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Etymology

History

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Alphabets related to Phoenician

Ancient Near Eastern alphabets

European alphabets

Asian alphabets

Hangul

Bopomofo

Types

Alphabetical order

Latin alphabets

Early alphabets

Acrophony
 

Orthography and pronunciation

See also

References

Bibliography

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Abcs" redirects here. For other uses, see ABCS (disambiguation).

This article is about alphabets in general. For the English alphabet in particular, see English
alphabet. For the international technology conglomerate, see Alphabet Inc. For other uses,
see Alphabet (disambiguation).

An alphabet is a writing system that uses a standard set of symbols, called letters, to more or
less represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond
to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from another in a
given language.[1] Not all writing systems represent language in this way: a syllabary assigns
symbols to spoken syllables, while logographies assign symbols to words, morphemes, or other
semantic units.[2][3]

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 lexicographers.[4] This system
was used until the 5th century AD,[5] 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.[6] 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, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and possibly Brahmic.[7][8][9][10]

Corresponding letters in the Phoenician and Latin

alphabets

Peter T. Daniels distinguishes true alphabets—which use letters to represent

both consonants and vowels—from both abugidas and abjads, which only need letters for
consonants. Abugidas represent them with diacritics added to letters, while abjads generally
lack vowel indicators altogether. In this narrower sense, the Greek alphabet was the first true
alphabet;[11][12] it was originally derived from the Phoenician alphabet, which was an abjad.[13]

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, Hebrew,
and Syriac; systems without include the Latin alphabet.

Etymology
The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum,
which in turn originated in the Greek ἀλφάβητος alphábētos; it was made from the first two
letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha (α) and beta (β).[14] The names for the Greek letters, in
turn, came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet: aleph, the word for ox,
and bet, the word for house.[15]

History

Main article: History of the alphabet

Alphabets related to Phoenician

Ancient Near Eastern alphabets

The Ancient Egyptian writing system had a set of some 24 hieroglyphs that are called
uniliterals,[16] which are glyphs that provide one sound.[17] These glyphs were used as
pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe
loan words and foreign names.[6] The script was used a fair amount in the 4th
century AD.[18] However, after pagan temples were closed down, it was forgotten in the 5th
century until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.[5] There was also cuneiform, primarily used to
write several ancient languages, including Sumerian.[19] The last known use of cuneiform was in
75 AD, after which the script fell out of use.[20] In the Middle Bronze Age, an apparently
alphabetic system known as the Proto-Sinaitic script appeared in Egyptian turquoise mines in
the Sinai Peninsula c. 1840 BC, apparently left by Canaanite workers. Orly Goldwasser has
connected the illiterate turquoise miner graffiti theory to the origin of the alphabet. [9] In 1999,
American Egyptologists John and Deborah Darnell discovered an earlier version of this first
alphabet at the Wadi el-Hol valley. The script dated to c. 1800 BC and shows evidence of
having been adapted from specific forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs that could be dated
to c. 2000 BC, strongly suggesting that the first alphabet had developed about that time. [21] The
script was based on letter appearances and names, believed to be based on Egyptian
hieroglyphs.[7] This script had no characters representing vowels. Originally, it probably was a
syllabary—a script where syllables are represented with characters—with symbols that were
not needed being removed. The best-attested Bronze Age alphabet is Ugaritic, invented
in Ugarit before the 15th century BC. This was an alphabetic cuneiform script with 30 signs,
including three that indicate the following vowel. This script was not used after the destruction
of Ugarit in 1178 BC.[22]

A specimen of the Proto-Sinaitic script, one of the

earliest phonemic scripts

The Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, conventionally
called Proto-Canaanite, before c. 1050 BC.[8] The oldest text in Phoenician script is an
inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram c. 1000 BC. This script is the parent script of all
western alphabets. By the 10th century BC, two other forms distinguish
themselves, Canaanite and Aramaic. The Aramaic gave rise to the Hebrew alphabet.[23]
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 abjads, with
examples being Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac. 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.[24][25]

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,[7][8] 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. [26]

The Phoenician script was spread across the Mediterranean by the Phoenicians. [8] 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. [27]

European alphabets

Abecedarium latinum clasicum, or the Latin

alphabet, used to write most languages of modern Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania.

