where did the letters of the alphabet come from
the Phoenician alphabet
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rise to the Hebrew script. The South Arabian alphabet, a sister script to the Phoenician alphabet, is the script from which the Ge'ez alphabet (an abugida) is descended. Vowelless alphabets, which are not true alphabets, are called abjads, currently exemplified in scripts including Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac. The omission of vowels was not always a satisfactory solution and some "weak" consonants are sometimes used to indicate the vowel quality of a syllable (matres lectionis). These letters have a dual function since they are also used as pure consonants. The Proto-Sinaitic or Proto-Canaanite script and the Ugaritic script were the first
Alphabet
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alphabet, in which vowels were accorded equal status with consonants. According to Greek legends transmitted by Herodotus, the alphabet was brought from Phoenicia to Greece by Cadmos. The letters of the Greek alphabet are the same as those of the Phoenician alphabet, and both alphabets are arranged in the same order. However, whereas separate letters for vowels would have actually hindered the legibility of Egyptian, Phoenician, or Hebrew, their absence was problematic for Greek, where vowels played a much more important role. The Greeks used for vowels some of the Phoenician letters representing consonants which weren't used in Greek speech.
History of the alphabet
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for sounds not in Greek at the time. Those additional letters are based on Demotic script. According to Herodotus, the Phoenician prince Cadmus was accredited with the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet—"phoinikeia grammata", "Phoenician letters"—to the Greeks, who adapted it to form their Greek alphabet, which was later introduced to the rest of Europe. Herodotus estimates that Cadmus lived sixteen hundred years before his time, or around 2000 BC, and claims that the Greeks did not know of the Phoenician alphabet before Cadmus. However, Herodotus's writings are not used as a standard source by contemporary historians. The Greek alphabet is
Phoenician alphabet
9373
items, in such contexts as numbered lists and number placements. The English word "alphabet" came into Middle English from the Late Latin word "alphabetum", which in turn originated in the Greek ἀλφάβητος ("alphabētos"). The Greek word was made from the first two letters, "alpha"(α) and "beta"(β). The names for the Greek letters came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet; "aleph", which also meant "ox", and "bet", which also meant "house". Sometimes, like in the alphabet song in English, the term "ABCs" is used instead of the word "alphabet" ("Now I know my ABCs"...). "Knowing one's ABCs", in
Alphabet
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and order of appearance correspond closely. The Greek alphabet, adapted around 800 BCE, added four letters. This was the first alphabet assigning letters not only to consonant sounds, but also to vowels. The Roman Empire brought the development and refinement of our Roman alphabet, beginning around 500 BCE. The Romans added or dropped certain letters to accommodate Greek and Etruscan words; they also experimented with styles such as cursive when writing in ink. By about the fifth century CE, the beginnings of lowercase letterforms began to emerge in Roman writing, but they did not come into common use until the
Letter (alphabet)
11183391
that they knew their own name-letters were there. The letters first learned by a child, commonly their own name, may come to have lasting positive associations. Hoorens and Todorova tested this by looking for a name-letter effect in bilingual subjects where their mother tongue alphabet was Cyrillic and their foreign-language alphabet Roman. Because learning a foreign language at a later age does not typically involve extra attention given to name letters, there should be no name-letter effect in the foreign-language alphabet, only in the first-language alphabet. Results of a study with 100 Bulgarian subjects who at a later age learned
Name-letter effect
9399
(for the Latin script), with 46. However, these scripts either count di- and tri-graphs as separate letters, as Spanish did with "ch" and "ll" until recently, or uses diacritics like Slovak "č". The Georgian alphabet ( "") is alphabetical writing system. It is the largest true alphabet where each letter is graphically independent with 33 letters. Original Georgian alphabet had 38 letters but 5 letters were removed in 19th century by Ilia Chavchavadze. The Georgian alphabet is much closer to Greek than the other Caucasian alphabets. The numeric value runs parallel to the Greek one, the consonants without a Greek
Alphabet
2823798
some material promulgated. Although it did not supplant the Syriac script, the usage of the Latin script in the Syriac community has still become widespread because most of the Assyrian diaspora is in Europe and the Anglosphere, where the Latin alphabet is predominant. As a result of Westernisation, the Latin alphabet has been used for Syriac writing. Some letters are altered and would feature diacritics and macrons to indicate long vowels, schwas and diphthongs. The letters with diacritics and macrons, though, are mostly upheld in educational or formal writing. The Latin letters below are commonly used when it comes to
Syriac alphabet
6174611
Letters" ("О писмєньхъ") by Chernorizets Hrabar, where he defended the Cyrillic alphabet against its Byzantine Greek critics and proved not only its right to existence but also its superiority to the Greek alphabet arguing that the Greek letters were neither the oldest known to man, nor divine. In the form of rhetoric questions and answers "On the Letters" demonstrated excellent historic and linguistic knowledge of Chernorizets Hrabar, as he indicated that "God did not first create the Hebrew or the Greek language, but Syrian which Adam spoke..." and underlined that "Before then the Greeks had no alphabet of their own
First Bulgarian Empire
5512811
the early western Greek dialects, where the letter eta remained an , gave rise to the Old Italic alphabet which in turn developed into the Old Roman alphabet. In the eastern Greek dialects, which did not have an /h/, eta stood for a vowel, and remains a vowel in modern Greek and all other alphabets derived from the eastern variants: Glagolitic, Cyrillic, Armenian, Gothic (which used both Greek and Roman letters), and perhaps Georgian. Although this description presents the evolution of scripts in a linear fashion, this is a simplification. For example, the Manchu alphabet, descended from the abjads of
History of the alphabet
6146123
in Basque is "a" and the least common is "v" (although "w", "y", and "q" did not appear at all in the sampled text). Basque alphabet The Basque alphabet is a Latin alphabet used to write the Basque language. It consists of 27 letters. The letters of the Basque alphabet are the 26 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet plus the "ñ" (and the "ç", as a variant of the "c"). This is the whole list, plus the IPA phonology: All letters and digraphs represent unique phonemes. The main exception is if "l", "n" or sometimes "t" is preceded
Basque alphabet
242770
in the 1st century BC, Latin adopted the Greek letters and (or readopted, in the latter case) to write Greek loanwords, placing them at the end of the alphabet. An attempt by the emperor Claudius to introduce three additional letters did not last. Thus it was during the classical Latin period that the Latin alphabet contained 23 letters: The Latin names of some of these letters are disputed. In general the Romans did not use the traditional (Semitic-derived) names as in Greek: the names of the plosives were formed by adding to their sound (except for and , which needed
Latin alphabet
891526
Abkhaz alphabet The Abkhaz alphabet is a Cyrillic alphabet of 62 letters used for the Abkhaz language. Abkhaz did not become a written language until the 19th century. Up until then, Abkhazians, especially princes, had been using Greek (up to c. 9th century), Georgian (9–19th centuries), and partially Turkish (18th century) languages. The Abkhaz word for alphabet is анбан (anban), which was borrowed from Georgian ანბანი (anbani). The first Abkhaz alphabet was created in 1862 by Dimitry Gulia and K. Machavariani. The script was developed by Peter von Uslar. It had 37 letters and was based on the Cyrillic script.
