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Alphabet

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Linguistics

                                                   History of the Alphabet

                                          Middle Bronze Age 19–15th c. BC
      * Canaanite- Phoenician 14th c. BC
           + Paleo-Hebrew 10th c. BC
           + Aramaic 9th c. BC
                o Brāhmī & Indic 6th c. BC
                     # Tibetan 7th c.
                     # Khmer/ Javanese 9th c.
                o Hebrew 3rd c. BC
                o Syriac 2nd c. BC
                     # Nabatean 2nd c. BC
                          @ Arabic 4th c.
                o Avestan 4th to 6th c.
           + Greek 9th c. BC
                o Etruscan 8th c. BC
                     # Latin 7th c. BC
                     # Runes 2nd c.
                     # Ogham 4th c.
                o Gothic 4th c.
                o Armenian 405
                o Glagolitic 862
                o Cyrillic 10th c.
           + Samaritan 6th c. BC
           + Iberian 6th c. BC
      * Epigraphic South Arabian 9th c. BC
           + Ge'ez 5–6th c. BC

                                                        Meroitic 3rd c. BC
                                                        Complete genealogy

   An alphabet is a complete standardized set of letters — basic written
   symbols — each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken
   language, either as it exists now or as it may have been in the past.
   There are other systems of writing such as logosyllabic writing, in
   which each symbol represents a morpheme, or word or a syllable or
   places the word within a category, and syllabaries, in which each
   symbol represents a syllable.

   The etymology of the word "alphabet" itself comes to Middle English
   from the Late Latin Alphabetum which in turn originates from the
   Ancient Greek Alphabetos, from alpha and beta, the first two letters of
   the Greek alphabet. There are dozens of alphabets in use today. Most of
   them are ' linear', which means that they are made up of lines. Notable
   exceptions are Braille, manual alphabets, Morse code, and the cuneiform
   alphabet of the ancient civilization Sumer.

Linguistic definition and context

   In spite of its imprecision, the term "alphabet" is commonly used to
   refer to any writing system whose graphemes represent both consonant
   and vowel sounds.

   A grapheme is an abstract entity which may be physically represented by
   different styles of glyphs. There are many written entities which do
   not form part of the alphabet, including numerals, mathematical
   symbols, and punctuation. Some human languages are commonly written by
   using a combination of logograms (which represent morphemes or words)
   and syllabograms instead of an alphabet. Egyptian hieroglyphs and
   Chinese characters are two of the best-known writing systems with
   predominantly non-alphabetic representations.

   Non-written languages also have alphabetic and non-alphabetic
   representations. For example, in American Sign Language one can spell
   words using the character set borrowed from the English language
   alphabet. Experienced ASL signers express most concepts using ideomatic
   hand signs which either correspond to English words or are original to
   the signed language.

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

History

   The history of the alphabet starts in ancient Egypt. By 2700 BCE
   Egyptian writing had a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent
   syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a
   vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These glyphs
   were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical
   inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names.

   However, although seemingly alphabetic in nature, the original Egyptian
   uniliterals were not a system and were never used by themselves to
   encode Egyptian speech. In the Middle Bronze Age an apparently
   "alphabetic" system is thought by some to have been developed in
   central Egypt around 1700 BCE for or by Semitic workers, but we cannot
   read these early writings and their exact nature remain open to
   interpretation.

   Over the next five centuries this Semitic "alphabet" (really an abjad
   like Phoenician writing) seems to have spread north. All subsequent
   alphabets around the world with the sole possible exception of Korean
   Hangul have either descended from it, or been inspired by one of its
   descendants.

Types

   World distribution of alphabets ██ Latin Alphabet ██ Cyrillic alphabet
   ██ Arabic alphabet ██ Brahmic alphabet ██ Latin and Cyrillic ██ Latin
   and Arabic ██ Other alphabet ██ No alphabet ██ Other or none
   Enlarge
   World distribution of alphabets ██  Latin Alphabet ██  Cyrillic
   alphabet ██  Arabic alphabet ██  Brahmic alphabet ██ Latin and Cyrillic
   ██ Latin and Arabic ██  Other alphabet ██ No alphabet ██ Other or none

   The term "alphabet" is used by linguists and paleographers in both a
   wide and narrow sense. In the wider sense, an alphabet is a script that
   is segmental on the phoneme level, that is, that has separate glyphs
   for individual sounds and not for larger units such as syllables or
   words. In the narrower sense, some scholars distinguish "true"
   alphabets from two other types of segmental script, abjads and
   abugidas. These three differ from each other in the way they treat
   vowels: Abjads have letters for consonants and leave most vowels
   unexpressed; abugidas are also consonant-based, but indicate vowels
   with diacritics to or a systematic graphic modification of the
   consonants. In alphabets in the narrow sense, on the other hand,
   consonants and vowels are written as independent letters. The earliest
   known alphabet in the wider sense is the Wadi el-Hol script, believed
   to be an abjad, which through its successor Phoenician is the ancestor
   of modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin (via the Old Italic
   alphabet), Cyrillic (via the Greek alphabet) and Hebrew (via Aramaic).