The Greek alphabet, in Euboean form, was carried over by Greek colonists to the Italian
peninsula c. 800–600 BC giving rise to many different alphabets used to write the Italic
languages, like the Etruscan alphabet.[28] One of these became the Latin alphabet, which
spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their republic. After the fall of the Western
Roman Empire, the alphabet survived in intellectual and religious works. It came to be used for
the Romance languages that descended from Latin and most of the other languages of western
and central Europe. Today, it is the most widely used script in the world. [29]

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.[30] Afterwards, however, the alphabet went through many different changes. The
final classical form of Etruscan contained 20 letters. Four of them are vowels—⟨a, e, i, u⟩—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.[31]
Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet have ligatures, a combination of two letters make one,
such as æ in Danish and Icelandic and ⟨Ȣ⟩ in Algonquian; borrowings from other alphabets,
such as the thorn ⟨þ⟩ in Old English and Icelandic, which came from the Futhark runes;[32] and
modified existing letters, such as the eth ⟨ð⟩ 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.[33]

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 Runic
alphabets. 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.[34]

The Old Hungarian script alphabet.

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.[35]

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, 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.[36]

Asian alphabets

This section needs

expansion. You can help
by making an edit
request. (November 2025)

Many phonetic scripts exist in Asia. The Arabic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet,
and other abjads of the Middle East are developments of the Aramaic alphabet.[37][38]

Most alphabetic scripts of India and Eastern Asia descend from the Brahmi script, believed to
be a descendant of Aramaic.[39]
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.[40][41]

Hangul

In Korea, Sejong the Great created the Hangul alphabet in 1443. Hangul is a unique alphabet: it
is a featural alphabet, where the design of many of the letters comes from a sound's place of
articulation, like P looking like the widened mouth and L looking like the tongue pulled
in.[42][better source needed] The creation of Hangul was planned by the government of the day,[43] and
it places individual letters in syllable clusters with equal dimensions, in the same way
as Chinese characters. This change allows for mixed-script writing, where one syllable always
takes up one type space no matter how many letters get stacked into building that one sound-
block.[44]

Bopomofo

Bopomofo, also referred to as zhuyin, is a semi-syllabary used primarily in Taiwan to transcribe

the sounds of Standard Chinese. Following the proclamation of the People's Republic of China
in 1949 and its adoption of Hanyu Pinyin in 1956, the use of bopomofo on the mainland is
limited. Bopomofo developed from 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 initials are represented by individual symbols, but like a syllabary, the
phonemes of the syllable finals are not; each possible final—excluding the medial glide—has
its own character, an example being luan written as Zhuyin Fuhao: ㄌㄨㄢ (l-u-an). The last
symbol Zhuyin Fuhao: ㄢ takes place as the entire final -an. While bopomofo is not a
mainstream writing system, it is often used in ways similar to a romanization system, for aiding
pronunciation and as an input method for Chinese characters on computers and
cellphones.[45][better source needed]

Types

History of the alphabet


 


 


 A Venn diagram showing
the Greek (left), Cyrillic (bottom) and Latin (right) alphabets, which share many of the
same letters, although they have different [Link]ʽez script of Ethiopia and Eritrea.

The term "alphabet" is used by linguists and paleographers in both a wide and a narrow sense.
In its broader sense, an alphabet is a segmental script at the phoneme level—that is, it has
separate glyphs for individual sounds and not for larger units such as syllables or words. In its
narrower sense, some scholars distinguish "true" alphabets from two other types of segmental
script: abjads and abugidas. These three differ in how they treat vowels. Abjads have letters
for consonants and leave most vowels unexpressed. Abugidas are also consonant-based but
indicate vowels with diacritics, a systematic graphic modification of the consonants.[46] The
earliest known alphabet using this sense is the Wadi el-Hol script, believed to be an abjad. 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).[47][48]

Examples of present-day abjads are the Arabic and Hebrew scripts;[49] true alphabets
include Latin, Cyrillic, and Korean hangul; and abugidas, used to write Tigrinya, Amharic, Hindi,
and Thai. 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.[50]

All three types may be augmented with syllabic glyphs. Ugaritic, for example, is essentially an
abjad but has syllabic letters for /ʔa, ʔi, ʔu/[51][52] These are the only times that vowels are
indicated. Coptic has a letter for /ti/.[53][better source needed] 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.[54][55]