Abkhaz alphabet
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alphabet by three letters, but any number works. Another method of substitution cipher is based on a keyword. All spaces and repeated letters are removed from a word or phrase, which the encoder then uses as the start of the cipher alphabet. The end of the cipher alphabet is the rest of the alphabet in order without repeating the letters in the keyword. For example, if the keyword is CIPHER, the cipher alphabet would look like this: The previous examples were all examples of monoalphabetic substitution ciphers, where just one cipher alphabet is used. It is also possible to have
Classical cipher
4846187
Claudian letters The Claudian letters were developed by, and named after, the Roman Emperor Claudius (reigned 41–54). He introduced three new letters to the Latin alphabet: These letters were used to a small extent on public inscriptions dating from Claudius' reign, but their use was abandoned after his death. Their forms were probably chosen to ease the transition, as they could be made from templates for existing letters. He may have been inspired by his ancestor Appius Claudius the Censor, who made earlier changes to the Latin alphabet. Claudius did indeed introduce his letters during his own term as censor
Claudian letters
9884
gi da", in much the same way that "abecedary" is derived from Latin "a be ce de", "abjad" is derived from the Arabic "a b j d", and "alphabet" is derived from the names of the two first letters in the Greek alphabet, "alpha" and "beta". As Daniels used the word, an abugida is in contrast with a syllabary, where letters with shared consonants or vowels show no particular resemblance to one another, and also with an alphabet proper, where independent letters are used to denote both consonants and vowels. The term "alphasyllabary" was suggested for the Indic scripts in
Abugida
242767
alphabets may discard letters, like the Rotokas alphabet, or add new letters, like the Danish and Norwegian alphabets. Letter shapes have evolved over the centuries, including the development in Medieval Latin of lower-case, forms which did not exist in the Classical period alphabet. English is the only major modern European language requiring no diacritics for native words (although a diaeresis may be used in words such as "coöperation"). It is generally believed that the Romans adopted the Cumae alphabet, a variant of the Greek alphabet, in the 7th century BC from Cumae, a Greek colony in Southern Italy. (Gaius Julius
Latin alphabet
891529
The modern Abkhaz orthography gives preference to the letters Г П with descender (Ӷ Ԥ) instead of hook (Ҕ Ҧ). The characters Ԥ and ԥ are encoded in Unicode since version 5.2. Abkhaz alphabet The Abkhaz alphabet is a Cyrillic alphabet of 62 letters used for the Abkhaz language. Abkhaz did not become a written language until the 19th century. Up until then, Abkhazians, especially princes, had been using Greek (up to c. 9th century), Georgian (9–19th centuries), and partially Turkish (18th century) languages. The Abkhaz word for alphabet is анбан (anban), which was borrowed from Georgian ანბანი (anbani). The
Abkhaz alphabet
11409359
called by any one before Scaliger by the combination ἐπίσημον βαῦ. However this may be, Scaliger has been followed by all who have written on the subject since his time. The true account of these three characters seems to be that though the Phoenicians themselves did not use the letters of their alphabet for purposes of numeration, the Greeks, who derived their alphabet from them, did so in the 5th century BC; that their alphabet then still contained two of the Phoenician letters which in the next century were disused, viz., βαῦ in the sixth place, and κόππα, the Roman
Marcosians
6866785
based on a transliteration of Cyrillic into Latin letters, would have used apostrophes to denote those Kazakh letters where there was no direct Latin equivalent. It is similar to the Karakalpak Latin alphabet and the Uzbek alphabet. A revised version of the 2017 Latin alphabet was announced in February 2018. Presidential Decree 637 of 19 February 2018 amends the 2017 decree and the use of apostrophes was discontinued and replaced with diacritics and digraphs. Notably, the new alphabet uses the acute accent where other alphabets prefer using umlauts. The Uniform Turkic Alphabet was used in the USSR from 1927 to
Kazakh alphabets
13606684
("ō") although this letter was taken from the Greek alphabet to write foreign words beginning with "o" . The number and order of the letters have changed over time. In the Middle Ages, two new letters (օ , ֆ ) were introduced in order to better represent foreign sounds; this increased the number of letters from 36 to 38. From 1922 to 1924, Soviet Armenia adopted a reformed spelling of the Armenian language. The reform changed the digraph ու and the ligature և into two new letters, but it generally did not change the pronunciation of individual letters. Those outside
Armenian alphabet
3181360
follows: Alpha and Omega represent the sovereign majesty of God and His dominion and lordship over all things. These letters come from the book of Revelation, where Jesus Christ says, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end." The letter Gamma, the third letter in the Greek alphabet, represents Christ, which itself begins with "C", the third letter of the English alphabet. It is in the center to represent Christ being at the center of the fraternity and the lives of its members. Pledges may become active members of an AGO
Alpha Gamma Omega
17992990
does not mix consonants and vowels. Rather, first are velar consonants, then coronals, labials, sibilants, etc. The vowels come after the consonants. The order from the "Hunminjeong'eum" in 1446 was: In 1527, Choe Sejin reorganized the alphabet in Hunmongjahoe: This is the basis of the modern alphabetic orders. It was before the development of the Korean tense consonants and the double letters that represent them, and before the conflation of the letters (') and (ng). Thus, when the North Korean and South Korean governments implemented full use of the Korean alphabet, they ordered these letters differently, with North Korea, placing
Hangul
7384029
about whether to unite, so one Patriarch would be the head of both Churches in Egypt. The unification did not come about, but one of the proposals made at the time was to make Coptic pronunciation conform more closely to Greek. The chief architect of this project was Arian G. Moftah, who taught Coptic in the Patriarchal Church at that time. Since the Coptic alphabet shares many letters with the Greek alphabet, he assumed that any change of Coptic pronunciation towards Greek would be a positive reform and would also assist with the expected union between the churches. At the
Coptic pronunciation reform
20865525
includes all the Ukrainian letters with the exception of ї, plus ы and ъ. The Rusyn alphabets all place ь after я, like the Ukrainian alphabet did until 1990. The vast majority of Cyrillic alphabets place ь before э (if present), ю, and я. The Lemko and Prešov Rusyn alphabets place ъ at the very end, while the vast majority of Cyrillic alphabets place it after щ. They also place ы before й, while the vast majority of Cyrillic alphabets place it after ш, щ (if present), and ъ (if present). In the Prešov Rusyn alphabet, і and ї come
Carpathian Rusyn language
9402
a new letter ՈՒ ու (which was a digraph before). The Armenian word for "alphabet" is "" (), named after the first two letters of the Armenian alphabet Ա այբ ayb and Բ բեն ben. The Armenian script's directionality is horizontal left-to-right, like the Latin and Greek alphabets. Alphabets often come to be associated with a standard ordering of their letters, which can then be used for purposes of collation—namely for the listing of words and other items in what is called "alphabetical order". The basic ordering of the Latin alphabet (A B C D E F G H I
Alphabet
