A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia. For other uses or meanings of Caslon see Caslon (disambiguation. Cyclopaedia or A Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences ( folio, 2 vols

Writing systems
History
Grapheme
List of writing systems
Types
Featural alphabet
Alphabet
Abjad
Abugida
Syllabary
Logography
Related
Pictogram
Ideogram

An alphabet is a standardized set of letters—basic written symbols—each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. A writing system is a type of Symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in Language. The history of writing encompasses the various Writing systems that evolved in the Early Bronze Age (late 4th millennium BC) In Typography, a grapheme is the fundamental unit in written language. This is a list of writing systems (or scripts) classified according to some common distinguishing features A featural alphabet is an Alphabet wherein the shapes of the letters are not arbitrary but encode phonological features of the phonemes they represent An Abjad is a type of Writing system in which each symbol stands for a Consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate Vowel. An abugida ( from Ge‘ez አቡጊዳ ’äbugida or Amharic አቡጊዳ ’abugida is a segmental Writing system which A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate Syllables which make up Words A symbol in a syllabary typically represents an optional A logogram, or logograph, is a Grapheme which represents a word or a Morpheme (a meaningful unit of language A pictogram ( also spelled pictogramme) or pictograph is a Symbol representing a Concept, object, activity place or event An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek idea "idea" + grafo "to write" is a Graphic symbol that represents an Idea A letter is an element in an Alphabetic system of writing such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants The phoneME project is Sun Microsystems reference implementation of Java virtual machine and associated libraries of Java ME with source licensed under the GNU A spoken language is a human Natural language in which the Words are uttered through the Mouth. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic unit, and syllabaries, in which each character represents a syllable. A writing system is a type of Symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in Language. A logogram, or logograph, is a Grapheme which represents a word or a Morpheme (a meaningful unit of language A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate Syllables which make up Words A symbol in a syllabary typically represents an optional A syllable ( Greek:) is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds Alphabets are classified according to how they indicate vowels:

• the same way as consonants, as in Greek (true alphabet)
• modifications of consonants, as in Hindi (abugida)
• not at all, as in Arabic (abjad)

The word "alphabet" came into Middle English from the Late Latin word Alphabetum, which in turn originated in the Ancient Greek Alphabetos, from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. The Greek alphabet (Ελληνικό αλφάβητο is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early An abugida ( from Ge‘ez አቡጊዳ ’äbugida or Amharic አቡጊዳ ’abugida is a segmental Writing system which The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa such as Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. An Abjad is a type of Writing system in which each symbol stands for a Consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate Vowel. Middle English is the name given by Historical linguistics to the diverse forms of the English language spoken between the Norman invasion of Vulgar Latin (in Latin sermo vulgaris, "folk speech" is a Blanket term covering the popular Dialects and Sociolects of the Latin The Ancient Greek language is the historical stage in the development of the Hellenic language family spanning the Archaic (c Alpha (uppercase Α, lowercase α; Αλφα is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. Beta (uppercase Β, lowercase β, internal ϐ; Βήτα Vita is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. The Greek alphabet (Ελληνικό αλφάβητο is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early ^[1]. Alpha and beta in turn came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet, and meant ox and house respectively. The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to originate around 1050 BC There are dozens of alphabets in use today. Most of them are composed of lines (linear writing); notable exceptions are Braille, fingerspelling, and Morse code. The Braille system is a method that is widely used by blind people to read and write Fingerspelling (or dactylology) is the representation of the letters of a Writing system, and sometimes Numeral systems using only the hands Morse code is a Character encoding for transmitting telegraphic information using standardized sequences of short and long elements to represent the letters numerals

Linguistic definition and context

Main article: Writing system

The term alphabet prototypically refers to a writing system that has characters (graphemes) for representing both consonant and vowel sounds, even though there may not be a complete one-to-one correspondence between symbol and sound. A writing system is a type of Symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in Language. In Typography, a grapheme is the fundamental unit in written language.

A grapheme is an abstract entity which may be physically represented by different styles of glyphs. In Typography, a grapheme is the fundamental unit in written language. For other uses see Abstract In Philosophy it is commonly considered that every object is either abstract or concrete A glyph is an element of writing Two or more glyphs representing the same symbol whether interchangeable or context-dependent are called Allographs the abstract unit they There are many written entities which do not form part of the alphabet, including numerals, mathematical symbols, and punctuation. This is a listing of common symbols found within all branches of the science of Mathematics. Some human languages are commonly written by using a combination of logograms (which represent morphemes or words) and syllabaries (which represent syllables) instead of an alphabet. A logogram, or logograph, is a Grapheme which represents a word or a Morpheme (a meaningful unit of language In Morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. A word is a unit of Language that carries meaning and consists of one or more Morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together and has a Phonetic A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate Syllables which make up Words A symbol in a syllabary typically represents an optional A syllable ( Greek:) is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters are two of the best-known writing systems with predominantly non-alphabetic representations. Egyptian hieroglyphs (ˈhaɪərəʊɡlɪf from Greek grc-Grek ἱερογλύφος " sacred carving " also hieroglyphic = grc-Grek A Chinese character, also known as a Han character ( is a Logogram used in writing Chinese (hanzi Japanese (

Non-written languages may also be represented alphabetically. For example, linguists researching a non-written language (such as some of the indigenous Amerindian languages) will use the International Phonetic Alphabet to enable them to write down the sounds they hear.

