For other uses, see Alphabet (disambiguation).

"Alphabetical" redirects here. For other uses, see Alphabetical (disambiguation).

Charles Morton's 1759 updated version of Edward Bernard's "Orbis eruditi",[1] comparing all known alphabets as
of 1689

Writing systems

 History
 Grapheme
 List of writing systems

Major current examples

 Roman alphabet
 Cyrillic alphabet
 Chinese characters
 Arabic alphabet
 Devanagari
 Kana
 Hangul
 Hebrew alphabet
 Greek alphabet

Types
 Alphabet
 Abjad (Impure Abjad)
 Abugida
 Syllabary
 Semi-syllabary
  Logography
 Logophonetic (Logosyllabary, Logoconsonantal)
 Shorthand
 Featural

Related topics
 Pictogram
 Ideogram

 v
 t
 e

An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written symbols or graphemes (called letters) that

represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in
this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllable, for instance, and logographic
systems use characters to represent words, morphemes, or other semantic units.
The first fully phonemic script, the Proto-Canaanite script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is
considered to be the first alphabet, and is the ancestor of most modern alphabets,
including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and possibly Brahmic.[2][3] It was created by Semitic-
speaking workers and slaves in the Sinai Peninsula (as the Proto-Sinaitic script), by selecting a
small number of hieroglyphs commonly seen in their Egyptian surroundings to describe the sounds,
as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language.[4][5] Peter T. Daniels, however,
distinguishes an abugida or alphasyllabary, a set of graphemes that represent consonantal base
letters which diacritics modify to represent vowels (as in Devanagari and other South Asian scripts),
an abjad, in which letters predominantly or exclusively represent consonants (as in the original
Phoenician, Hebrew or Arabic), and an "alphabet", a set of graphemes that represent
both vowels and consonants. In this narrow sense of the word the first "true" alphabet was the Greek
alphabet,[6][7] which was developed on the basis of the earlier Phoenician alphabet.
Of the dozens of alphabets in use today, the most popular is the Latin alphabet,[8] which was derived
from the Greek, and which many languages modify by adding 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. The Khmer alphabet (for Cambodian) is the longest, with 74 letters.
[9]

Alphabets are usually associated with a standard ordering of 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 and number placements.

Contents

 1Etymology
 2History
o 2.1Ancient Northeast African and Middle Eastern scripts
o 2.2European alphabets
o 2.3Asian alphabets
 3Types
 4Alphabetical order
 5Names of letters
 6Orthography and pronunciation
 7See also
 8References
 9Bibliography
 10External links

Etymology
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).[10] 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 general, can be used as
a metaphor for knowing the basics about anything.

History
Main article: History of the alphabet

A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia

Ancient Northeast African and Middle Eastern scripts

The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. Egyptian writing had a set of some 24
hieroglyphs that are called uniliterals,[11] 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. [12]

A specimen of Proto-Sinaitic script, one of the earliest (if not the very first) phonemic scripts

In the Middle Bronze Age, an apparently "alphabetic" system known as the Proto-Sinaitic

script appears in Egyptian turquoise mines in the Sinai peninsula dated to circa the 15th century BC,
apparently left by Canaanite workers. In 1999, John and Deborah Darnell discovered an even earlier
version of this first alphabet at Wadi el-Hol dated to circa 1800 BC and showing evidence of having
been adapted from specific forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs that could be dated to circa 2000 BC,
strongly suggesting that the first alphabet had been developed about that time. [13] Based on letter
appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. [2] This script had no
characters representing vowels, although originally it probably was a syllabary, but unneeded
symbols were discarded. An alphabetic cuneiform script with 30 signs including three that indicate
the following vowel was invented in Ugarit before the 15th century BC. This script was not used after
the destruction of Ugarit.[14]
The Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, which is conventionally
called "Proto-Canaanite" before ca. 1050 BC.[3] The oldest text in Phoenician script is an inscription
on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram. This script is the parent script of all western alphabets. By the
tenth century, two other forms can be distinguished, namely Canaanite and Aramaic. The Aramaic
gave rise to the Hebrew script.[15] 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 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. [16]
The Proto-Sinaitic or Proto-Canaanite script and the Ugaritic script were the first scripts with a limited
number of signs, in contrast to the other widely used writing systems at the
time, Cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Linear B. The Phoenician script was probably the first
phonemic script[2][3] and it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple
enough for common traders to learn. Another advantage of Phoenician was that it could be used to
write down many different languages, since it recorded words phonemically.
Illustration from Acta Eruditorum, 1741

The script was spread by the Phoenicians across the Mediterranean. [3] In Greece, the script was
modified to add vowels, giving rise to the ancestor of all alphabets in the West. It was the first
alphabet in which vowels have independent letter forms separate from those of consonants. 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.

