Product Code Database
An alphabet is a writing system that uses a standard set of symbols called letters to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from another in a given language. Not all represent language in this way: a syllabary assigns symbols to spoken , while logographies assign symbols to , , or other semantic units. (1980). 9781468410709 ISBN 9781468410709
The first letters were invented in Ancient Egypt to serve as an aid in writing Egyptian hieroglyphs; these are referred to as Egyptian uniliteral signs by . This system was used until the 5th century AD, and fundamentally differed by adding pronunciation hints to existing hieroglyphs that had previously carried no pronunciation information. Later on, these phonemic symbols also became used to transcribe foreign words. The first fully phonemic script was the Proto-Sinaitic script, also descending from Egyptian hieroglyphs, which was later modified to create the Phoenician alphabet. The Phoenician system is considered the first true alphabet and is the ultimate ancestor of many modern scripts, including Arabic alphabet, Cyrillic script, Greek alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Latin alphabet, and possibly Brahmic scripts.
Peter T. Daniels distinguishes true alphabets—which use letters to represent both consonants and vowels—from both and , which only need letters for consonants. Abjads generally lack vowel indicators altogether, while abugidas represent them with added to letters. In this narrower sense, the Greek alphabet was the first true alphabet; it was originally derived from the Phoenician alphabet, which was an abjad.
Alphabets usually have a standard ordering for their letters. This makes alphabets a useful tool in collation, as words can be listed in a well-defined order—commonly known as alphabetical order. This also means that letters may be used as a method of "numbering" ordered items. Some systems demonstrate acrophony, a phenomenon where letters have been given names distinct from their pronunciations. Systems with acrophony include Greek, Arabic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, and Syriac alphabet; systems without include the Latin alphabet.
The South Arabian alphabet, a sister script to the Phoenician alphabet, is the script from which the Geʽez script was descended. Abugidas are writing systems with characters comprising consonant–vowel sequences. Alphabets without obligatory vowels are called , with examples being Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac alphabet. The omission of vowels was not always a satisfactory solution due to the need of preserving sacred texts. "Weak" consonants are used to indicate vowels. These letters have a dual function since they can also be used as pure consonants.
The Proto-Sinaitic script and the Ugaritic script were the first scripts with a limited number of signs instead of using many different signs for words, in contrast to cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Linear B. The Phoenician script was probably the first phonemic script, and it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for traders to learn. Another advantage of the Phoenician alphabet was that it could write different languages since it recorded words phonemically.
The Phoenician script was spread across the Mediterranean by the Phoenicians. The Greek alphabet was the first in which vowels had independent letterforms separate from those of consonants. The Greeks chose letters representing sounds that did not exist in Greek to represent vowels. The Linear B syllabary, used by Mycenaean Greeks from the 16th century BC, had 87 symbols, including five vowels. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, causing many different alphabets to evolve from it. (2025). 9781107503410, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107503410
The Etruscan alphabet remained nearly unchanged for several hundred years. Only evolving once the Etruscan language changed itself. The letters used for non-existent phonemes were dropped. Afterwards, however, the alphabet went through many different changes. The final classical form of Etruscan contained 20 letters. Four of them are vowels——six fewer letters than the earlier forms. The script in its classical form was used until the 1st century AD. The Etruscan language itself was not used during the Roman Empire, but the script was used for religious texts.
Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet have ligatures, a combination of two letters make one, such as æ in Danish and Icelandic and in Algonquian; borrowings from other alphabets, such as the thorn in Old English and Icelandic, which came from the Runic alphabet runes; and modified existing letters, such as the eth of Old English and Icelandic, which is a modified d. Other alphabets only use a subset of the Latin alphabet, such as Hawaiian and Italian, which uses the letters j, k, x, y, and w only in foreign words.
Another notable script is Elder Futhark, believed to have evolved out of one of the Old Italic alphabets. Elder Futhark gave rise to other alphabets known collectively as the . The Runic alphabets were used for Germanic languages from 100 AD to the late Middle Ages, being engraved on stone and jewelry, although inscriptions found on bone and wood occasionally appear. These alphabets have since been replaced with the Latin alphabet. The exception was for decorative use, where the runes remained in use until the 20th century.Stifter, David (2010), "Lepontische Studien: Lexicon Leponticum und die Funktion von san im Lepontischen", in Stüber, Karin; et al. (eds.), Akten des 5. Deutschsprachigen Keltologensymposiums. Zürich, 7.–10. September 2009, Wien. The Old Hungarian script was the writing system of the Hungarians. It was in use during the entire history of Hungary, albeit not as an official writing system. From the 19th century, it once again became more and more popular.
