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Several of the Phoenician consonants encoded sounds not used in Greek, and at some point an unknown genius took a momentous step: he or she converted these unneeded letters into vowels. The new Greek vowels eliminated nearly all the ambiguity of a consonant-only script and thus enabled mastery of the alphabet by children as young as five or six.

- William J. Bernstein. Masters of the Word (2014).


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An alphabet with vowels is more "free monoidable" than one without them.

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