alphabet

1 a character set that includes letters and is used to write a language

2 the elementary stages of any subject (usually plural); "he mastered only the rudiments of geometry" [syn: rudiment, first rudiment, first principle, ABC, ABC's, ABCs]

see Alphabet

English

Etymology

From Late Latin alphabētum < Greek αλφάβητος, from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha (Α) and beta (Β), from Phoenician aleph (≮, א, "ox") + beth (ב ,פ, "house"), so called because they were pictograms of those objects.

Pronunciation

• /ˈæl.fəˌbɛt/, /"

An alphabet is a 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 was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic unit, and syllabaries, in which each character represents a syllable. Alphabets are classified according to how they indicate vowels:

• the same way as consonants, as in Greek (true alphabet)
• modifications of consonants, as in Hindi (abugida)
• not at all, as in Arabic (abjad)

Linguistic definition and context

The term alphabet prototypically refers to a writing system that has characters (graphemes) for representing both consonant and vowel sounds, even though there may not be a complete one-to-one correspondence between symbol and sound.

History

Middle Eastern Scripts

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.

Orthography and 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.

• 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. German uses the tesseragraphs (four letters) "tsch" for the phoneme and "dsch" for [dʒ], although, the latter is rare. Kabardian also uses a tesseragraph 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 (sandhi).
• 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. Strictly speaking, there is no word in the Finnish language corresponding to the verb "to spell" (meaning to split a word into its letters), the closest match being a verb meaning to split a word into its syllables. Similarly, 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 in cases of irregular syllabic stress. 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, 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, albeit complex, rules that predict pronunciation from spelling, and these rules are successful most of the time. Rules to predict spelling from the pronunciation have a high failure rate for English.

Sometimes, countries have the written language undergo a spelling reform in order 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 itself, as when Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet to the Roman alphabet.

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.

See also

• ABC-DEF-GHI
• Abecedarium
• Akshara
• Alphabet Effect
• Alphabetical order
• Alphabet song
• Collation
• Artificial scripts
• Character set
• Lipogram
• List of alphabets
• Pangram
• Transliteration
• Writing
• Unicode

Bibliography

• The World's Writing Systems —(Overview of modern and some ancient writing systems).
• Semitic Writing (Schweich Lectures on Biblical Archaeology S.) 3Rev Ed
• In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language —(Chapter 3 traces and summarizes the invention of alphabetic writing).
• The Alphabet Effect: A Media Ecology Understanding of the Making of Western Civilization
• McLuhan, Marshall; Logan, Robert K. (1977). Alphabet, Mother of Invention. Etcetera. Vol. 34, pp. 373–383.
• Mysteries of the Alphabet: The Origins of Writing
• Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet
• Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet from A to Z
• Civilization Before Greece and Rome —(Chapter 4 traces the invention of writing).
• The Writing Systems of the World

References

External links

• Language, Writing and Alphabet: An Interview with Christophe Rico Damqatum 3 (2007)
• Alphabetic Writing Systems
• Michael Everson's Alphabets of Europe
• Evolution of alphabets animation by Prof. Robert Fradkin at the University of Maryland
• Deseret Alphabet
• History of alphabet
• Online Video: The Alphabet's Big Bang
• The Alphabet as a Mirror of Human Civilization
• "The Alphabet – its creation and development" on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time featuring Eleanor Robson, Alan Millard, Rosalind Thomas

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