Most, if not all, linguistic writing systems have some means for phonetic approximation of foreign words, usually using the native character set. ^[2]

History

Main article: History of the alphabet

Middle Eastern Scripts

A specimen of Proto-Sinaitic script, one of the earliest (if not the very first) phonemic scripts

The history of the alphabet starts in ancient Egypt. The history of the Alphabet begins in Ancient Egypt, more than a millennium into the History of writing. Ancient Egypt was an Ancient Civilization in eastern North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now By 2700 BCE Egyptian writing had a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. The 27th century BC is a Century which lasted from the year 2700 BC to 2601 BC In Articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a Speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the upper Vocal tract, the upper vocal These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names. A logogram, or logograph, is a Grapheme which represents a word or a Morpheme (a meaningful unit of language ^[3]

However, although seemingly alphabetic in nature, the original Egyptian uniliterals were not a system and were never used by themselves to encode Egyptian speech. ^[4] In the Middle Bronze Age an apparently "alphabetic" system known as the Proto-Sinaitic script is thought by some to have been developed in central Egypt around 1700 BCE for or by Semitic workers, but only one of these early writings has been deciphered and their exact nature remains open to interpretation. The term Bronze Age refers to a period in human cultural development when the most advanced Metalworking (at least in systematic and widespread use included techniques for The Middle Bronze Age alphabets are two similar Undeciphered scripts dated to be from the Middle Bronze Age (2000-1500 BCE and believed to be ancestral This article is about the country of Egypt For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic Egypt topics. In Linguistics and Ethnology, Semitic (from the Biblical " Shem " Hebrew שם translated as "name" Arabic: ساميّ ^[5] Based on letter appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. ^[5]

This script eventually developed into the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, which in turn was refined into the Phoenician alphabet. The Proto-Canaanite alphabet is a consonantal alphabet of twenty-two acrophonic glyphs found in Levantine texts of the Late Bronze Age (from ca The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to originate around 1050 BC ^[6] Note that the scripts mentioned above are not considered proper alphabets, as they all lack characters representing vowels. These early vowelless alphabets are called abjads, and still exist in scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew and Syriac. An Abjad is a type of Writing system in which each symbol stands for a Consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate Vowel. The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa such as Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. The Hebrew alphabet (אָלֶף-בֵּית עִבְרִי alephbet ’ivri) consists of 22 letters used for writing the Hebrew language. The Syriac alphabet is a Writing system used to write the Syriac language from around the 2nd century BC.

Phoenician was the first major phonemic script. ^[7][8] In contrast to two other widely used writing systems at the time, Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, each of which contained thousands of different characters, it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for common traders to learn. Egyptian hieroglyphs (ˈhaɪərəʊɡlɪf from Greek grc-Grek ἱερογλύφος " sacred carving " also hieroglyphic = grc-Grek Another advantage to Phoenician was that it could be used to write down many different languages, since it recorded words phonemically.

The script was spread by the Phoenicians, whose Thalassocracy allowed the script to be spread across the Mediterranean. The term thalassocracy (from the θάλασσα meaning sea and κρατείν meaning "to rule" giving θαλασσοκρατία "rule of the sea" ^[7] In Greece, the script was modified to add the vowels, giving rise to the first true alphabet. The Greeks took letters which did not represent sounds that existed in Greek, and changed them to represent the vowels. This marks the creation of a "true" alphabet, with the presence of both vowels and consonants as explicit symbols in a single script. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, a situation which caused many different alphabets to evolve from it.

European alphabets

Codex Zographensis in the Glagolitic alphabet from Medieval Bulgaria

The Cumae form was carried over to the Italian peninsula, where it gave rise to a variety of alphabets used to inscribe the Italic languages. The Codex Zographensis (Зографско евангелие andЗографское евангелие is an Illuminated manuscript Gospel Book that The state of Bulgaria (България transliterated bg-Latn ''Balgaria'' The country preserves the traditions (in ethnic name language and alphabet of the First Bulgarian The Cumae alphabet, was a western variant of the early Greek alphabet, used between the 8th to 5th centuries BC The Italic subfamily is a member of the Indo-European language family's Centum branch One of these became the Latin alphabet, which was spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their empire. Even after the fall of the Roman state, the alphabet survived in intellectual and religious works. It eventually became used for the descendant languages of Latin (the Romance languages), and then for the other languages of Europe. The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages, or Neolatin languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising all

Another notable script is Elder Futhark, mewhich is believed to have evolved out of one of the Old Italic alphabets. The Elder Futhark (or Elder Fuþark, Older Futhark, Old Futhark) is the oldest form of the Runic alphabet, used by Germanic tribes Old Italic refers to several now extinct Alphabet systems used on the Italian Peninsula in ancient times for various Indo-European (predominantly Italic Elder Futhark gave rise to a variety of alphabets known collectively as the Runic alphabets. The Runic alphabets were used for Germanic languages from 100 AD to the late Middle Ages. Its usage was mostly restricted to engravings on stone and jewelry, although inscriptions have also been found on bone and wood. These alphabets have since been replaced with the Latin alphabet, except for decorative usage for which the runes remained in use until the 20th century.