14302526
k, L l, M m, N n, P p, W w, ). Alphabetic order differs from the normal Latin order in that the vowels come first, then the consonants. The five vowels with macrons – Ā ā, Ē ē, Ī ī, Ō ō, Ū ū – are not treated as separate letters, but are alphabetized immediately after unaccented vowels. The okina is ignored for purposes of alphabetization, but is included as a consonant. Hawaiian alphabet The Hawaiian alphabet (in ) is an alphabet used to write Hawaiian. It was adapted from the English alphabet in the early 19th century by
Hawaiian alphabet
4467746
ending "-ed" where it is pronounced as such (for example "dropt" for "dropped"). Some of the English language's most celebrated writers and poets have used these spellings and others proposed by today's spelling reformers. Edmund Spenser, for example, used spellings such as "rize, wize" and "advize" in his famous poem "The Faerie Queene", published in the 1590s. Many English words are based on French modifications (e.g., "colour" and "analogue") even though they come from Latin or Greek. The English alphabet has several letters whose characteristic sounds are already represented elsewhere in the alphabet. These include X, which can be realised
English-language spelling reform
2823784
Syriac alphabet The Syriac alphabet ( ) is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language since the 1st century AD. It is one of the Semitic abjads descending from the Aramaic alphabet through the Palmyrene alphabet, and it shares similarities with the Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic and the traditional Mongolian scripts. Syriac is written from right to left in horizontal lines. It is a cursive script where most, but not all, letters connect within a word. Spaces separate individual words. All 22 letters are consonants, although there are optional diacritic marks to indicate vowels and other features. In
Syriac alphabet
9412
usually achieved in practice; some languages (such as Spanish and Finnish) come close to it, while others (such as English) deviate from it to a much larger degree. The pronunciation of a language often evolves independently of its writing system, 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: National languages
Alphabet
10774825
Slavica alphabet Slavica is a simple writing system for the Croatian and Serbian languages proposed by Rajko Igić in his 1987 book, "Nova Slovarica", published by Universal from Tuzla. The alphabet is a combination of Croat Latin and Serbian Cyrillic alphabets and was intended for people from Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia that spoke the same language but wrote it using two different writing systems. Slavica uses 17 Latin letters, with 8 Cyrillic letters used in the cases where the native Slavic Latin script uses diacritics and digraphs. Five letters common to both alphabets — "a", "e", "o", "j", and
Slavica alphabet
8879430
in its position – according to Plutarch, by Spurius Carvilius Ruga – so that afterward, C = /k/, G = /ɡ/. An attempt by the emperor Claudius to introduce three additional letters was short-lived, but after the conquest of Greece in the 1st century BC the letters Y and Z were, respectively, adopted and readopted from the Greek alphabet and placed at the end. Now the new Latin alphabet contained 23 letters: The Latin names of some of the letters are disputed. In general, however, the Romans did not use the traditional (Semitic-derived) names as in Greek, but adopted the
History of the Latin script
101576
the 16th century. The spoken language however has changed a lot since then, creating a gap between the spoken and written languages. The modern Danish alphabet is similar to the English one, with three additional letters: "æ", "ø", and "å", which come at the end of the alphabet, in that order. The letters c, q, w, x and z are only used in loan words. A spelling reform in 1948 introduced the letter "å", already in use in Norwegian and Swedish, into the Danish alphabet to replace the digraph "aa". The old usage continues to occur in some personal and
Danish language
6720065
Old English Latin alphabet The Old English Latin alphabet—though it had no standard orthography—generally consisted of 24 letters, and was used for writing Old English from the 9th to the 12th centuries. Of these letters, 20 were directly adopted from the Latin alphabet, two were modified Latin letters (Æ, Ð), and two developed from the runic alphabet (Ƿ, Þ). The letters K, Q and Z were not in the spelling of native English words. In the year 1011, a writer named Byrhtferð ordered the Old English alphabet for numerological purposes. He listed the 24 letters of the Latin alphabet (including
Old English Latin alphabet
6720060
Old English Latin alphabet The Old English Latin alphabet—though it had no standard orthography—generally consisted of 24 letters, and was used for writing Old English from the 9th to the 12th centuries. Of these letters, 20 were directly adopted from the Latin alphabet, two were modified Latin letters (Æ, Ð), and two developed from the runic alphabet (Ƿ, Þ). The letters K, Q and Z were not in the spelling of native English words. In the year 1011, a writer named Byrhtferð ordered the Old English alphabet for numerological purposes. He listed the 24 letters of the Latin alphabet (including
Old English Latin alphabet
2259140
of 30 graphemes and eight digraphs: Based on the Steuer alphabet, in 2006 the "Phonetic Silesian Alphabet" was proposed: Silesian's phonetic alphabet replaces the digraphs with single letters (Sz with Š, etc.) and does not include the letter Ł, whose sound can be represented phonetically with U. It is therefore the alphabet that contains the fewest letters. Although it is the (phonetically) most logical and hence the most intuitive writing of Silesian, it did not become popular with Silesian organizations, with the argument that it contains too many caron diacritics and hence resembles the Czech alphabet. Large parts of the
Silesian language
16658899
respective alphabet sequences. In some languages, digraphs are included in the collation sequence (e.g. Hungarian CS, Welsh RH). The International Phonetic Alphabet is also derived mainly from the Latin script. Coverage of the letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet can be and additional letters can be Most alphabets have the letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet in the same order as that alphabet. Some alphabets regard digraphs as distinct letters, e.g. the old Spanish alphabet had CH and LL sorted apart from C and L. Some Spanish dictionaries still list "ll" separately. Some alphabets sort letters that have
Latin-script alphabet
197201
on the context and language. Occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters, 52 diacritics and four prosodic marks in the IPA. These are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, formed what would come to be known from 1897 onwards as the International Phonetic Association (in French, ""). Their original alphabet was based
International Phonetic Alphabet
3401183
must be terminated by a different termination symbol or word. A suffix tree for a string formula_1 of length formula_6 can be built in formula_17 time, if the letters come from an alphabet of integers in a polynomial range (in particular, this is true for constant-sized alphabets). For larger alphabets, the running time is dominated by first sorting the letters to bring them into a range of size formula_18; in general, this takes formula_4 time. The costs below are given under the assumption that the alphabet is constant. Assume that a suffix tree has been built for the string formula_1
Suffix tree
3755332
written in Molodtsov alphabet, also derived from Cyrillic. In the 1930s it was switched to Latin. Since the 1940s the Komi alphabet was simply changed to the Russian alphabet, albeit with the addition of "І, і" and "Ӧ, ӧ". Letters particular to the Molodtsov alphabet include ԁ, ԃ, ԅ, ԇ, ԉ, ԋ, ԍ, ԏ, where the hooks represent palatalization. In addition, the letters Ф ф, Х х, and Ц ц might be used for words borrowed from Russian. The first book published in Komi was a vaccination manual published in 1815. Komi has seven vowels: close , , , mid