The Glagolitic alphabet was the initial script of the liturgical language Old Church Slavonic and became, together with the Greek uncial script, the basis of the Cyrillic script. Cyrillic is one of the most widely used modern alphabetic scripts and is notable for its use in Slavic languages and also for other languages within the former Soviet Union. Cyrillic alphabets include Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Russian alphabet, Belarusian, and Ukrainian. The Glagolitic alphabet is believed to have been created by Saints Cyril and Methodius, while the Cyrillic alphabet was created by a circle of their disciples in the Preslav Literary School including Naum of Preslav, Constantine of Preslav, Chernorizets Hrabar among others. They feature many letters that appear to have been borrowed from or influenced by Greek and Hebrew.
Most alphabetic scripts of India and Eastern Asia descend from the Brahmi script, believed to be a descendant of Aramaic.
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 alphabet and Persian alphabet, and sometimes as a complete alphabet, as with Kurdish alphabet and Uyghur alphabet.Thackston, W. M. (2006), "—Sorani Kurdish— A Reference Grammar with Selected Readings", Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences, Harvard University, retrieved 10 June 2021
Examples of present-day abjads are the Arabic script and ; true alphabets include Latin script, Cyrillic, and Korean hangul; and abugidas, used to write Tigrinya, Amharic language, Hindi, and Thai language. The Canadian Aboriginal syllabics are also an abugida, rather than a syllabary, as their name would imply, because each glyph stands for a consonant and is modified by rotation to represent the following vowel. In a true syllabary, each consonant-vowel combination gets represented by a separate glyph.Bernard Comrie, 2005, "Writing Systems", in Haspelmath et al. eds, The World Atlas of Language Structures (p 568 ff). Also Robert Bringhurst, 2004, The solid form of language: an essay on writing and meaning.
All three types may be augmented with syllabic glyphs. Ugaritic script, for example, is essentially an abjad but has syllabic letters for Florian Coulmas, 1991, The writing systems of the world These are the only times that vowels are indicated. Coptic alphabet has a letter for . Devanagari is typically an abugida augmented with dedicated letters for initial vowels, though some traditions use अ as a zero consonant as the graphic base for such vowels. (2025). 9781135797119, Routledge. ISBN 9781135797119
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, when used for other languages, is an abjad. In Kurdish, writing the vowels is mandatory, and whole letters are used, so the script is a true alphabet. Other languages may use a Semitic abjad with forced vowel diacritics, effectively making them abugidas. On the other hand, the ʼPhags-pa script of the Mongol Empire was based closely on the Tibetan script, but vowel marks are written after the preceding consonant rather than as diacritic marks. Although short a is not written, as in the Indic abugidas, The source of the term "abugida", namely the Geʽez script now used for Amharic language and Tigrinya, has assimilated into their consonant modifications. It is no longer systematic and must be learned as a syllabary rather than as a segmental script. Even more extreme, the Pahlavi abjad eventually became logogram.
Thus the primary categorisation of alphabets reflects how they treat vowels. For tonal languages, further classification can be based on their treatment of tone. Though names do not yet exist to distinguish the various types. Some alphabets disregard tone entirely, especially when it does not carry a heavy functional load, (2025). 9781509061068 ISBN 9781509061068 as in Somali language and many other languages of Africa and the Americas. Most commonly, tones are indicated by diacritics, which is how vowels are treated in abugidas, which is the case for Vietnamese (a true alphabet) and Thai script (an abugida). In Thai, the tone is determined primarily by a consonant, with diacritics for disambiguation. In the Pollard script, an abugida, vowels are indicated by diacritics. The placing of the diacritic relative to the consonant is modified to indicate the tone. More rarely, a script may have separate letters for tones, as is the case for Hmong alphabet and Zhuang alphabet. For many, regardless of whether letters or diacritics get 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 a lack of tone, like the virama of Indic.
In German, words starting with sch- (which spells the German phoneme ) are inserted between words with initial sca- and sci- (all incidentally loanwords) instead of appearing after the initial sz, as though it were a single letter, which contrasts several languages such as Albanian, in which dh-, ë-, gj-, ll-, rr-, th-, xh-, and zh-, which all represent phonemes and considered separate single letters, would follow the letters respectively, as well as Hungarian and Welsh. Further, German words with an umlaut get collated ignoring the umlaut as—contrary to Turkish alphabet, which adopted the ö and ü, and where a word like tüfek would come after tuz, in the dictionary. An exception is the German telephone directory, where umlauts are sorted like ä= ae since names such as Jäger also appear with the spelling Jaeger and are not distinguished in the spoken language.