   Examples of present-day abjads are the Arabic and Hebrew scripts; true
   alphabets include Latin, Cyrillic, and Korean Hangul; and abugidas are
   used to write Tigrinya Amharic, Hindi, and Thai. The Canadian
   Aboriginal Syllabics are also an abugida rather than a syllabary as
   their name would imply, since each glyph stands for a consonant which
   is modified by rotation to represent the following vowel. (In a true
   syllabary, each consonant-vowel combination would be represented by a
   separate glyph.)

   The boundaries between the three types of segmental scripts are not
   always clear-cut. For example, Iraqi Kurdish is written in the Arabic
   script, which is normally an abjad. However, in Kurdish, writing the
   vowels is mandatory, and full letters are used, so the script is a true
   alphabet. Other languages may use a Semitic abjad with mandatory vowel
   diacritics, effectively making them abugidas. On the other hand, the
   Phagspa script of the Mongol Empire was based closely on the Tibetan
   abugida, but all vowel marks were written after the preceding consonant
   rather than as diacritic marks. Although short a was not written, as in
   the Indic abugidas, one could argue that the linear arrangement made
   this a true alphabet. Conversely, the vowel marks of the Tigrinya
   abugida and the Amharic abugida (ironically, the original source of the
   term "abugida") have been so completely assimilated into their
   consonants that the modifications are no longer systematic and have to
   be learned as a syllabary rather than as a segmental script. Even more
   extreme, the Pahlavi abjad eventually became logographic. (See below.)

   Thus the primary classification of alphabets reflects how they treat
   vowels. For tonal languages, further classification can be based on
   their treatment of tone, though there are yet no names to distinguish
   the various types. Some alphabets disregard tone entirely, especially
   when it does not carry a heavy functional load, as in Somali and many
   other languages of Africa and the Americas. Such scripts are to tone
   what abjads are to vowels. Most commonly, tones are indicated with
   diacritics, the way vowels are treated in abugidas. This is the case
   for Vietnamese (a true alphabet) and Thai (an abugida). In Thai, tone
   is determined primarily by the choice of consonant, with diacritics for
   disambiguation. In the Pollard script, an abugida, vowels are indicated
   by diacritics, but the placement of the diacritic relative to the
   consonant is modified to indicate the tone. More rarely, a script may
   have separate letters for tones, as is the case for Hmong and Zhuang.
   For most of these scripts, regardless of whether letters or diacritics
   are used, the most common tone is not marked, just as the most common
   vowel is not marked in Indic abugidas.

   Alphabets can be quite small. The Book Pahlavi script, an abjad, had
   only twelve letters at one point, and may have had even fewer later on.
   Today the Rotokas alphabet has only twelve letters. (The Hawaiian
   alphabet is sometimes claimed to be as small, but it actually consists
   of 18 letters, including the ʻokina and five long vowels.) While
   Rotokas has a small alphabet because it has few phonemes to represent
   (just eleven), Book Pahlavi was small because many letters had been
   conflated, that is, the graphic distinctions had been lost over time,
   and diacritics were not developed to compensate for this as they were
   in Arabic, another script that lost many of its distinct letter shapes.
   For example, a comma-shaped letter represented g, d, y, k, or j.
   However, such apparent simplifications can perversely make a script
   more complicated. In later Pahlavi papyri, up to half of the remaining
   graphic distinctions of these twelve letters were lost, and the script
   could no longer be read as a sequence of letters at all, but instead
   each word had to be learned as a whole – that is, they had become
   logograms as in Egyptian Demotic.

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

   The largest known abjad is Sindhi, with 51 letters. The largest
   alphabets in the narrow sense include Kabardian and Abkhaz (for
   Cyrillic), with 58 and 56 letters, respectively, and Slovak (for the
   Latin alphabet), with 46. However, these scripts either count di- and
   tri-graphs as separate letters, as Spanish does with ch and ll, or uses
   diacritics like Slovak č. The largest true alphabet where each letter
   is graphically independent is probably Georgian, with 41 letters.

   Syllabaries typically contain 50 to 400 glyphs (though the Múra-Pirahã
   language of Brazil would require only 24 if it did not denote tone, and
   Rotokas would require only 30), and the glyphs of logographic systems
   typically number from the many hundreds into the thousands. Thus a
   simple count of the number of distinct symbols is an important clue to
   the nature of an unknown script.

   It is not always clear what constitutes a distinct alphabet. French
   uses the same basic alphabet as English, but many of the letters can
   carry additional marks, such as é, à, and ô. In French, these
   combinations are not considered to be additional letters. However, in
   Icelandic, the accented letters such as á, í, and ö are considered to
   be distinct letters of the alphabet. Some adaptations of the Latin
   alphabet are augmented with ligatures, such as æ in Old English and Ȣ
   in Algonquian; by borrowings from other alphabets, such as the thorn þ
   in Old English and Icelandic, which came from the Futhark runes; and by
   modifying existing letters, such as the eth ð of Old English and
   Icelandic, which is a modified d. Other alphabets only use a subset of
   the Latin alphabet, such as Hawaiian, or Italian, which only uses the
   letters j, k, x, y and w in foreign words.

