An alphabet is a
standard set of letters
(basic written symbols
or graphemes) which is used
to write one or more languages
based on the general principle that the letters represent phonemes (basic
significant sounds) of the spoken language. This is
in contrast to other types of writing systems, such as syllabaries (in which each
character represents a syllable)
and logographies (in which
each character represents a word, morpheme or semantic
unit).
A true alphabet has
letters for the vowels
of a language as well as the consonants.
The first "true alphabet" in this sense is believed to be the Greek alphabet, which is a
modified form of the Phoenician
alphabet. In other types of alphabet either the vowels are not
indicated at all, as was the case in the Phoenician alphabet (such systems are
known as abjads), or else the
vowels are shown by diacritics
or modification of consonants, as in the devanagari used in India
and Nepal (these systems are known as abugidas or
alphasyllabaries).
There are dozens of
alphabets in use today, the most popular being the Latin alphabet (which was
derived from the Greek). Many languages use modified forms of the Latin
alphabet, with additional letters formed using diacritical marks. While most
alphabets have letters composed of lines (linear writing), there are
also exceptions
such as the alphabets used in Braille,
fingerspelling, and Morse code.
Alphabets are usually associated with a
standard ordering of their letters. This makes them useful for purposes of collation, specifically by
allowing words to be sorted in alphabetical order. It
also means that their letters can be used as an alternative method of
"numbering" ordered items, in such contexts as numbered lists.
The English word alphabet came
into Middle
English from the Late Latin
word alphabetum, which in turn originated in the Greek ἀλφάβητος (alphabētos),
from alpha
and beta,
the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. Alpha
and beta in turn came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet,
and originally meant ox and house respectively.
The term
"alphabet" is used by linguists and paleographers in both a
wide and a narrow sense. In the wider sense, an alphabet is a script that is segmental
at the phoneme level—that is, it
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.[14] 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.)
All three types may be
augmented with syllabic glyphs. Ugaritic, for example, is
basically an abjad, but has syllabic letters for /ʔa, ʔi, ʔu/. (These are the only time vowels are
indicated.) Cyrillic is basically a true alphabet, but has syllabic letters for
/ja, je, ju/ (я, е, ю); Coptic
has a letter for /ti/. 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.
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 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.
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