The Glagolitic alphabet was the script of the liturgical language Old Church Slavonic, and became the basis of the Cyrillic alphabet. The Glagolitic alphabet or Glagolitsa is the oldest known Slavic Alphabet. to make sure old Cyrillic letters are displayed properly (For example instead of just Ѣ write Ѣ The Cyrillic alphabet (səˈrɪlɪk also called azbuka, from the old name of the first two letters is actually a family of Alphabets, subsets of which are used by The Cyrillic alphabet is one of the most widely used modern alphabets, and is notable for its use in Slavic languages and languages within the former Soviet Union. Variants include the Bulgarian and Russian alphabets. Bulgarian (български език IPA: ɛzˈik is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group The modern Russian alphabet is a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet. The Glagolitic alphabet is believed to have been created by Saints Cyril and Methodius, while the Cyrillic alphabet was invented by the Bulgarian scholar Clement of Ohrid, who was their disciple. Saints Cyril and Methodius (Κύριλλος και Μεθόδιος Old Church Slavonic: Кѷриллъ и Меѳодїи) were two Byzantine Greek brothers born The Bulgarians (българи balgari) are a South Slavic people generally associated with the Republic of Bulgaria and the Bulgarian language Saint Clement of Ohrid (Свети Климент Охридски sve'ti 'kliment 'oxridski (ca They feature many letters that appear to have been borrowed from or influenced by the Greek alphabet and the Hebrew alphabet. The Greek alphabet (Ελληνικό αλφάβητο is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early The Hebrew alphabet (אָלֶף-בֵּית עִבְרִי alephbet ’ivri) consists of 22 letters used for writing the Hebrew language.

Asian alphabets

Beyond the logographic Chinese writing, many phonetic scripts are in existence in Asia. Written Chinese comprises the written symbols used to represent Spoken Chinese and the rules about how they are arranged and punctuated The Arabic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet, and other abjads of the Middle East are developments of the Aramaic alphabet, but because these writing systems are largely consonant-based they are often not considered true alphabets. The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa such as Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. The Hebrew alphabet (אָלֶף-בֵּית עִבְרִי alephbet ’ivri) consists of 22 letters used for writing the Hebrew language. The Syriac alphabet is a Writing system used to write the Syriac language from around the 2nd century BC. An Abjad is a type of Writing system in which each symbol stands for a Consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate Vowel. The Aramaic alphabet is an Abjad, a Consonantal Alphabet, used for writing Aramaic. In Articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a Speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the upper Vocal tract, the upper vocal

Most alphabetic scripts of India and Eastern Asia are descended from the Brahmi script, which is often believed to be a descendent of Aramaic, but this link is controversial. Brāhmī script refers to the oldest members of the Brahmic family of alphabets. These scripts are abugidas, that is, they write syllables instead of individual sounds, so their status as alphabets is disputed. An abugida ( from Ge‘ez አቡጊዳ ’äbugida or Amharic አቡጊዳ ’abugida is a segmental Writing system which

Zhuyin on a cell phone

In Korea, the Hangeul alphabet was created, although it may also have been derived from the Mongolian Phagspa script, which in turn was derived from the Brahmi script. Korea is a geographic area composed of two sovereign countries a civilization and a former state situated on the Korean Peninsula in East Asia. The ’Phagspa script (дөрвөлжин үсэг dörvöljin üseg "square script" Tibetan: hor gsar yig "new Mongolian script" Hangeul is a unique alphabet in a variety of ways: it is a featural alphabet, where many of the letters are designed off of a sound's place of articulation; it was consciously designed by the government at the time; and it situates individual letters into syllable clusters with equal dimensions as Chinese characters to allow for mixed script writing. A featural alphabet is an Alphabet wherein the shapes of the letters are not arbitrary but encode phonological features of the phonemes they represent A Chinese character, also known as a Han character ( is a Logogram used in writing Chinese (hanzi Japanese (

Zhuyin (sometimes called Bopomofo) is an alphabet used to phonetically transcribe Mandarin Chinese in the Republic of China. REPUBLIC OF CHINA ARTICLE GUIDELINES After the later establishment of the People's Republic of China and its adoption of Hanyu Pinyin, the use of Zhuyin in Mainland China today is limited, but it's still widely used in Taiwan where the Republic of China still governs. Talk People's Republic of China) PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA ARTICLE GUIDELINES Pinyin, more formally Hanyu pinyin, is the most common Standard Mandarin Romanization system in use Mainland China, Continental China, the Chinese mainland or simply the mainland, is a geopolitical term synonymous with the area that is under the jurisdiction Taiwan ( Taiwanese: Tâi-oân/Tāi-oân (historically 大灣/台員/大員/台圓/大圓/台窩灣 is an Island in East Asia. Zhuyin developed out of a form of Chinese shorthand based on Chinese characters in the early 1900s and has elements of both an alphabet and a syllabary. Like an alphabet the phonemes of syllable initals are represented by individual symbols, but like a syllabary the phonemes of the syllable finals are not; rather, each possible final (excluding the medial glide) is represented by its own symbol. In Phonetics and Phonology, a syllable onset is the part of a Syllable that precedes the Syllable nucleus. In the study of Phonology in Linguistics, the rime or rhyme of a Syllable consists of a nucleus and an optional coda For example, luan is represented as ㄌㄨㄢ (l-u-an), where the last symbol ㄢ represents the entire final -an. While Zhuyin is not used as a mainstream writing system, it is still often used in ways similar to a romanization system—that is, for aiding in pronunciation and as an input method for Chinese characters on computers and cell phones. In Linguistics, romanization (or latinization, also spelled romanisation or latinisation) is the representation of a Word or

European alphabets, especially Latin and Cyrillic, have been adapted for many languages of Asia. Arabic is also widely used, sometimes as an abjad (as with Urdu and Persian) and sometimes as a complete alphabet (as with Kurdish and Uyghur). The Urdu alphabet is the Right to left Alphabet used for the Urdu language. The Perso-Arabic script is a Writing system that is based on the Arabic alphabet. The Kurdish alphabet is a Writing system for the Kurdish language.