Komi language
2743668
taken place from the 15th century and lasted right up to the 19th century. Other forms of Arabic-based scripts existed in the region, notably the Pegon alphabet of Javanese language in Java and the Serang alphabet of Bugis language in South Sulawesi. Both writing systems applied extensively the Arabic diacritics and added several letters other than Jawi letters to suit the languages. Due to their fairly limited usage, the spelling system of both scripts did not undergo similar advance developments and modifications as experienced by Jawi script. The script became prominent with the spread of Islam, as the Malays found
Jawi alphabet
8597403
alphabet. From then on, represented the voiced plosive , while was generally reserved for the voiceless plosive . The letter was used only rarely, in a small number of words such as "Kalendae", often interchangeably with . After the Roman conquest of Greece in the 1st century BC, Latin adopted the Greek letters and (or readopted, in the latter case) to write Greek loanwords, placing them at the end of the alphabet. An attempt by the emperor Claudius to introduce three additional letters did not last. Thus it was during the classical Latin period that the Latin alphabet contained 23
Latin script
4741167
its spelling. This rule excludes recent loanwords such as proper names. The letters representing vowel sounds in Turkic languages are, in alphabetical order, , and , , , , , , . The Uniform Turkic Alphabet was a Latin alphabet used by non-Slavic peoples of the USSR in the 1930s. The alphabet used letters from Jaꞑalif as it was also a part of the uniform alphabet. The uniform alphabet utilized Latin letters, excluding "w". Some additional letters were also introduced into the alphabet. Common Turkic Alphabet The terms Common Turkic Alphabet or Turkic concil Alphabet refer to two different systems
Common Turkic Alphabet
1976786
(e, é, i, í, ö, ő, ü, ű). The names of the consonants are always pronounced with a vowel. In the old alphabet, the consonant-vowel order is reversed, unlike today's pronunciation ("ep" rather than "pé"). This is because the oldest inscriptions lacked vowels and were rarely written down, similar to other ancient languages' consonant-writing systems (Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, etc.). The alphabet did not contain letters for the phonemes dz and dzs of modern Hungarian, since these are relatively recent developments in the language's history. Nor did it have letters corresponding to the Latin q, w, x and y. The modern
Old Hungarian alphabet
94745
(However, in some computer graphics contexts, the ordinate axis may be oriented downwards.) The origin is often labeled "O", and the two coordinates are often denoted by the letters "X" and "Y", or "x" and "y". The axes may then be referred to as the "X"-axis and "Y"-axis. The choices of letters come from the original convention, which is to use the latter part of the alphabet to indicate unknown values. The first part of the alphabet was used to designate known values. A Euclidean plane with a chosen Cartesian coordinate system is called a "Cartesian plane". In a Cartesian
Cartesian coordinate system
14734952
Swedish Dialect Alphabet The Swedish Dialect Alphabet () is a phonetic alphabet created in 1878 by Johan August Lundell and used for the narrow transcription of Swedish dialects. The initial version of the alphabet consisted of 89 letters, 42 of which came from the phonetic alphabet proposed by Carl Jakob Sundevall. It has since grown to over 200 letters.<ref name="L2/06-036"></ref> The alphabet supplemented Latin letters with symbols adapted from a range of alphabets, including modified forms of þ and ð from Germanic alphabets, γ and φ from the Greek alphabet and ы from the Cyrillic alphabet, and extended with systematic
Swedish Dialect Alphabet
9385
the Brahmi script, which is often believed to be a descendant of Aramaic. In Korea, the Hangul alphabet was created by Sejong the Great. Hangul is a unique alphabet: it is a featural alphabet, where many of the letters are designed from a sound's place of articulation (P to look like the widened mouth, L to look like the tongue pulled in, etc.); its design was planned by the government of the day; and it places individual letters in syllable clusters with equal dimensions, in the same way as Chinese characters, to allow for mixed-script writing (one syllable always takes
Alphabet
9711277
displaced Chagatai; "Kona Yëziq", meaning "old script", now distinguishes it and UEY from the alternatives that are "not" derived from Arabic. Between 1937 and 1954 the Perso-Arabic alphabet used to write Uyghur was modified by removing redundant letters and adding markings for vowels. A Cyrillic alphabet was adopted in the 1950s and a Latin alphabet in 1958. The modern Uyghur Perso-Arabic alphabet was made official in 1978 and reinstituted by the Chinese government in 1983, with modifications for representing Uyghur vowels. The Arabic alphabet used before the modifications (Kona Yëziq) did not represent Uyghur vowels and according to Robert Barkley
Uyghur Arabic alphabet
10760691
Bohorič alphabet The Bohorič alphabet () was an orthography used for Slovene between the 16th and 19th centuries. Its name is derived from Adam Bohorič, who codified the alphabet in his book "Articae Horulae Succisivae". It was printed in 1583 and published in 1584. The Bohorič alphabet was first used by the Lutheran preacher Primož Trubar, the author of the first printed book in Slovene. However, Trubar did not follow strict rules and often used alternate spellings for the same word. The alphabet consists of 25 letters (including 3 digraphs) in the following order: a b d e f g
Bohorič alphabet
16658897
Latin-script alphabet A Latin-script alphabet (Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet) is an alphabet that uses letters of the Latin script. The 21-letter archaic Latin alphabet and the 23-letter classical Latin alphabet belong to the oldest of this group. The 26-letter ISO basic Latin alphabet contains the 26 most widely used letters. Apart from alphabets for spoken languages, there exist phonetic alphabets and Spelling alphabets. Some letters of the Latin script were altered slightly for use in particular languages, although the main letters are largely the same. There were several general types of alterations made to extend the alphabet's uses, depending
Latin-script alphabet
13401037
Pashto alphabet The Pashto alphabet () is derived from the Perso-Arabic or Arabic script, with letters added to accommodate phonemes used in Pashto that are not found in Arabic. In the 16th century, Bayazid Pir Roshan from Waziristan invented the Roshani script to write Pashto. It had 41 letters: 28 of his letters came from the Arabic alphabet. He introduced 13 new letters into the Pashto alphabet. Most of the new letters he introduced i.e. ګ ,ښ ,ړ ,ډ ,څ ,ټ and ڼ are still written in the same form and are pronounced almost in the same way in modern
Pashto alphabet
2806277
speech the "foreign sounds" were replaced with respectively /t͡ɕ/, /p/, and /k/, respectively. The Komi-Permyak vowel system can be considered as being three-dimensional, where vowels are characterised by three features: front and back, rounded and unrounded and vowel height. Komi-Permyak does not distinguish between long and short vowels and does not have vowel harmony. There are no diphthongs; when two vowels come together, which occurs at some morpheme boundaries, each vowel retains its individual sound. The both regional standards of the Komi language have an identical alphabet, introduced in 1938. The alphabet (анбур) includes all the Russian letters plus two
Komi-Permyak language