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 abugida, but vowel marks are written after the
preceding consonant rather than as diacritic marks. The short a is not written in the Geʽez
script now used for Amharic and Tigrinya, unlike the Indic abugidas; the source of the term
"abugida" assimilating the short a vowel into its consonant modifications made the abugida no
longer systematic, and by definition, a syllabary rather than a segmental script. Even more
extreme, the Pahlavi abjad eventually became logographic.[56]
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,[57] as in Somali and many other
languages of Africa and the Americas.[58] 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 (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.[41] More rarely, a script may have separate letters for tones, as is the case
for Hmong and Zhuang.[59] 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.[citation needed]

Alphabetical order

Main article: Alphabetical order

Alphabets often come to be associated with a standard ordering of their letters; this is
for collation—namely, for listing words and other items in "alphabetical order."[60][61]

Latin alphabets

The ordering of the Latin alphabet (A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z), which

derives from the Northwest Semitic "Abgad" order,[62] is already well established. Although,
languages using this alphabet have different conventions for their treatment of modified
letters (such as the French é, à, and ô) and certain combinations of letters (multigraphs). In
French, these are not considered to be additional letters for collation. However, in Icelandic,
the accented letters such as á, í, and ö are considered distinct letters representing different
vowel sounds from sounds represented by their unaccented counterparts. In Spanish, ñ is
considered a separate letter, but accented vowels such as á and é are not. The ll and ch were
also formerly considered single letters and sorted separately after l and c, but in 1994, the
tenth congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies changed the collating order
so that ll came to be sorted between lk and lm in the dictionary and ch came to be sorted
between cg and ci; those digraphs were still formally designated as letters, but in 2010
the Real Academia Española changed it, so they are no longer considered letters at all. [63][64]

In German, words starting with sch- (which spells the German phoneme /ʃ/) 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 ⟨d, e, g, l, n, r, t, x, z⟩ respectively,
as well as Hungarian and Welsh. Further, German words with an umlaut get collated ignoring
the umlaut as—contrary to Turkish, which adopted the graphemes 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.[65]
The Danish and Norwegian alphabets end with ⟨æ, ø, å⟩,[66][67] whereas the Swedish
conventionally put ⟨å, ä, ö⟩ at the end. However, ⟨æ⟩ phonetically corresponds with ⟨ä⟩, as
does ⟨ø⟩ and ⟨ö⟩.[68]

Early alphabets

It is unknown whether the earliest alphabets had a defined sequence. Some alphabets today,
such as the Hanuno'o script, are learned one letter at a time, in no particular order, and are
not used for collation where a definite order is required.[69] However, a dozen Ugaritic tablets
from the 14th century BC preserve the alphabet in two sequences. One, the ABCDE 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 Geʽez.[70] Both orders have therefore been stable for
at least 3000 years.[71][better source needed]

Runic used an unrelated Futhark sequence, which got simplified later on.[72] Arabic usually uses
its sequence, although Arabic retains the traditional abjadi order, which is used for
numbers.[citation needed]

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.[73]

Acrophony

"names of letters" redirects here.

Main article: acrophony

In Phoenician, each letter got associated with a word that begins with that sound. This is
called acrophony and is continuously used to varying degrees
in Samaritan, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic.[74]

Acrophony was abandoned in Latin. It referred to the letters by adding a vowel—usually ⟨e⟩,
sometimes ⟨a⟩ or ⟨u⟩—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. [75] 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 /eɪ, biː, siː, diː/ in today's English, but in contemporary French they
are /a, be, se, de/.[76] 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 (/ɛf, ɛl, ɛm, ɛn, ɛs/) remain the same in both languages because "short" vowels
were largely unaffected by the Shift.[77]

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.[78]

Orthography and pronunciation

Further information: Phonemic orthography

When an alphabet is adopted or developed to represent a given language,

an orthography generally comes into being, providing rules for spelling words, following the
principle on which alphabets get based. These rules will map letters of the alphabet to
the phonemes of the spoken language.[79] In a perfectly phonemic orthography, there would be
a consistent one-to-one correspondence between the letters and the phonemes so that a
writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a speaker would always
know the pronunciation of a word given its spelling, and vice versa. However, this ideal is
usually never achieved in practice. Languages can come close to it, such as Spanish
and Finnish. Others, such as English, deviate from it to a much larger degree.[80]