Types

Alphabets:  Latin ,  Latin and Arabic ,  Cyrillic ,  Latin and Cyrillic ,  Greek ,  Georgian ,  Armenian 
Abjads:  Arabic ,  Hebrew and Arabic 
Abugidas:  North Indic ,  South Indic ,  Ethiopic ,  Thaana   Canadian Syllabic ,
Logographic+syllabic:  Pure logographic ,  Mixed logographic and syllabaries ,  Featural-alphabetic syllabary + limited logographic   Featural-alphabetic syllabary 

The term "alphabet" is used by linguists and paleographers in both a wide and narrow sense. Canadian Aboriginal syllabic writing', or simply syllabics, is a family of Abugidas {dubious}} used to write a number of Aboriginal Canadian Nearly all the segmental scripts (loosely " Alphabets " but see below for more precise terminology used around the globe appear to have derived from the Linguistics is the scientific study of Language, encompassing a number of sub-fields Palaeography, palæography ( British) or paleography ( American) (from the Greek grc παλαιός palaiós, In the wider sense, an alphabet is a script that is segmental on the phoneme level, that is, that has separate glyphs for individual sounds and not for larger units such as syllables or words. The phoneME project is Sun Microsystems reference implementation of Java virtual machine and associated libraries of Java ME with source licensed under the GNU In the narrower sense, some scholars distinguish "true" alphabets from two other types of segmental script, abjads and abugidas. An Abjad is a type of Writing system in which each symbol stands for a Consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate Vowel. An abugida ( from Ge‘ez አቡጊዳ ’äbugida or Amharic አቡጊዳ ’abugida is a segmental Writing system which These three differ from each other in the way they treat vowels: Abjads have letters for consonants and leave most vowels unexpressed; abugidas are also consonant-based, but indicate vowels with diacritics to or a systematic graphic modification of the consonants. A diacritic ( also called a diacritic or diacritical mark, point, or sign, is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation In alphabets in the narrow sense, on the other hand, consonants and vowels are written as independent letters. The earliest known alphabet in the wider sense is the Wadi el-Hol script, believed to be an abjad, which through its successor Phoenician is the ancestor of modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin (via the Old Italic alphabet), Cyrillic (via the Greek alphabet) and Hebrew (via Aramaic). The Middle Bronze Age alphabets are two similar Undeciphered scripts dated to be from the Middle Bronze Age (2000-1500 BCE and believed to be ancestral An Abjad is a type of Writing system in which each symbol stands for a Consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate Vowel. The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to originate around 1050 BC The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa such as Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. The Greek alphabet (Ελληνικό αλφάβητο is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early Old Italic refers to several now extinct Alphabet systems used on the Italian Peninsula in ancient times for various Indo-European (predominantly Italic The Cyrillic alphabet (səˈrɪlɪk also called azbuka, from the old name of the first two letters is actually a family of Alphabets, subsets of which are used by The Hebrew alphabet (אָלֶף-בֵּית עִבְרִי alephbet ’ivri) consists of 22 letters used for writing the Hebrew language.

Examples of present-day abjads are the Arabic and Hebrew scripts; true alphabets include Latin, Cyrillic, and Korean hangul; and abugidas are used to write Tigrinya Amharic, Hindi, and Thai. The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa such as Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. The Hebrew alphabet (אָלֶף-בֵּית עִבְרִי alephbet ’ivri) consists of 22 letters used for writing the Hebrew language. The Cyrillic alphabet (səˈrɪlɪk also called azbuka, from the old name of the first two letters is actually a family of Alphabets, subsets of which are used by Tigrinya ( Ge'ez: ትግርኛ tigriññā) also spelled Tigrigna, Tigrina, less commonly Tigrinian, Tigrinyan, is Amharic (አማርኛ amarəñña) is a Semitic language spoken in North Central Ethiopia by the Amhara. Hindi ( Devanāgarī: hi [[wiktहिन्दी हिन्दी]] or hi [[wiktहिंदी हिंदी]] IAST:, IPA:) is Thai (th ภาษาไทย, transcription: phasa thai, transliteration:; pʰāːsǎːtʰāj is the national and The Canadian Aboriginal syllabics are also an abugida rather than a syllabary as their name would imply, since each glyph stands for a consonant which is modified by rotation to represent the following vowel. Canadian Aboriginal syllabic writing', or simply syllabics, is a family of Abugidas {dubious}} used to write a number of Aboriginal Canadian (In a true syllabary, each consonant-vowel combination would be represented by a separate glyph. )