2258373
was a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters, Jernej Kopitar urged the development of a new alphabet. In 1825, Franc Serafin Metelko proposed his version of the alphabet called "metelčica". However, it was banned in 1833 in favour of the bohoričica after the so-called "Suit of the Letters" ("Črkarska pravda") (1830–1833), which was won by France Prešeren and Matija Čop. Another alphabet, "dajnčica", was developed by Peter Dajnko in 1824, but did not catch on as widely as "metelčica"; it was banned in 1838 because it mixed Latin and Cyrillic characters, which was seen as a poor way to handle
Slovene alphabet
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alphabet was prolifically employed in the Perm Oblast, where virtually all Komi-language publications from 1932 to 1936 were made in the Latin Molodtsov alphabet. Molodtsov alphabet The Cyrillic Molodtsov alphabet (, "Molodcov anbur") is an alphabet derived from Cyrillic that was used in the 1920s and 1930s to write two versions of the Komi language; Komi-Zyrian and Komi-Permyak. It was replaced by the Latin Molodtsov alphabet in 1931 and later by the Cyrillic alphabet in the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The letters particular to the Cyrillic Molodtsov alphabet are: Ԁ Ԃ Ԅ Ԇ Ԉ Ԋ Ԍ Ԏ (the hooks
Molodtsov alphabet
9379
all alphabets in the West. The vowels have independent letter forms separate from those of consonants; therefore it was the first true alphabet. The Greeks chose letters representing sounds that did not exist in Greek to represent vowels. Vowels are significant in the Greek language, and the syllabical Linear B script that was used by the Mycenaean Greeks from the 16th century BC had 87 symbols, including 5 vowels. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, a situation that caused many different alphabets to evolve from it. The Greek alphabet, in its Euboean form, was
Alphabet
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the letters of the alphabet in their conventional order from one to nine, 10 to 90 and 100 to 900; in this arrangement obsolete letters were retained in their original places so as to give the requisite number of 27 symbols. The Roman system of numerals — M, D, C, L, X, V, I (for 1,000, 500, 100, 50, 10, 5 and 1) is generally supposed to have arisen from the adaptation of those symbols in the Greek alphabet which the Romans did not want; an alternative theory is that it is simplified from a series of ideographs representing the
Epigraphy
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the letter "w" is considered an official letter. In computing, several different coding standards have existed for this alphabet: Danish and Norwegian alphabet The Danish and Norwegian alphabet, called the Dano-Norwegian alphabet is based upon the Latin alphabet and has consisted of the following 29 letters since 1917 (Norwegian) and 1948 (Danish). The letters c, q, w, x and z are not used in the spelling of indigenous words. They are rarely used in Norwegian, where loan words routinely have their orthography adapted to the native sound system. Conversely, Danish has a greater tendency to preserve the original spelling of
Danish and Norwegian alphabet
16620853
letters represent the phonemes /æ/, /ŋ/, /œ/, /ů/, /y/, /ẙ/ and /ə/. Mari alphabet The Mari language is mostly written using a Cyrillic alphabet. The Meadow Mari alphabet uses all of the letters of the Russian alphabet, plus 3 more: ҥ, ӧ, and ӱ. Respectively, these letters represent the phonemes /ŋ/, /œ/, and /y/. The Hill Mari alphabet uses all of the letters of the Russian alphabet, plus 4 more: ӓ, ӧ, ӱ, and ӹ. Respectively, these letters represent the phonemes /æ/, /œ/, /y/, and /ə/. The North-Western Mari alphabet uses all of the letters of the Russian alphabet, plus
Mari alphabet
9405
"sci-" (all incidentally loanwords) instead of appearing after initial "sz", as though it were a single letter—in contrast to several languages such as Albanian, in which "dh-", "ë-", "gj-", "ll-", "rr-", "th-", "xh-" and "zh-" (all representing phonemes and considered separate single letters) would follow the letters "d", "e", "g", "l", "n", "r", "t", "x" and "z" respectively, as well as Hungarian and Welsh. Further, German words with umlaut are collated ignoring the umlaut—contrary to Turkish that adopted the graphemes ö and ü, and where a word like "tüfek", would come after "tuz", in the dictionary. An exception is the
Alphabet
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Romic alphabet The Romic Alphabet, sometimes known as the Romic Reform, is a phonetic alphabet proposed by Henry Sweet. It descends from Ellis's Palaeotype alphabet and English Phonotypic Alphabet, and is the direct ancestor of the International Phonetic Alphabet. In Romic every sound had a dedicated symbol, and every symbol represented a single sound. There were no capital letters; there were letters derived from small capitals, though these were distinct letters. There were two variants, Broad Romic and Narrow Romic. Narrow Romic utilized italics to distinguish fine details of pronunciation; Broad Romic was cruder, and in it the vowels had
Romic alphabet
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in Russian or other Slavic languages (there are no words of Slavic origin beginning with "f" at all). The last line contains only one translatable word – "червь" ("worm"), which, however, was not included in the "translation". Russian alphabet The Russian alphabet () uses letters from the Cyrillic script. The modern Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters. The Russian alphabet is as follows: Consonant letters represent both "soft" (palatalized, represented in the IPA with a ) and "hard" consonant phonemes. If consonant letters are followed by vowel letters, the soft/hard quality of the consonant depends on whether the vowel is
Russian alphabet
2111771
Russian alphabet The Russian alphabet () uses letters from the Cyrillic script. The modern Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters. The Russian alphabet is as follows: Consonant letters represent both "soft" (palatalized, represented in the IPA with a ) and "hard" consonant phonemes. If consonant letters are followed by vowel letters, the soft/hard quality of the consonant depends on whether the vowel is meant to follow "hard" consonants or "soft" consonants ; see below. A soft sign indicates palatalization of the preceding consonant without adding a vowel. However, in modern Russian six consonant phonemes do not have phonemically distinct "soft"
Russian alphabet
1332824
of Poland has 34 letters. It includes all the Ukrainian letters with the exception of ї, plus ы and ъ. The Pannonian Rusyn alphabet has 32 letters, namely all the Ukrainian letters except і. The Rusyn alphabets all place ь after я, like the Ukrainian alphabet did until 1990. The vast majority of Cyrillic alphabets place ь before э (if present), ю, and я. The Lemko and Prešov Rusyn alphabets place ъ at the very end, while the vast majority of Cyrillic alphabets place it after щ. They also place ы before й, while the vast majority of Cyrillic alphabets
Rusyn language
4256248
the alphabet. Rather than the ancient Semitic names for the letters ("aleph", "beth", "gimel"), the letters are known as "a", "ba", "ga" and so on. It is written from right to left in horizontal lines. It is a cursive script, but not all letters connect within a word. Spaces separate individual words. The Mandaic alphabet contains 22 letters (in the same order as the Aramaic alphabet) and the digraph "adu". The alphabet is formally closed by repeating the first letter, "a", so that it has a symbolic count of 24 letters: Unlike most other Semitic alphabets, vowels are usually written
Mandaic alphabet
4197499
