of Latin can be used to reconstruct the Greek sounds. Latin often wrote for Greek . This can be explained by the fact that Latin were pronounced as near-close , and therefore were as similar to the Ancient Greek mid vowels as to the Ancient Greek close vowels . > > Sanskrit, Persian, and Armenian also provide evidence. The quality of short is shown by some transcriptions between Ancient Greek and Sanskrit. Greek short was transcribed with Sanskrit long , not with Sanskrit short , which had a closer pronunciation: . Conversely, Sanskrit short was transcribed with Greek . Gr > Skt (an astrological term) Skt > Gr Comparison with older alphabets The Greek alphabet developed from the older Phoenician alphabet. It may be assumed that the Greeks tended to assign to each Phoenician letter that Greek sound which most closely resembled the Phoenician sound. But, as with loanwords, the interpretation is not straightforward. Comparison with younger/derived alphabets The Greek alphabet was in turn the basis of other alphabets, notably the Etruscan and Coptic and later the Armenian, Gothic, and Cyrillic. Similar arguments can be derived in these cases as in the Phoenician-Greek case. For example, in Cyrillic, the letter (ve) stands for , confirming that beta was pronounced as a fricative by the 9th century AD, while the new letter (be) was invented to note the sound . Conversely, in Gothic, the letter derived from beta stands for , so in the 4th century AD, beta may have still been a plosive in Greek although according to evidence from the Greek papyri of Egypt, beta as a stop had been generally replaced by beta as a voiced bilabial fricative by the first century AD. Comparison with Modern Greek Any reconstruction of Ancient Greek needs to take into account how the sounds later developed towards Modern Greek, and how these changes could have occurred. In general, the changes between the reconstructed Ancient Greek and Modern Greek are assumed to be unproblematic in this respect by historical linguists, because all the relevant changes (spirantization, chain-shifts of long vowels towards , loss of initial , restructuring of vowel-length and accentuation systems, etc.) are of types that are cross-linguistically frequently attested and relatively easy to explain. Comparative reconstruction of Indo-European Systematic relationships between sounds in Greek and sounds in other Indo-European languages are taken as strong evidence for reconstruction by historical linguists, because