The boundaries between the three types of segmental scripts are not always clear-cut. For example, Sorani Kurdish is written in the Arabic script, which is normally an abjad. Soranî ( Kurdish: سۆرانی is the name of a Kurdish dialect that is spoken in Iran and Iraq and such is a member of the Iranian languages The Kurdish language (Kurdish Kurdî or کوردی is a term used for the language spoken by Kurds. The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa such as Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. However, in Kurdish, writing the vowels is mandatory, and full letters are used, so the script is a true alphabet. Other languages may use a Semitic abjad with mandatory vowel diacritics, effectively making them abugidas. On the other hand, the Phagspa script of the Mongol Empire was based closely on the Tibetan abugida, but all vowel marks were written after the preceding consonant rather than as diacritic marks. The ’Phagspa script (дөрвөлжин үсэг dörvöljin üseg "square script" Tibetan: hor gsar yig "new Mongolian script" The Mongol Empire ( Mongolyn Ezent Güren or mn Их Mонгол улс Ikh Mongol Uls; 1206–1368 was the largest contiguous Empire The Tibetan script is an Abugida of Indic origin used to write the Tibetan language as well as the Dzongkha language, Ladakhi language Although short a was not written, as in the Indic abugidas, one could argue that the linear arrangement made this a true alphabet. Conversely, the vowel marks of the Tigrinya abugida and the Amharic abugida (ironically, the original source of the term "abugida") have been so completely assimilated into their consonants that the modifications are no longer systematic and have to be learned as a syllabary rather than as a segmental script. Ge'ez (gez ግዕዝ) also called Ethiopic, is an Abugida script that was originally developed to write Ge'ez, a Semitic language Ge'ez (gez ግዕዝ) also called Ethiopic, is an Abugida script that was originally developed to write Ge'ez, a Semitic language A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate Syllables which make up Words A symbol in a syllabary typically represents an optional Even more extreme, the Pahlavi abjad eventually became logographic. A logogram, or logograph, is a Grapheme which represents a word or a Morpheme (a meaningful unit of language (See below. )

Thus the primary classification of alphabets reflects how they treat vowels. Categorization is the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated and understood. For tonal languages, further classification can be based on their treatment of tone, though names do not yet exist to distinguish the various types. Tone is the use of pitch in Language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is to distinguish or inflect words Some alphabets disregard tone entirely, especially when it does not carry a heavy functional load, as in Somali and many other languages of Africa and the Americas. Somali ( Af Soomaali, الصوماليه is a member of the East Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken by ethnic Somalis Such scripts are to tone what abjads are to vowels. Most commonly, tones are indicated with diacritics, the way vowels are treated in abugidas. This is the case for Vietnamese (a true alphabet) and Thai (an abugida). The Vietnamese alphabet has the following 29 letters in collating order Description The Vietnamese alphabet called Chữ Quốc Ngữ The Thai Alphabet (อักษรไทย àksŏn thai) is used to write the Thai language and other minority languages in Thailand In Thai, tone is determined primarily by the choice of consonant, with diacritics for disambiguation. In the Pollard script, an abugida, vowels are indicated by diacritics, but the placement of the diacritic relative to the consonant is modified to indicate the tone. Biography Born the son of a Bible Christian Church preacher Sam Pollard initially aimed for a career in the civil service More rarely, a script may have separate letters for tones, as is the case for Hmong and Zhuang. Hmong ( RPA: Hmoob) or Mong ( RPA: Moob) is the common name for a group of dialects of the West Hmongic (Chuanqiandian branch The Zhuang language ( autonym: Cuengh or Cueŋь) is used by the Zhuang people in the People's Republic of China. For most of these scripts, regardless of whether letters or diacritics are used, the most common tone is not marked, just as the most common vowel is not marked in Indic abugidas; in Zhuyin not only is one of the tones unmarked, but there is a diacritic to indicate lack of tone, like the virama of Indic. Virama is a generic term for the Diacritic character in many Brahmic scripts that is used to suppress an inherent Vowel sound that occurs with every consonant

The number of letters in an alphabet can be quite small. The Book Pahlavi script, an abjad, had only twelve letters at one point, and may have had even fewer later on. Today the Rotokas alphabet has only twelve letters. The Rotokas alphabet used in writing the Rotokas language is a Subset of the Latin alphabet consisting of only the twelve letters Pronunciation (The Hawaiian alphabet is sometimes claimed to be as small, but it actually consists of 18 letters, including the ʻokina and five long vowels. The Hawaiian language (Hawaiian ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i) is an Austronesian language that takes its name from Hawai'i, the largest island in the tropical Encoding and displaying the Polynesian glottal Old conventions In plain ASCII the glottal is sometimes represented by the apostrophe character (' ) While Rotokas has a small alphabet because it has few phonemes to represent (just eleven), Book Pahlavi was small because many letters had been conflated, that is, the graphic distinctions had been lost over time, and diacritics were not developed to compensate for this as they were in Arabic, another script that lost many of its distinct letter shapes. The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa such as Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. For example, a comma-shaped letter represented g, d, y, k, or j. However, such apparent simplifications can perversely make a script more complicated. In later Pahlavi papyri, up to half of the remaining graphic distinctions of these twelve letters were lost, and the script could no longer be read as a sequence of letters at all, but instead each word had to be learned as a whole – that is, they had become logograms as in Egyptian Demotic. Papyrus (/pəˈpaɪrəs/ (Rhymes -aɪrəs)is a thick paper-like material produced from the Pith of the papyrus plant Cyperus papyrus A logogram, or logograph, is a Grapheme which represents a word or a Morpheme (a meaningful unit of language Demotic (from δημοτικός dēmotikós, "popular" refers to either the Ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of Hieratic

The largest segmental script is probably an abugida, Devanagari. When written in Devanagari, Vedic Sanskrit has an alphabet of 53 letters, including the visarga mark for final aspiration and special letters for kš and jñ, though one of the letters is theoretical and not actually used. Sanskrit (sa संस्कृता वाक् saṃskṛtā vāk, for short sa संस्कृतम् saṃskṛtam) is a historical The Hindi alphabet must represent both Sanskrit and modern vocabulary, and so has been expanded to 58 with the khutma letters (letters with a dot added) to represent sounds from Persian and English.

