Alphabet

Writing systems
History
Types
Alphabet
Abjad
Abugida
Syllabary
Logogram
Related
Pictogram
Ideogram

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

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 of writing such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, and syllabaries, in which each character represents a syllable, but alphabets are the most widespread writing system. Alphabets are in turn classified according to how they indicate vowels: as equal to consonants, as in Greek, as modifications of consonants, as in Hindi, or not at all, as in Arabic.

The word "alphabet" came into Middle English from the Late Latin Alphabetum, which in turn originated in 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 composed of lines (linear writing); notable exceptions are Braille, fingerspelling, and Morse code.

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.

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 syllabaries (which represent syllables) 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 may also be represented alphabetically. For example, linguists researching a non-written language (such as some of the indigenous Amerindian languages) will use the International Phonetic Alphabet to enable them to write down the sounds they hear.

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

History

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Egyptian hieroglyphs 32 c. BCE

• Hieratic 32 c. BCE
  • Demotic 7 c. BCE
    • Meroitic 3 c. BCE
• Proto-Sinaitic 19 c. BCE
  • Ugaritic 15 c. BCE
  • Epigraphic South Arabian 9 c. BCE
    • Ge’ez 5–6 c. BCE
  • Phoenician 12 c. BCE
    • Paleo-Hebrew 10 c. BCE
      • Samaritan 6 c. BCE
    • Libyco-Berber 3 c. BCE
      • Tifinagh
    • Paleohispanic (semi-syllabic) 7 c. BCE
    • Aramaic 8 c. BCE
      • Kharoṣṭhī 4 c. BCE
      • Brāhmī 4 c. BCE
        • Brahmic family (see)
          • E.g. Tibetan 7 c. CE
            • Hangul (core letters only) 1443
          • Devanagari 13 c. CE
            • Canadian syllabics 1840
      • Hebrew 3 c. BCE
      • Pahlavi 3 c. BCE
        • Avestan 4 c. CE
      • Palmyrene 2 c. BCE
      • Syriac 2 c. BCE
        • Nabataean 2 c. BCE
          • Arabic 4 c. CE
        • Sogdian 2 c. BCE
      • Orkhon (old Turkic) 6 c. CE
        • Old Hungarian c. 650
          • Old Uyghur
            • Mongolian 1204
            • N'Ko 20 c. CE
      • Mandaic 2 c. CE
    • Greek 8 c. BCE
      • Etruscan 8 c. BCE
        • Latin 7 c. BCE
          • Cherokee (syllabary; letter forms only) c. 1820
        • Runic 2 c. CE
        • Ogham (origin uncertain) 4 c. CE
      • Coptic 3 c. CE
      • Gothic 3 c. CE
      • Armenian (origin uncertain) 405
      • Georgian (origin uncertain) c. 430
      • Glagolitic (origin uncertain) 862
      • Cyrillic c. 940
        • Old Permic 1372

Thaana 18 c. (derived from Brahmi numerals)

The history of the alphabet begins in Ancient Egypt, more than a millennium into the history of writing. The first pure alphabet emerged around 2000 B.C.E. to represent the language of Semitic workers in Egypt (see Middle Bronze Age alphabets), and was derived from the alphabetic principles of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Most alphabets in the world today either descend directly from this development, for example the Greek and Latin alphabets, or were inspired by its design.

Pre-alphabetic scripts

Two scripts are well attested from before the end of the fourth millennium B.C.E.: Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Both were well known in the part of the Middle East that produced the first widely used alphabet, the Phoenician. There are signs that cuneiform was developing alphabetic properties in some of the languages it was adapted for, as was seen again later in the Old Persian cuneiform script, but it now appears these developments were a sideline and not ancestral to the alphabet.

The Beginnings in Egypt

By 2700 B.C.E. the ancient Egyptians had developed a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent the individual consonants of their language, plus a 23^rd that seems to have represented word-initial or word-final vowels. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names. However, although alphabetic in nature, the system was not used for purely alphabetic writing. That is, while capable of being used as an alphabet, it was in fact always used with a strong logographic component, presumably due to strong cultural attachment to the complex Egyptian script. The first purely alphabetic script is thought to have been developed around 2000 B.C.E. for Semitic workers in central Egypt. Over the next five centuries it spread north, and all subsequent alphabets around the world have either descended from it, or been inspired by one of its descendants, with the possible exception of the Meroitic alphabet, a 3rd century B.C.E. adaptation of hieroglyphs in Nubia to the south of Egypt - though even here many scholars suspect the influence of that first alphabet.^{[citation needed]}

The Semitic alphabet

The Middle Bronze Age scripts of Egypt have yet to be deciphered. However, they appear to be at least partially, and perhaps completely, alphabetic. The oldest examples are found as graffiti from central Egypt and date to around 1800 B.C.E. [1]/[2]. These inscriptions, according to Gordon J. Hamilton, help to show that the most likely place for the alphabet’s invention was in Egypt proper.

This Semitic script did not restrict itself to the existing Egyptian consonantal signs, but incorporated a number of other Egyptian hieroglyphs, for a total of perhaps thirty, and used Semitic names for them. So, for example, the hieroglyph per ("house" in Egyptian) became bayt ("house" in Semitic). It is unclear at this point whether these glyphs, when used to write the Semitic language, were purely alphabetic in nature, representing only the first consonant of their names according to the acrophonic principle, or whether they could also represent sequences of consonants or even words as their hieroglyphic ancestors had. For example, the "house" glyph may have stood only for b (b as in beyt "house"), or it may have stood for both the consonant b and the sequence byt, as it had stood for both p and the sequence pr in Egyptian. However, by the time the script was inherited by the Canaanites, it was purely alphabetic, and the hieroglyph originally representing "house" stood only for b.

