inflected forms. The principal Greek change arose in applying a script developed to represent a Semitic language, in which vowel sounds are of minor importance to the identity of a word, to a language in which such vowel differences are crucial to the identity of a word. The letters for b, g, d, z, k, l, m, n, p, r, and t, which are sounds common to the Semitic and Greek languages, were taken over without change. There are, however, some early Greek inscriptions written from left to right, and after 500 bce Greek writing invariably proceeded from left to right. This change occurred approximately in the 6th century bce. The direction of writing in the oldest Greek inscriptions-as in the Semitic scripts-is from right to left, a style that was superseded by the boustrophedon (meaning, in Greek, “as the ox draws the plow”), in which lines run alternately from right to left and left to right.
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