The Danish and Norwegian alphabets end with , whereas the Swedish conventionally put at the end. However, phonetically corresponds with , as does and .
Runic alphabet used an unrelated Elder Futhark sequence, which got Younger Futhark later on. Arabic alphabet usually uses its sequence, although Arabic retains the traditional abjadi order, which is used for numbers.
The Brahmic family of alphabets used in India uses a unique order based on phonology: The letters are arranged according to how and where the sounds get produced in the mouth. This organization is present in Southeast Asia, Tibet, Korean hangul, and even Japanese kana, which is not an alphabet.
Acrophony was abandoned in Latin alphabet. It referred to the letters by adding a vowel—usually , sometimes or —before or after the consonant. Two exceptions were Y and Z, which were borrowed from the Greek alphabet rather than Etruscan. They were known as Y Graeca "Greek Y" and zeta (from Greek)—this discrepancy was inherited by many European languages, as in the term zed for Z in all forms of English, other than American English. Over time names sometimes shifted or were added, as in double U for W, or "double V" in French, the English name for Y, and the American zee for Z. Comparing them in English and French gives a clear reflection of the Great Vowel Shift: A, B, C, and D are pronounced in today's English, but in contemporary French they are . The French names (from which the English names got derived) preserve the qualities of the English vowels before the Great Vowel Shift. By contrast, the names of F, L, M, N, and S () remain the same in both languages because "short" vowels were largely unaffected by the Shift. Note how it says short vowels are similar between Middle and Modern English.
In Cyrillic, originally, acrophony was present using Slavic words. The first three words going, azŭ, buky, vědě, with the Cyrillic collation order being, А, Б, В. However, this was later abandoned in favor of a system similar to Latin.
The pronunciation of a language often evolves independently of its writing system. Writing systems have been borrowed for languages the orthography was not initially made to use. The degree to which letters of an alphabet correspond to phonemes of a language varies.
Languages may fail to achieve a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds in any of several ways:
National languages sometimes elect to address the problem of dialects by associating the alphabet with the national standard. Some national languages like Finnish language, Armenian, Turkish language, Russian, Serbo-Croatian (Serbian language, Croatian, and Bosnian language), and Bulgarian have a very regular spelling system with nearly one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes. Similarly, the Italian verb corresponding to 'spell (out),' compitare, is unknown to many Italians because spelling is usually trivial, as Italian spelling is highly phonemic. In standard Spanish, one can tell the pronunciation of a word from its spelling, but not vice versa, as phonemes sometimes can be represented in more than one way, but a given letter is consistently pronounced. French using , , and elision, may seem to lack much correspondence between the spelling and pronunciation. However, its rules on pronunciation, though complex, are consistent and predictable with a fair degree of accuracy.
At the other extreme are languages such as English, where pronunciations mostly have to be memorized as they do not correspond to the spelling consistently. For English, this is because the Great Vowel Shift occurred after the orthography got established and because English has acquired a large number of loanwords at different times, retaining their original spelling at varying levels. (2025). 9781413015898, Wadsworth. ISBN 9781413015898 However, even English has general, albeit complex, rules that predict pronunciation from spelling. Rules like this are usually successful. However, rules to predict spelling from pronunciation have a higher failure rate.
Sometimes, countries have the written language undergo a spelling reform to realign the writing with the contemporary spoken language. These can range from simple spelling changes and word forms to switching the entire writing system. For example, Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet to a Latin-based Turkish alphabet, and Kazakh alphabets changed from an Arabic script to a Cyrillic script due to the Soviet Union's influence. In 2021, it made a transition to the Latin alphabet, similar to Turkish. О переводе алфавита казахского языка с кириллицы на латинскую графику On (in Russian). President of the Republic of Kazakhstan. 26 October 2017. Archived from the original on 27 October 2017. Retrieved 26 October 2017. The Cyrillic script used to be official in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan before they switched to the Latin alphabet. Uzbekistan is reforming the alphabet to use diacritics on the letters that are marked by apostrophes and the letters that are digraphs.
The standard system of symbols used by to represent sounds in any language, independently of orthography, is called the International Phonetic Alphabet.International Phonetic Association (1999). 9780521652360, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521652360
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> An Early Hellenic Alphabet
|
|