(see page 12,13). These three glyphs do not have the official status of letters, but serve to represent these sounds when they are indispensable to comprehension. Turkey does not recognize this alphabet. Use of the letters Q, W, and X, which did not exist in the Turkish alphabet until 2013, led to persecution in 2000 and 2003 (see , p. 8, and ). Since September 2003, many Kurds applied to the courts seeking to change their names to Kurdish ones written with these letters, but failed. The Turkish government finally legalized the letters Q, W, and X as part of
Kurdish alphabets
10633132
letters to indicate that a vowel is long: In yet other dialects, with additional sounds, additional letters are employed: Quechua employs additional letters to write loanwords, mainly originating from Spanish. In careful speech, the letters may represent a Spanish sound, but generally are substituted with a native sound. For phonetic transcription, four additional letters are used: Quechua alphabet The Quechua alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet. It is used to write the Quechuan languages. The number of letters employed in writing Quechua highly depends on the Quechua dialect. However, the following are the core letters generally used: In Ecuador
Quechua alphabet
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Mari alphabet The Mari language is mostly written using a Cyrillic alphabet. The Meadow Mari alphabet uses all of the letters of the Russian alphabet, plus 3 more: ҥ, ӧ, and ӱ. Respectively, these letters represent the phonemes /ŋ/, /œ/, and /y/. The Hill Mari alphabet uses all of the letters of the Russian alphabet, plus 4 more: ӓ, ӧ, ӱ, and ӹ. Respectively, these letters represent the phonemes /æ/, /œ/, /y/, and /ə/. The North-Western Mari alphabet uses all of the letters of the Russian alphabet, plus 7 more: ӓ, ҥ, ӧ, ө, ӱ, ӫ and ӹ. Respectively, these
Mari alphabet
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alphabet and shares similarities with the Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic, and the traditional Mongolian alphabets. The alphabet consists of 22 letters, all of which are consonants. It is a cursive script where some, but not all, letters connect within a word. The oldest and classical form of the alphabet is "" (); the name is thought to derive from the Greek adjective "strongýlē" (, 'rounded'), Although ʾEsṭrangēlā is no longer used as the main script for writing Syriac, it has undergone some revival since the 10th century. When Arabic gradually began to be the dominant spoken language in the Fertile Crescent
Assyrian Neo-Aramaic
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length of RISK's career and his lifelong dedication to letterforms. "Twenty-Six is a celebration of where I'm at today and where I have come from," RISK explained. "I have been painting for 26 years; there are 26 letters in the alphabet—I could not pick a better way to define myself and my view of graffiti art." In 2014, Risk joined Regime Management. Gastman, Roger. "Freight Train Graffiti." New York: Abrams, 2006. Alva, Robert. "The History of Los Angeles Graffiti Art." Alva & Reiling Publications, 2005. Grody, Steve. "Graffiti L.A." New York: Abrams, 2006. RISK (graffiti artist) RISK (born Kelly Graval),
RISK (graffiti artist)
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French manual alphabet The French manual alphabet is an alphabet used for French Sign Language (LSF), both to distinguish LSF words and to sign French words in LSF. The alphabet has the following letters: These are largely similar to the letters of the American manual alphabet. A few letters (upward G, sideward M and N) are oriented differently, with the result that D and G depend on a difference in hand shape that has been lost from informal ASL, and N looks like an ASL H. Several letters (hitchhiker-thumb A, clawed E, splayed F, nodding P, etc.) have minor differences
French manual alphabet
466290
of the vowels "a/o/u" and as a (standardized) variant spelling of "ss", not as independent letters, so they come after the unmodified letters in the alphabetical order. The German alphabet ends with "z". A glyph variant of Z originating in the medieval Gothic minuscules and the Early Modern Blackletter typefaces is the "tailed z" (German ', also '). In some Antiqua typefaces, this letter is present as a standalone letter or in ligatures. Ligated with long s (ſ), it is part of the origin of the Eszett (ß) in the German alphabet. The character ezh (Ʒ) resembles a tailed z.
Z
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"The Kid." The result was published children's book, "Cloudberry". For higher literature courses Aksyonova seriously addressed the issues Dolgan writing. In his first letter to the translator Valery Kravtsov it in March 1978, it was reported that he wanted the experience of other nations. "Now come to grips with our alphabet - wrote Aksenov. - I'll take five letters of the Yakuts and the Kazakhs want to take two letters. " The first draft of his prepared script Aksenova by the end of 1978. Her version is largely supported by Novosibirsk philologists. In 1979, was approved by Dolgan alphabet. A
Ogdo Aksyonova
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Hungarian Braille The braille alphabet used to write Hungarian is based on the international norm for the 26 basic letters of the Latin script. However, the letters for "q" and "z" have been replaced, to increase the symmetry of the accented letters of the Hungarian alphabet, which are largely innovative to Hungarian braille. The Hungarian alphabet is: The letters that conform to traditional braille are: The accented vowel letters are derived from their base letters through stretching or reflection as follows. The traditional letter for "q" (which is not part of the basic Hungarian alphabet) has been reassigned to "ö",
Hungarian Braille
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Danish and Norwegian alphabet The Danish and Norwegian alphabet, called the Dano-Norwegian alphabet is based upon the Latin alphabet and has consisted of the following 29 letters since 1917 (Norwegian) and 1948 (Danish). The letters c, q, w, x and z are not used in the spelling of indigenous words. They are rarely used in Norwegian, where loan words routinely have their orthography adapted to the native sound system. Conversely, Danish has a greater tendency to preserve the original spelling of loan words. In particular, a 'c' that represents /s/ is almost never normalized to 's' in Danish, as would
Danish and Norwegian alphabet
1630851
Turkish alphabet The Turkish alphabet () is a Latin-script alphabet used for writing the Turkish language, consisting of 29 letters, seven of which (Ç, Ş, Ğ, I, İ, Ö, Ü) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language. This alphabet represents modern Turkish pronunciation with a high degree of accuracy and specificity. It is the current official alphabet and the latest in a series of distinct alphabets used in different eras. The letters of the Turkish alphabet are: Of these 29 letters, eight are vowels (A, E, I, İ, O, Ö, U, Ü); the
Turkish alphabet
331695
India, Southeast Asia, Tibet, and Mongolia. Initially, the Aramaic script did not differ from the Phoenician, but then the Aramaeans simplified some of the letters, thickened and rounded their lines: a specific feature of its letters is the distinction between d and r. One innovation in Aramaic is the "matres lectionis" system to indicate certain vowels. Early Phoenician-derived scripts did not have letters for vowels, and so most texts recorded just consonants. Most likely as a consequence of phonetic changes in North Semitic languages, the Aramaeans reused certain letters in the alphabet to represent long vowels. The letter "aleph" was
Palaeography
5512823