The largest known abjad is Sindhi, with 51 letters. Sindhi ( Arabic script: سنڌي Devanagari script: सिन्धी Sindhī) is the language of the Sindh region of South Asia The largest alphabets in the narrow sense include Kabardian and Abkhaz (for Cyrillic), with 58 and 56 letters, respectively, and Slovak (for the Latin alphabet), with 46. The Kabardian language is closely related to the Adyghe language (see Adyghe people) both members of the Northwest Caucasian language family mainly Abkhaz is a Northwest Caucasian language spoken mainly in Abkhazia and Turkey by the Abkhaz people. The Cyrillic alphabet (səˈrɪlɪk also called azbuka, from the old name of the first two letters is actually a family of Alphabets, subsets of which are used by The Slovak language ( slovenčina, slovenský jazyk, not to be confused with Slovenščina) sometimes referred to as "Slovakian" However, these scripts either count di- and tri-graphs as separate letters, as Spanish did with ch and ll up to a recent time, or uses diacritics like Slovak č. A digraph, bigraph, or digram is a pair of characters used to write one Phoneme (distinct sound or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond A diacritic ( also called a diacritic or diacritical mark, point, or sign, is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation The largest true alphabet where each letter is graphically independent is probably Georgian, with 41 letters. The Georgian alphabet (ქართული დამწერლობა is the writing system currently used to write the Georgian language and other South Caucasian

Syllabaries typically contain 50 to 400 glyphs (though the Múra-Pirahã language of Brazil would require only 24 if it did not denote tone, and Rotokas would require only 30), and the glyphs of logographic systems typically number from the many hundreds into the thousands. Pirahã (also spelled Pirahá, Pirahán; Portuguese: Pirarrã; Pirahã language xapaitíiso) is a Language spoken by the |utc_offset = -2 to -4 |time_zone_DST = BRST |utc_offset_DST = -2 to -5 |cctld Thus a simple count of the number of distinct symbols is an important clue to the nature of an unknown script.

It is not always clear what constitutes a distinct alphabet. French uses the same basic alphabet as English, but many of the letters can carry additional marks, such as é, à, and ô. French ( français,) is a Romance language spoken around the world by 118 million people as a native language and by about 180 to 260 million people In French, these combinations are not considered to be additional letters. However, in Icelandic, the accented letters such as á, í, and ö are considered to be distinct letters of the alphabet. Icelandic ( is a North Germanic language, the language of Iceland. In Spanish, ñ is considered a separate letter, but accented vowels such as á and é are not. double L is also considered a separate letter to a single l. Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet are augmented with ligatures, such as æ in Old English and Ȣ in Algonquian; by borrowings from other alphabets, such as the thorn þ in Old English and Icelandic, which came from the Futhark runes; and by modifying existing letters, such as the eth ð of Old English and Icelandic, which is a modified d. Æ ( minuscule: æ) is a Grapheme formed from the letters A and E. Thorn, or þorn (Þ þ is a letter in the Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic Alphabets It was also used in Medieval Scandinavia Icelandic ( is a North Germanic language, the language of Iceland. Eth ( Ð, ð; also spelled edh or eð) is a letter used in Old English, Icelandic, Faroese (in Other alphabets only use a subset of the Latin alphabet, such as Hawaiian, or Italian, which only uses the letters j, k, x, y and w in foreign words. Italian ( or lingua italiana) is a Romance language spoken by about 63 million people as a First language, primarily in Italy.

Alphabetic order

It is unknown if the earliest alphabets had a defined sequence. Some alphabets today, such as Hanunoo, are learned one letter at a time, in no particular order, and are not used for collation where a definite order is required. However, a dozen Ugaritic tablets from the fourteenth century BCE preserve the alphabet in two sequences. The Ugaritic alphabet is a Cuneiform Abjad (alphabet without vowels used from around 1500 BCE for the Ugaritic language, an extinct One, the ABGDE order later used in Phoenician, has continued with minor changes in Hebrew, Greek, Armenian, Gothic, Cyrillic, and Latin; the other, HMĦLQ, was used in southern Arabia and is preserved today in Ethiopic. The Hebrew alphabet (אָלֶף-בֵּית עִבְרִי alephbet ’ivri) consists of 22 letters used for writing the Hebrew language. The Greek alphabet (Ελληνικό αλφάβητο is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early The Armenian alphabet is an Alphabet that has been used to write the Armenian language since the year 405 or 406. This article is about the 4th century alphabet of the Gothic bible The Cyrillic alphabet (səˈrɪlɪk also called azbuka, from the old name of the first two letters is actually a family of Alphabets, subsets of which are used by Ge'ez (gez ግዕዝ) also called Ethiopic, is an Abugida script that was originally developed to write Ge'ez, a Semitic language ^[9] Both orders have therefore been stable for at least 3000 years.

