and Cyrillic alphabets are used for multiple languages in multiple states, both inside and outside Europe. As well as these two, there are two alphabets used primarily for a single language, although they are occasionally applied to minority languages in the states from which they originate. The oldest of these alphabets is the Greek alphabet, which could be considered the progenitor of all the surviving alphabets of Europe, with the earliest recorded inscriptions appearing in the 9th century BC. The other is found in the Caucasus, originating in the 5th century. The Georgian alphabet is used primarily to write Georgian, though it is also used to write the other Kartvelian languages, Svan, Mingrelian and Laz, all of which are found largely within the borders of Georgia. Sound features (Sources and further information for this section: Haarmann 1973, Asher 1994, Price 1998, Grzega 2006) The sound systems of languages may differ considerably between languages. European languages can thus rather be characterized negatively, e.g. by the absence of click sounds. One could also think of specific prosodic features, such as tonal accents. But there are also tonal languages in Europe: Serbo-Croatian (e.g. lètī ‘he flies, is flying’ with long rising accent vs. lêta ‘years’ with long falling accent) and Slovene (e.g. sûda ‘of the vessel’ with long falling accent vs. súda ‘of the court’ with long rising accent). In Slovene, the use of the musical accent is declining though (cf. Rehder 1998: 234) --but there are hardly any contexts where intelligibility is endangered. In Sweden Swedish (but not in Finland Swedish) there also is a pitch accent in some words, which can be meaningful, e.g. ´anden ‘the duck’ vs. ˇanden ‘the ghost, spirit’. Grammatical features (Sources and further information for this section: Asher 1994, Price 1998, Haspelmath 2001, Heine/Kuteva 2006) As a general introductory remark we can distinguish between three structural types of languages: isolating (i.e. grammatical/sentence functions are expressed through analytic means and relatively strict word-order rules, e.g. the strict S-V order rule in English), agglutinating (i.e. grammatical/sentence functions are expressed through affixes, with one affix expressing exactly one function) and inflecting (i.e. grammatical/sentence functions are expressed through affixes, with one affix expressing several functions). European languages are seldom pure representatives of one type. For (a) Modern English is a good example (and in many ways the code oral of French verbs); for (c) Old English and Modern High German are