English terms with diacritical marks
The Old English Latin alphabet began to replace the Runic alphabet in the 9th century, due to the influence of Celtic Christian missionaries to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The orthography of Old English – which was entirely handwritten in its own time – was not well standardized, though it did not use all the Latin letters, and included several letters not present in the modern alphabet. When reprinted (on a printing press or computer) in modern times, an overdot is occasionally used with two Latin letters to differentiate sounds for the reader:
Greek alphabet
During the Mycenaean period, from around the sixteenth century to the twelfth century BC, Linear B was used to write the earliest attested form of the Greek language, known as Mycenaean Greek. This writing system, unrelated to the Greek alphabet, last appeared in the thirteenth century BC. In the late ninth century BC or early eighth century BC, the Greek alphabet emerged. The period between the use of the two writing systems, during which no Greek texts are attested, is known as the Greek Dark Ages. The Greeks adopted the alphabet from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, one of the closely related scripts used for the West Semitic languages. However, the Phoenician alphabet is limited to consonants. When it was adopted for writing Greek, certain consonants were adapted to express vowels. The use of both vowels and consonants makes Greek the first alphabet in the narrow sense, as distinguished from the abjads used in Semitic languages, which have letters only for consonants.