Spelling

   Each language may establish certain general rules that govern the
   association between letters and phonemes, but, depending on the
   language, these rules may or may not be consistently followed. In a
   perfectly phonological alphabet, the phonemes and letters would
   correspond perfectly in two directions: a writer could predict the
   spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a speaker could predict
   the pronunciation of a word given its spelling. However, languages
   often evolve independently of their writing systems, and writing
   systems have been borrowed for languages they were not designed for, so
   the degree to which letters of an alphabet correspond to phonemes of a
   language varies greatly from one language to another and even within a
   single language.

   Languages may fail to achieve a one-to-one correspondence between
   letters and sounds in any of several ways:
     * A language may represent a given phoneme with a combination of
       letters rather than just a single letter. Two-letter combinations
       are called digraphs and three-letter groups are called trigraphs.
       Kabardian uses a tesseragraph (four letters) for one of its
       phonemes.
     * A language may represent the same phoneme with two different
       letters or combinations of letters.
     * A language may spell some words with unpronounced letters that
       exist for historical or other reasons.
     * Pronunciation of individual words may change according to the
       presence of surrounding words in a sentence.
     * Different dialects of a language may use different phonemes for the
       same word.
     * A language may use different sets of symbols or different rules for
       distinct sets of vocabulary items (such as the Japanese hiragana
       and katakana syllabaries, or the various rules in English for
       spelling words from Latin and Greek, or the original Germanic
       vocabulary.

   National languages generally elect to address the problem of dialects
   by simply associating the alphabet with the national standard. However,
   with an international language with wide variations in its dialects,
   such as English, it would be impossible to represent the language in
   all its variations with a single phonetic alphabet.

   Some national languages like Finnish have a very regular spelling
   system with a nearly one-to-one correspondence between letters and
   phonemes. The Italian verb corresponding to 'spell', compitare, is
   unknown to many Italians because the act of spelling itself is almost
   never needed: each phoneme of Standard Italian is represented in only
   one way. However, pronunciation cannot always be predicted from
   spelling because certain letters are pronounced in more than one way.
   In standard Spanish, it is possible to tell the pronunciation of a word
   from its spelling, but not vice versa; this is because certain phonemes
   can be represented in more than one way, but a given letter is
   consistently pronounced. French, with its silent letters and its heavy
   use of nasal vowels and elision, may seem to lack much correspondence
   between spelling and pronunciation, but its rules on pronunciation are
   actually consistent and predictable with a fair degree of accuracy. At
   the other extreme, however, are languages such as English and Irish,
   where the spelling of many words simply has to be memorized as they do
   not correspond to sounds in a consistent way. For English, this is
   because the Great Vowel Shift occurred after the orthography was
   established, and because English has acquired a large number of
   loanwords at different times retaining their original spelling at
   varying levels. However, even English has general rules that predict
   pronunciation from spelling, and these rules are successful most of the
   time.

   The sounds of speech of all languages of the world can be written by a
   rather small universal phonetic alphabet. A standard for this is the
   International Phonetic Alphabet.

The Alphabet effect

   Some communication theorists (notably those associated with the
   so-called "Toronto school of communications", such as Marshall McLuhan,
   Harold Innis and more recently Robert K. Logan) have advanced the
   hypothesis that alphabetic scripts have promoted and encouraged the
   skills of analysis, coding, decoding, and classification. This is known
   as "the Alphabet effect", after the title of Logan's 1986 work.

   The theory implies that a greater level of abstraction is needed to
   understand the relatively small set symbols in alphabetic systems and
   to interpret them as phonemes; this has contributed in some way to the
   development of the societies which use it. McLuhan and Logan (1977)
   postulate that, as a result of these skills, the use of the alphabet
   created an environment that lead the development of codified law,
   monotheism, science, deductive logic, objective history, and
   individualism. According to Logan, "All of these innovations, including
   the alphabet, arose within the very narrow geographic zone between the
   Tigris-Euphrates river system and the Aegean Sea, and within the very
   narrow time frame between 2000 B.C. and 500 B.C." (Logan 2004).

   However, many of these abstractions first occurred in societies which
   no sufficient data show the use of an alphabet, such as the codified
   law of Hammurabi in Babylonia, which predated similar laws in societies
   with the alphabet.

   Nonetheless, Paul Levinson argues in his 1997 The Soft Edge that the
   alphabet facilitated the rise and dissemination of monotheism, by
   providing an easy way to write about a deity that is omnipotent,
   omnipresent, yet invisible. In contrast, monotheism did not succeed
   when Ikhnaton attempted to promulgate it via hieroglyphics in Ancient
   Egypt, nor did it even arise in places such as China, which relied on
   an ideographic writing system.

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
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