French/American one-handed alphabets retain the forms of the Latin alphabet, as the Indian manual alphabet does Devanagari, and the Korean does Hangul), Braille, semaphore, maritime signal flags, and the Morse codes are essentially arbitrary geometric forms. The shapes of the English Braille and semaphore letters, for example, are derived from the alphabetic order of the Latin alphabet, but not from the graphic forms of the letters themselves. Most modern forms of shorthand are also unrelated to the alphabet, generally transcribing sounds instead of letters. History of the alphabet The history of alphabetic writing goes back to the consonantal writing system
History of the alphabet
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Carpathian Rusyn language Carpathian Rusyn ( (), ()) is a dialect of the Rusyn language, spoken by the Rusyns of Carpathian Ruthenia (Eastern Slovakia, Zakarpattia Oblast of Ukraine, Southern Poland). Carpathian Rusyn is spoken in: The table below shows the alphabet of Slovakia (Prešov) Rusyn. The alphabet of the other Carpathian Rusyn standard, Lemko (Poland) Rusyn, differs from it only by lacking the letters ё and ї. The Prešov Rusyn alphabet of Slovakia has 36 letters. It includes all the letters of the Ukrainian alphabet plus ё, ы, and ъ. The Lemko Rusyn alphabet of Poland has 34 letters. It
Carpathian Rusyn language
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be seen, the Uyghur Arabic alphabet, Uyghur New Script and Uyghur Latin alphabet each have a total of 32 letters (including one digraph for NG/ng in the two Latin-based alphabets, plus four digraphs in ULY). There may still exist differences in texts using the newer Latin orthography, where the standard choice of is sometimes written instead, with the acute accent instead of the standardized diaeresis: this should not make any difference in Uyghur. The Uyghur Cyrillic alphabet has three additional letters, the Cyrillic soft letters/ligatures , , and , representing , , and , respectively, which are written with independent
Uyghur alphabets
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English alphabet The modern English alphabet is a Latin alphabet consisting of 26 letters, each having an uppercase and a lowercase form, and the same letters constitute the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The exact shape of printed letters varies depending on the typeface (and font), and the shape of handwritten letters can differ significantly from the standard printed form (and between individuals), especially when written in cursive style. English is the only major modern European language requiring no diacritics for native words (although a diaeresis is used by some publishers in words such as "coöperation" or "naïve"). Written English does,
English alphabet
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is pronounced as if it were "Schi" all over the German-speaking areas (reflecting its pronunciation in its source language Norwegian), but only written that way in Austria. This section lists German letters and letter combinations, and how to pronounce them transliterated into the International Phonetic Alphabet. This is the pronunciation of Standard German. Note that the pronunciation of standard German varies slightly from region to region. In fact, it is possible to tell where most German speakers come from by their accent in standard German (not to be confused with the different German dialects). Foreign words are usually pronounced approximately
German orthography
300019
half-uncial script of the Latin alphabet introduced by Irish Christian missionaries. This was replaced by insular script, a cursive and pointed version of the half-uncial script. This was used until the end of the 12th century when continental Carolingian minuscule (also known as "Caroline") replaced the insular. The Latin alphabet of the time still lacked the letters and , and there was no as distinct from ; moreover native Old English spellings did not use , or . The remaining 20 Latin letters were supplemented by four more: (, modern "ash") and (, now called eth or edh), which were
Old English
3254812
Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late ninth or early eighth century BC. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the first alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many different local variants, but, by the end of the fourth century BC, the Eucleidean alphabet, with twenty-four letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used to write Greek today. These twenty-four letters
Greek alphabet
4513557
script, known as ("script with dots and circles"). As a result, the Manchu alphabet contains little ambiguity. Recently discovered manuscripts from the 1620s make clear, however, that the addition of dots and circles to Manchu script began before their supposed introduction by Dahai. Dahai also added ten graphemes ("tulergi hergen": "foreign (outer) letters"), to allow Manchu to be used to write Chinese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan loanwords. Previously, these words contained sounds that did not have corresponding letters in Manchu. Sounds that were transliterated included the aspirated sounds k' (Chinese pinyin: k, ), k (g, ), x (h, ); ts' (c,
Manchu alphabet
3254845
letters were also used to write numbers. In the classical Ionian system, the first nine letters of the alphabet stood for the numbers from 1 to 9, the next nine letters stood for the multiples of 10, from 10 to 90, and the next nine letters stood for the multiples of 100, from 100 to 900. For this purpose, in addition to the 24 letters which by that time made up the standard alphabet, three otherwise obsolete letters were retained or revived: digamma for 6, koppa for 90, and a rare Ionian letter for [ss], today called sampi , for
Greek alphabet
92293
systems of collation where items of information are identified by strings consisting principally of letters from an alphabet. The ordering of the strings relies on the existence of a standard ordering for the letters of the alphabet in question. (The system is not limited to alphabets in the strict technical sense; languages that use a syllabary or abugida, for example Cherokee, can use the same ordering principle provided there is a set ordering for the symbols used.) To decide which of two strings comes first in alphabetical order, initially their first letters are compared. The string whose first letter appears
Collation
24213
letters to differentiate them. (The Aramaic language had fewer phonemes than the Arabic, and some originally distinct Aramaic letters had become indistinguishable in shape, so that in the early writings 15 distinct letter-shapes had to do duty for 28 sounds; cf. the similarly ambiguous Pahlavi alphabet.) The first surviving document that definitely uses these dots is also the first surviving Arabic papyrus (PERF 558), dated April 643, although they did not become obligatory until much later. Important texts were and still are frequently memorized, especially in Qurʾan memorization, a practice which probably arose partially from a desire to avoid the
Arabic alphabet
12021644
Corsican alphabet The modern Corsican alphabet (Corsican u santacroce or u salteriu) uses 22 basic letters taken from the Latin alphabet with some changes, plus some multigraphs. The pronunciations of the English, French, Italian or Latin forms of these letters are not a guide to their pronunciation in "Corsu", which has its own pronunciation, often the same, but frequently not. As can be seen from the table below, two of the phonemic letters are represented as trigraphs, plus some other digraphs. Nearly all the letters are allophonic; that is, a phoneme of the language might have more than one pronunciation
Corsican alphabet
9384
Clement of Ohrid, who was their disciple. They feature many letters that appear to have been borrowed from or influenced by the Greek alphabet and the Hebrew alphabet. The longest European alphabet is the Latin-derived Slovak alphabet which has 46 letters. Beyond the logographic Chinese writing, many phonetic scripts are in existence in Asia. 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. Most alphabetic scripts of India and Eastern Asia are descended from
Alphabet
