The singular letter  , found in an archaic inscription on a wall of the Temple of Apollo Delphinius at Dreros, in an inscription from Praisos and in certain other non-Greek texts, was formerly considered a form of crooked iota. On one 6th-century funerary epigram from Sikinos, however, it is used to represent the phoneme /x/. As the alphabet of Sikinos is most probably derived from the Cretan alphabet, the same or a similar phoneme must also have been represented by the specific letter on the inscriptions of Dreros and Praisos. This letter was widely-known in Crete but does not appear to have been used by the Doric Cretans, as their dialect lacked a guttural phoneme. |