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Okay, the frequency of greek letters has been discussed way more than really necessary...
But as for reasons why certain letters occur over and over again...
First of all, since the beggining of fraternities (with the exception being Phi Beta Kappa since that was the first ever), most groups have been copies of another group. Beta Theta Pi was founded in 1839 making it like 6th or 7th oldest group, and yet our founders modeled it after Alpha Delta Phi (which was the first fraternity on the campus of Miami University) only without the negative aspects that our founders had with that association.
Even today I think everyone who is greek has the feelign that the aims of our organizations are similar - great friendship, high achievement, support from the group, becoming better than you were before. With that assumption it makes sense that since our ideals cross, so too would our letters. I'm pretty sure that Phi for most orgs has to do with friendship or a word associated with friendship, and so it's repeated use makes sense as friendship is a shared value/goal of all organizations. I'm sure that the other common letters have similar types of situations where their meaning is close to that of the meanings for other organizations.
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