European alphabets

Codex Zographensis in the Glagolitic alphabet from Medieval Bulgaria

The Greek alphabet, in its Euboean form, was carried over by Greek colonists to the Italian
peninsula, where it gave rise to a variety of alphabets used to write the Italic languages. One of
these became the Latin alphabet, which was spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their
empire. Even after the fall of the Roman state, the alphabet survived in intellectual and religious
works. It eventually became used for the descendant languages of Latin (the Romance languages)
and then for most of the other languages of Europe.
Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet are augmented with ligatures, such
as æ in Danish and Icelandic 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, and Italian, which uses the
letters j, k, x, y and w only in foreign words.
Another notable script is Elder Futhark, which is believed to have evolved out of one of the Old Italic
alphabets. Elder Futhark gave rise to a variety of alphabets known collectively as the Runic
alphabets. The Runic alphabets were used for Germanic languages from AD 100 to the late Middle
Ages. Its usage is mostly restricted to engravings on stone and jewelry, although inscriptions have
also been found on bone and wood. These alphabets have since been replaced with the Latin
alphabet, except for decorative usage for which the runes remained in use until the 20th century.
The Old Hungarian script is a contemporary 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.
The Glagolitic alphabet was the initial script of the liturgical language Old Church Slavonic and
became, together with the Greek uncial script, the basis of the Cyrillic script. Cyrillic is one of the
most widely used modern alphabetic scripts, and is notable for its use in Slavic languages and also
for other languages within the former Soviet Union. Cyrillic alphabets include
the Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian. The Glagolitic alphabet is
believed to have been created by Saints Cyril and Methodius, while the Cyrillic alphabet was
invented by 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.

Asian alphabets
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.
Most alphabetic scripts of India and Eastern Asia are descended from the Brahmi script, which is
often believed to be a descendant of Aramaic.
Zhuyin on a cell phone

In Korea, the Hangul alphabet was created by Sejong the Great.[17] 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[18] (one syllable always takes
up one type-space no matter how many letters get stacked into building that one sound-block).
Zhuyin (sometimes called Bopomofo) is a semi-syllabary used to phonetically transcribe Mandarin
Chinese in the Republic of China. After the later establishment of the People's Republic of China and
its adoption of Hanyu Pinyin, the use of Zhuyin today is limited, but it is still widely used
in Taiwan where the Republic of China still governs. Zhuyin developed out of a form of Chinese
shorthand based on Chinese characters in the early 1900s and has elements of both an alphabet
and a syllabary. Like an alphabet the phonemes of syllable initials are represented by individual
symbols, but like a syllabary the phonemes of the syllable finals are not; rather, each possible final
(excluding the medial glide) is represented by its own symbol. For example, luan is represented as
ㄌㄨㄢ (l-u-an), where the last symbol ㄢ represents the entire final -an. While Zhuyin is not used as
a mainstream writing system, it is still often used in ways similar to a romanization system—that is,
for aiding in pronunciation and as an input method for Chinese characters on computers and
cellphones.
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 Urdu and Persian) and sometimes as a
complete alphabet (as with Kurdish and Uyghur).

Types

Predominant national and selected regional or minority scripts

Alphabetic Abjad Abugida
[L]ogographic
and [S]yllabic
  Latin   Hanzi [L]   Arabic   North Indic
  Cyrillic   Kana [S] / Kanji [L]     Hebrew   South Indic
  Greek   Ethiopic
  Armenia   Thaana
n   Canadian syllabic
  Georgian
  Hangul

History of the alphabet[show]

  v
 t
 e

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.[19] 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 that 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