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.[81]

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 by combinations of letters rather than just
a single letter. Two-letter combinations are called digraphs, and three-letter groups
are called trigraphs. German uses the tetragraphs (four letters) "tsch" for the
phoneme German pronunciation: [tʃ] and (in a few borrowed words) "dsch"
for [dʒ].[82] Kabardian also uses a tetragraph for one of its phonemes, namely
"кхъу."[83] Two letters representing one sound occur in several instances in Hungarian
as well (where, for instance, cs stands for [tʃ], sz for [s], zs for [ʒ], dzs for [dʒ]).[84]

 A language may represent the same phoneme with two or more different letters or
combinations of letters. An example is modern Greek which may write the
phoneme Greek pronunciation: [i] in six different ways: ⟨ι⟩, ⟨η⟩, ⟨υ⟩, ⟨ει⟩, ⟨οι⟩,
and ⟨υι⟩.[85]

 A language may spell some words with unpronounced letters that exist for historical or
other reasons. For example, the spelling of the Thai word for 'beer' เบียร ์ retains a letter
for the final consonant /r/ present in the English word it borrows, but silences it. [86]

 Pronunciation of individual words may change according to the presence of

surrounding words in a sentence, for example, in sandhi.[87]

 Different dialects of a language may use different phonemes for the same
word.[88][better source needed]

 A language may use different sets of symbols or rules for distinct vocabulary items,
typically for foreign words, such as in the Japanese katakana syllabary is used for
foreign words, and there are rules in English for using loanwords from other
languages.[89][90]

National languages sometimes elect to address the problem of dialects by associating the
alphabet with the national standard. Some national languages like Finnish, Armenian, Turkish,
Russian, Serbo-Croatian (Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian), and Bulgarian have a very regular
spelling system with nearly one-to-one correspondence between letters and
phonemes.[91] 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. [92] 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 silent letters, nasal vowels, 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.[93]

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.[94] 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. [95]

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,[96] and Kazakh changed from an Arabic
script to a Cyrillic script due to the Soviet Union's influence. Kazakhstan is in the process of
transitioning its official writing script to the Latin alphabet after making a version of it in
2021.[97] 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. [98][99]

The standard system of symbols used by linguists to represent sounds in any language,
independently of orthography, is called the International Phonetic Alphabet.[100]

See also

 Abecedarium

 Alphabet book

 Alphabet effect

 Fingerspelling

 Pangram

 Letter symbolism

References

1. Pulgram, Ernst (1951). "Phoneme and Grapheme: A Parallel". WORD. 7 (1): 15–
20. doi:10.1080/00437956.1951.11659389.

2. Daniels & Bright 1996, p. 4

3. Taylor, Insup (1980). "The Korean writing system: An alphabet? A syllabary? A

logography?". Processing of Visible Language. pp. 67–82. doi:10.1007/978-1-4684-
1068-6_5. ISBN 978-1-4684-1070-9.
4. Himelfarb, Elizabeth J. (2000). "First Alphabet Found in Egypt". Archaeology. 53 (1):
21.
5. Houston, Stephen; Baines, John; Cooper, Jerrold (2003). "Last Writing: Script
Obsolescence in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica". Comparative Studies in
Society and History. 45 (3): 430–
479. doi:10.1017/S0010417503000227. JSTOR 3879458. ProQuest 212670035.

6. Daniels & Bright 1996, pp. 74–75

7. Coulmas 1989, pp. 140–141

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398. doi:10.1080/00438243.1986.9979978. JSTOR 124703.

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External links

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article "Alphabet".

Look up alphabet in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Alphabets.

 "Language, Writing and Alphabet: An Interview with Christophe Rico", Damqātum

3 (2007)

 Michael Everson's Alphabets of Europe

 How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs—Biblical Archaeology Review

 An Early Hellenic Alphabet

 Museum of the Alphabet

 The Alphabet, BBC Radio 4 discussion with Eleanor Robson, Alan Millard and Rosalind
Thomas (In Our Time, 18 December 2003)

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Categories:

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