The historical order was abandoned in Runic and Arabic, although Arabic retains the traditional "abjadi order" for numbering. The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa such as Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. The Abjad numerals are a decimal Numeral system in which the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet are assigned numerical values

The Brahmic family of alphabets used in India use a unique order based on phonology: The letters are arranged according to how and where they are produced in the mouth. The Brahmic family is a family of syllabaries (writing systems used in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and parts of Central Asia and East Asia, Phonology ( Greek φωνή (phōnē voice sound + λόγος (lógos word speech subject of discussion is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning This organization is used in Southeast Asia, Tibet, Korean hangul, and even Japanese kana, which is not an alphabet. Kana is a general term for the syllabic Japanese scripts Hiragana (ひらがな and Katakana (カタカナ as well as the old system

The Phoenician letter names, in which each letter is associated with a word that begins with that sound, continue to be used in Samaritan, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew, and Greek. The Samaritan alphabet is a direct descendant of the paleo-Hebrew variety of the Phoenician alphabet. The Aramaic alphabet is an Abjad, a Consonantal Alphabet, used for writing Aramaic. The Syriac alphabet is a Writing system used to write the Syriac language from around the 2nd century BC. The Hebrew alphabet (אָלֶף-בֵּית עִבְרִי alephbet ’ivri) consists of 22 letters used for writing the Hebrew language. The Greek alphabet (Ελληνικό αλφάβητο is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early However, they were abandoned in Arabic, Cyrillic and Latin. The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa such as Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. The Cyrillic alphabet (səˈrɪlɪk also called azbuka, from the old name of the first two letters is actually a family of Alphabets, subsets of which are used by

Orthography and spelling

Main articles: Orthography and Spelling

Each language may establish certain general rules that govern the association between letters and phonemes, but, depending on the language, these rules may or may not be consistently followed. The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific Writing system to write the language Spelling is the Writing of a Word or words with the necessary letters and Diacritics present in an accepted standard order In a perfectly phonological alphabet, the phonemes and letters would correspond perfectly in two directions: a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a speaker could predict the pronunciation of a word given its spelling. Phonology ( Greek φωνή (phōnē voice sound + λόγος (lógos word speech subject of discussion is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning However, languages often evolve independently of their writing systems, and writing systems have been borrowed for languages they were not designed for, so the degree to which letters of an alphabet correspond to phonemes of a language varies greatly from one language to another and even within a single language.

Languages may fail to achieve a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds in any of several ways:

• A language may represent a given phoneme with a combination of letters rather than just a single letter. Two-letter combinations are called digraphs and three-letter groups are called trigraphs. A digraph, bigraph, or digram is a pair of characters used to write one Phoneme (distinct sound or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond A trigraph (from the Greek words treis = three and graphein = write is a group of three letters used to represent a single sound or a combination of sounds German uses the tesseragraphs (four letters) "tsch" for the phoneme IPA: [tʃ] and "dsch" for [dʒ], although, the latter is rare. The German language (de ''Deutsch'') is a West Germanic language and one of the world's major languages. Kabardian also uses a tesseragraph for one of its phonemes. The Kabardian language is closely related to the Adyghe language (see Adyghe people) both members of the Northwest Caucasian language family mainly
• A language may represent the same phoneme with two different letters or combinations of letters.
• A language may spell some words with unpronounced letters that exist for historical or other reasons.
• Pronunciation of individual words may change according to the presence of surrounding words in a sentence (sandhi). Sandhi ( Sanskrit saṃdhi sa संधि "joining" is a cover term for a wide variety of phonological processes that occur at Morpheme
• Different dialects of a language may use different phonemes for the same word.
• A language may use different sets of symbols or different rules for distinct sets of vocabulary items, such as the Japanese hiragana and katakana syllabaries, or the various rules in English for spelling words from Latin and Greek, or the original Germanic vocabulary. is a Japanese Syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system, along with Katakana and Kanji; the Latin alphabet is a Japanese Syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with Hiragana, Kanji, and in some cases the Latin alphabet The Germanic languages are a group of related languages that constitute a branch of the Indo-European (IE Language family.

National languages generally elect to address the problem of dialects by simply associating the alphabet with the national standard. However, with an international language with wide variations in its dialects, such as English, it would be impossible to represent the language in all its variations with a single phonetic alphabet. English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States

Some national languages like Finnish have a very regular spelling system with a nearly one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes. Finnish ( or suomen kieli) is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland (92% As of 2006) and by ethnic Finns outside Strictly speaking, there is no word in the Finnish language corresponding to the verb "to spell" (meaning to split a word into its letters), the closest match being a verb meaning to split a word into its syllables. Similarly, the Italian verb corresponding to 'spell', compitare, is unknown to many Italians because the act of spelling itself is almost never needed: each phoneme of Standard Italian is represented in only one way. Italian ( or lingua italiana) is a Romance language spoken by about 63 million people as a First language, primarily in Italy. However, pronunciation cannot always be predicted from spelling in cases of irregular syllabic stress. In standard Spanish, it is possible to tell the pronunciation of a word from its spelling, but not vice versa; this is because certain phonemes can be represented in more than one way, but a given letter is consistently pronounced. French, with its silent letters and its heavy use of nasal vowels and elision, may seem to lack much correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, but its rules on pronunciation are actually consistent and predictable with a fair degree of accuracy. French ( français,) is a Romance language spoken around the world by 118 million people as a native language and by about 180 to 260 million people In an alphabetic writing system, a silent letter is a letter that in a particular word does not correspond to any sound in the word's Pronunciation. A nasal vowel is a Vowel that is produced with a lowering of the velum so that air escapes both through Nose as well as the Mouth. Elision is the omission of one or more sounds (such as a Vowel, a Consonant, or a whole Syllable) in a word or phrase producing a result that is easier

At the other extreme, however, are languages such as English, where the spelling of many words simply has to be memorized as they do not correspond to sounds in a consistent way. For English, this is because the Great Vowel Shift occurred after the orthography was established, and because English has acquired a large number of loanwords at different times retaining their original spelling at varying levels. The Great Vowel Shift was a major change in the Pronunciation of the English language that took place in the south of England between 1200 and However, even English has general, albeit complex, rules that predict pronunciation from spelling, and these rules are successful most of the time. Rules to predict spelling from the pronunciation have a high failure rate for English.

