Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of
The first letters were invented in
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. Abjads generally lack vowel indicators altogether, while abugidas represent them with diacritics added to letters. 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. Letters also have names in some languages; this is known as acrophony, and it is present in scripts including Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac. However, acrophony is not present in all languages, such as the Latin alphabet, which simply adds a vowel after the character representing each letter. Some systems also used to have acrophony but later abandoned it, such as Cyrillic.
Etymology
The English word alphabet came into
History
Ancient Near Eastern alphabets
The
The Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, conventionally called
The
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.
European alphabets
The Greek alphabet, in
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, and u). Six fewer letters than the earlier forms. The script in its classical form was used until the 1st century CE. The Etruscan language itself was not used in imperial Rome, but the script was used for religious texts.[31]
Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet have
Another notable script is
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
Asian alphabets
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
Other alphabets
Hangul
In
Zhuyin
Types
History of the alphabet | ||
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The term "alphabet" is used by
Examples of present-day abjads are the
All three types may be augmented with syllabic glyphs.
The boundaries between the three types of segmental scripts are not always clear-cut. For example,
Thus the primary
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.[64]
Latin alphabets
The basic ordering of the
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, and 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.[68]
The Danish and Norwegian alphabets end with æ—ø—å,[69][70] whereas the Swedish conventionally put å—ä—ö at the end. However, æ phonetically corresponds with ä, as does ø and ö.[71]
Early alphabets
It is unknown whether the earliest alphabets had a defined sequence. Some alphabets today, such as the
The
Acrophony
In Phoenician, each letter got associated with a word that begins with that sound. This is called
Acrophony got 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.[82] 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/.[83] 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.[84]
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.[85]
Orthography and pronunciation
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.[86] 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.[87]
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.[88]
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].[89] Kabardian also uses a tetragraph for one of its phonemes, namely "кхъу."[90] 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]).[91]
- 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⟩.[92]
- 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" [เบียร์] retains a letter for the final consonant "r" present in the English word it borrows, but silences it.[93]
- Pronunciation of individual words may change according to the presence of surrounding words in a sentence, for example, in sandhi.[94]
- Different dialects of a language may use different phonemes for the same word.[95]
- 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.[96][97]
National languages sometimes elect to address the problem of dialects by associating the alphabet with the national standard. Some national languages like
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.[102] 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.[103]
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,[104] and Kazakh changed from an Arabic script to a Cyrillic script due to the Soviet Union's influence. In 2021, it made a transition to the Latin alphabet, similar to Turkish.[105][106] 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.[107][108]
The standard system of symbols used by
See also
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Bibliography
- Coulmas, Florian (1989). The Writing Systems of the World. Blackwell Publishers Ltd. ISBN 978-0631180289.
- Daniels, Peter T.; Bright, William (1996). The World's Writing Systems. ISBN 978-0195079937. Overview of modern and some ancient writing systems.
- ISBN 978-0197259177.
- Haarmann, Harald (2004). Geschichte der Schrift [History of Writing] (in German) (2nd ed.). München: C. H. Beck. ISBN 978-3406479984.
- Hoffman, Joel M. (2004). In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language. NYU Press. ISBN 978-0814736548. Chapter 3 traces and summarizes the invention of alphabetic writing.
- Logan, Robert K. (2004). The Alphabet Effect: A Media Ecology Understanding of the Making of Western Civilization. Hampton Press. ISBN 978-1572735231.
- McLuhan, Marshall; Logan, Robert K. (1977). "Alphabet, Mother of Invention". ETC: A Review of General Semantics. 34 (4): 373–383. JSTOR 42575278.
- Millard, A. R. (1986). "The Infancy of the Alphabet". World Archaeology. 17 (3): 390–398. JSTOR 124703.
- Ouaknin, Marc-Alain; Bacon, Josephine (1999). Mysteries of the Alphabet: The Origins of Writing. Abbeville Press. ISBN 978-0789205216.
- Powell, Barry (1991). Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet. ISBN 978-0521589079.
- Powell, Barry B. (2009). Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 978-1405162562.
- Sacks, David (2004). Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet from A to Z. Broadway Books. ISBN 978-0767911733.
- Saggs, H. W. F. (1991). Civilization Before Greece and Rome. ISBN 978-0300050318. Chapter 4 traces the invention of writing
Further reading
- Josephine Quinn, "Alphabet Politics" (review of Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts, translated from the Italian by Todd Portnowitz, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022, 289 pp.; and Johanna Drucker, Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present, University of Chicago Press, 2022, 380 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXX, no. 1 (19 January 2023), pp. 6, 8, 10.
External links
- The Origins of abc
- "Language, Writing and Alphabet: An Interview with Christophe Rico", Damqātum 3 (2007)
- Michael Everson's Alphabets of Europe
- Evolution of alphabets, animation by Prof. Robert Fradkin at the University of Maryland
- 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)