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character references can be in decimal format (&#"DDDD";) or hexadecimal format (&#x"HHHH";). For example, ܕ and ܕ (1813 in decimal) both represent U+0715 SYRIAC LETTER DALATH. Syriac alphabet The Syriac alphabet ( ) is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language since the 1st century AD. It is one of the Semitic abjads descending from the Aramaic alphabet through the Palmyrene alphabet, and it shares similarities with the Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic and the traditional Mongolian scripts. Syriac is written from right to left in horizontal lines. It is a cursive script where most, but not all, letters
Syriac alphabet
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albeit with some adaptations. Japanese, Indian and Arabic names such as "Kajibumi", "Djakarta" and "Jabar" are written as "Kadžibumi", "Džakarta" and "Džabar", where j is replaced with dž. Except for ć and đ, graphemes with diacritical marks from other foreign alphabets (e.g., ä, å, æ, ç, ë, ï, ń, ö, ß, ş, ü) are not used as independent letters. The modern alphabet ("abeceda") was standardised in the mid-1840s from an arrangement of the Croatian national reviver and leader Ljudevit Gaj which would become the Croatian alphabet, and was in turn patterned on the Czech alphabet. Before the current alphabet became
Slovene alphabet
8597400
Latin script Latin or Roman script is a set of graphic signs (script) based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet. This is derived from a form of the Cumaean Greek version of the Greek alphabet used by the Etruscans. Several Latin-script alphabets exist, which differ in graphemes, collation, and phonetic values from the classical Latin alphabet. The Latin script is the basis of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and the 26 most widespread letters are the letters contained in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Latin script is the basis for the largest number of alphabets of any writing system
Latin script
2296612
taboo and most were frowned upon as non-scholarly. However, nowadays Sinhalese slang words and terms, even the ones with sexual references, are commonly used among younger Sri Lankans. The Sinhalese script, "Sinhala hodiya", is based on the ancient Brahmi script, as are most Indian scripts. The Sinhalese alphabet is closely related to South Indian Grantha alphabet and Khmer alphabet taken the elements from the related Kadamba alphabet. The Sinhalese writing system is an abugida, where the consonants are written with letters while the vowels are indicated with diacritics ("pilla") on those consonants, unlike English where both consonants and vowels are
Sinhalese language
4143880
the 27th letter. A traditional method for constructing a mixed alphabet from a key word or phrase is to write out the unique letters of the key in order, followed by the remaining letters of the alphabet in the usual order. For example, the key FELIX MARIE DELASTELLE yields the mixed alphabet FELIXMARDSTBCGHJKNOPQUVWYZ+. To each letter in the mixed alphabet we assign one of the 27 trigrams (111, 112, …, 333) by populating a 3 × 3 × 3 cube with the letters of the mixed alphabet, and using the Cartesian coordinates of each letter as the corresponding trigram. From
Trifid cipher
174978
and was known by Jewish sages as the Ashuri alphabet (lit. "Assyrian"), since its origins were alleged to be from Assyria. Various "styles" (in current terms, "fonts") of representation of the Jewish script letters described in this article also exist, including a variety of cursive Hebrew styles. In the remainder of this article, the term "Hebrew alphabet" refers to the square script unless otherwise indicated. The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters. It does not have case, but five letters have different forms when used at the end of a word. Hebrew is written from right to left. Originally, the alphabet
Hebrew alphabet
668277
of Greek origin; 6 or 7 more were retained from Demotic, depending on the dialect (6 in Sahidic, another each in Bohairic and Akhmimic). In addition to the alphabetic letters, the letter ϯ stood for the syllable or . As the Coptic alphabet is simply a typeface of the Greek alphabet, with a few added letters, it can be used to write Greek without any transliteration schemes. Latin equivalents would include the Icelandic alphabet (which likewise has added letters), or the Fraktur alphabet (which has distinctive forms). While initially unified with the Greek alphabet by Unicode, a proposal was later
Coptic alphabet
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ME or not, must acknowledge receipt of the message, but must not indicate its receipt to the user and must discard its contents, so the message will not be stored in the (U)SIM or ME. A special 7-bit encoding called "GSM 7 bit default alphabet" was designed for Short Message System in GSM. The alphabet contains the most-often used symbols from most Western-European languages (and some Greek uppercase letters). Some ASCII characters and the Euro sign did not fit into the GSM 7-bit default alphabet and must be encoded using two septets. These characters form GSM 7-bit default alphabet "extension
GSM 03.40
24188
Arabic alphabet The Arabic alphabet ( ', or ') or Arabic abjad is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing Arabic. It is written from right to left in a cursive style and includes 28 letters. Most letters have contextual letterforms. Originally, the alphabet was an abjad, with only consonants, but it is now considered an "impure abjad". As with other "abjads", such as the Hebrew alphabet, scribes later devised means of indicating vowel sounds by separate vowel diacritics. The basic Arabic alphabet contains 28 letters. Adaptations of the Arabic script for other languages added and removed some
Arabic alphabet
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Alphabet book An alphabet book is a book primarily designed for young children. It presents letters of the alphabet with corresponding words and/or images. Some alphabet books feature capitals and lower case letter forms, keywords beginning with specific letters, or illustrations of keywords. Alphabet books may consist of sentences, paragraphs, or entire pages highlighting letters and corresponding keywords in a variety of creative and imaginative formats. Alphabet books introduce the sounds and letters of the ordered alphabet. These books provide a non-threatening genre in which children engage in a variety of both fiction and non-fiction texts. Alphabet books provide opportunities
Alphabet book
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but contain Greek innovations such as the letters Φ and Ψ which did not exist in the earliest forms of the Greek alphabet. The Anatolian alphabets fell out of use around the 4th century BCE with the onset of the Hellenistic period. Alphabets of Asia Minor Various alphabetic writing systems were in use in Iron Age Anatolia to record Anatolian languages and Phrygian. Several of these languages had previously been written with logographic and syllabic scripts. The alphabets of Asia Minor proper share characteristics that distinguish them from the earliest attested forms of the Greek alphabet. Many letters in these
Alphabets of Asia Minor
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the Ukrainian alphabet until 1990, the Pannonian Rusyn alphabet places ь after я, while the vast majority of Cyrillic alphabets place ь before э (if present), ю, and я. The Prešov Rusyn alphabet of Slovakia has 36 letters. It includes all the letters of the Pannonian Rusyn alphabet plus ё, і, ы, and ъ. The Lemko Rusyn alphabet of Poland has 34 letters. It includes all the letters of the Pannonian Rusyn alphabet with the exception of ї, plus і, ы, and ъ. In the Ukrainian alphabet, и precedes і and ї, and the Pannonian Rusyn alphabet (which doesn't have
Pannonian Rusyn language