Sometimes, countries have the written language undergo a spelling reform in order to realign the writing with the contemporary spoken language. Many languages have undergone spelling reform, where a deliberate often officially sanctioned or mandated change to spelling takes place These can range from simple spelling changes and word forms to switching the entire writing system itself, as when Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet to the Roman alphabet. Turkey (Türkiye known officially as the Republic of Turkey ( is a Eurasian Country that stretches

The sounds of speech of all languages of the world can be written by a rather small universal phonetic alphabet. A standard for this is the International Phonetic Alphabet. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA is a system of phonetic notation based on the Latin alphabet, devised by the International Phonetic

See also

Bibliography

• Daniels, Peter T. ABC-DEF-GHI is a Song sung by Big Bird of Sesame Street. It is also erroneously known as Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz. An abecedarium (or abecedary is an Inscription consisting of the letters of the Alphabet, almost always listed in order Some communication theorists (notably those associated with the "Toronto School of Communications" such as Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, An alphabet song is any of various songs used to teach children the Alphabet, used in Kindergartens Pre-schools and homes around the world A constructed script (also artificial script, neography, and conscript for short is a new Writing system specifically created by an individual A character encoding consists of a code that pairs a sequence of characters from a given character set (sometimes incorrectly referred to as Code page A lipogram (from Greek lipagrammatos, "missing letter" is a kind of Constrained writing or Word game consisting of writing paragraphs This is a list of writing systems (or scripts) classified according to some common distinguishing features A pangram ( Greek: pan gramma, "every letter" or holoalphabetic sentence, is a sentence using every letter of the Alphabet at least Transliteration is the practice of Transcribing a Word or text written in one Writing system into another writing system or system of rules for such practice In Computing, Unicode is an Industry standard allowing Computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's ; Bright, William (1996). The World's Writing Systems. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-507993-0.  —(Overview of modern and some ancient writing systems).
• Driver, G. R. (1976). Semitic Writing (Schweich Lectures on Biblical Archaeology S. The Schweich Lectures on Biblical Archaeology are a series of lectures delivered and published under the auspices of the British Academy. ) 3Rev Ed. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-725917-0.  
• Hoffman, Joel M. (2004). In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language. NYU Press. ISBN 0-8147-3654-8.  —(Chapter 3 traces and summarizes the invention of alphabetic writing).
• Logan, Robert K. (2004). The Alphabet Effect: A Media Ecology Understanding of the Making of Western Civilization. Hampton Press. ISBN 1-57-273523-6.  
• McLuhan, Marshall; Logan, Robert K. (1977). Alphabet, Mother of Invention. Etcetera. Vol. 34, pp. 373–383.
• Ouaknin, Marc-Alain; Bacon, Josephine (1999). Mysteries of the Alphabet: The Origins of Writing. Abbeville Press. ISBN 0-7892-0521-1.  
• Powell, Barry (1991). Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet. Cambridge Universityh Press. ISBN 0-521-58907-X.  
• Sacks, David (2004). Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet from A to Z (PDF), Broadway Books. ISBN 0-7679-1173-3.  
• Saggs, H. W. F (1991). Civilization Before Greece and Rome. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-05031-3.  —(Chapter 4 traces the invention of writing).
• Coulmas, Florian (1989). The Writing Systems of the World. Blackwell Publishers Ltd. . ISBN 0-631-18028-1.  

References

1. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica Online — Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary
2. ^ Ohso, Mieko (April 1973). "A Phonological Study of Some English Loan Words in Japanese. Working Papers in Linguistics, No. 14, Studies in Phonology and Methodology" (in English). Studies in Phonology and Methodology (14): 27 pages. ERIC # ED122593.  
3. ^ Daniels and Bright (1996), pp. 74–75.
4. ^ Daniels and Bright (1996), pp. 74.
5. ^ ^{a b} Coulmas (1989), p. 140.
6. ^ Daniels and Bright (1996), pp. 92–94.
7. ^ ^{a b} Daniels and Bright (1996), pp. 94–96.
8. ^ Coulmas (1989), p. 141.
9. ^ Millard, A. R. "The Infancy of the Alphabet", World Archaeology 17, No. 3, Early Writing Systems (Feb. , 1986): 390–398. page 395.

External links

• Language, Writing and Alphabet: An Interview with Christophe Rico Damqatum 3 (2007)
• Alphabetic Writing Systems
• Michael Everson's Alphabets of Europe
• Evolution of alphabets animation by Prof. Damqatum is the newsletter of the ''Centro de Estudios de Historia del Antiguo Oriente (CEHAO'' (Institute of Studies for the History of the Ancient East History Department Michael Everson (born January 9, 1963) is a linguist, script encoder, typesetter, and Font designer. Robert Fradkin at the University of Maryland
• Deseret Alphabet
• History of alphabet
• Online Video: The Alphabet's Big Bang
• The Alphabet as a Mirror of Human Civilization
• "The Alphabet – its creation and development" on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time featuring Eleanor Robson, Alan Millard, Rosalind Thomas