The first Canaanite state to make extensive use of the alphabet was Phoenicia, and so later stages of the Canaanite script are called Phoenician. Phoenicia was a maritime state at the center of a vast trade network, and soon the Phoenician alphabet spread throughout the Mediterranean. [3] Two variants of the Phoenician alphabet would have major impacts on the history of writing: the Aramaic alphabet and the Greek alphabet. [4]

Descendants of the Aramaic abjad

Chart showing details of four alphabets' descent from Phoenician abjad, from left to right Latin, Greek, original Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic.

The Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets, like their Egyptian prototype, represented only consonants, a system called an abjad. The Aramaic alphabet, which evolved from the Phoenician in the 7th century B.C.E. as the official script of the Persian Empire, appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia:^{[citation needed]}

• The modern Hebrew alphabet started out as a local variant of Imperial Aramaic. (The original Hebrew alphabet has been retained by the Samaritans.)
• The Arabic alphabet descended from Aramaic via the Nabatean alphabet of what is now southern Jordan.
• The Syriac alphabet used after the 3rd century CE evolved, through Pahlavi and Sogdian, into the alphabets of northern Asia, such as Orkhon (probably), Uyghur, Mongolian, and Manchu.
• The Georgian alphabet is of uncertain provenance, but appears to be part of the Persian-Aramaic (or perhaps the Greek) family.
• The Aramaic alphabet is also the most likely ancestor of the Brahmic alphabets of the Indian subcontinent, which spread to Tibet, Mongolia, Indochina, and the Malay archipelago along with the Hindu and Buddhist religions. (China and Japan, while absorbing Buddhism, were already literate and retained their logographic and syllabic scripts.)
• The Hangul alphabet was invented in Korea in the 15th century. Tradition holds that it was an autonomous invention; however, Gari Ledyard suggests that portions of its consonantal system may be based on half a dozen letters derived from Tibetan via the imperial Phagspa alphabet of the Yuan dynasty of China; Tibetan is a Brahmic script. Uniquely among the world's alphabets, the rest of the consonants are derived from this core as a featural system.^{[citation needed]}

Transmission of the Alphabet to Greece

By at least the 8th century B.C.E. the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet and adapted it to their own language. The letters of the Greek alphabet are the same as those of the Phoenician alphabet, and both alphabets are arranged in the same order. However, whereas separate letters for vowels would have actually hindered the legibility of Egyptian, Phoenician, or Hebrew, their absence was problematic for Greek, where vowels played a much more important role. The Greeks adapted those Phoenician letters for consonants they couldn't pronounce to write vowels. All of the names of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet started with consonants, and these consonants were what the letters represented, something called the acrophonic principle. However, several Phoenician consonants were rather soft and unpronounceable by the Greeks, and thus several letter names came to be pronounced with initial vowels. Since the start of the name of a letter was expected to be the sound of the letter, in Greek these letters now stood for vowels.^{[citation needed]} For example, the Greeks had no glottal stop or h, so the Phoenician letters ’alep and he became Greek alpha and e (later renamed e psilon), and stood for the vowels /a/ and /e/ rather than the consonants /ʔ/ and /h/. As this fortunate development only provided for five or six (depending on dialect) of the twelve Greek vowels, the Greeks eventually created digraphs and other modifications, such as ei, ou, and o (which became omega), or in some cases simply ignored the deficiency, as in long a, i, u.

Several varieties of the Greek alphabet developed. One, known as Western Greek or Chalcidian, was west of Athens and in southern Italy. The other variation, known as Eastern Greek, was used in present-day Turkey, and the Athenians, and eventually the rest of the world that spoke Greek, adopted this variation. After first writing right to left, the Greeks eventually chose to write from left to right, unlike the Phoenicians who wrote from right to left. [5]

Descendants of the Greek Alphabet

Greek is in turn the source for all the modern scripts of Europe. The alphabet of the early western Greek dialects, where the letter eta remained an h, gave rise to the Old Italic and Roman alphabets. In the eastern Greek dialects, which did not have an /h/, eta stood for a vowel, and remains a vowel in modern Greek and all other alphabets derived from the eastern variants: Glagolitic, Cyrillic, Armenian, Gothic (which used both Greek and Roman letters), and perhaps Georgian.

Although this description presents the evolution of scripts in a linear fashion, this is a simplification. For example, the Manchu alphabet, descended from the abjads of West Asia, was also influenced by Korean hangul, which was either independent (the traditional view) or derived from the abugidas of South Asia. Georgian apparently derives from the Aramaic family, but was strongly influenced in its conception by Greek. The Greek alphabet, itself ultimately a derivative of hieroglyphs through that first Semitic alphabet, later adopted an additional half dozen demotic hieroglyphs when it was used to write Coptic Egyptian. Then there is Cree Syllabics (an abugida), which appears to be a fusion of Devanagari and Pitman shorthand; the latter may be an independent invention, but likely has its ultimate origins in cursive Latin script. ^{[citation needed]}

Development of the Roman Alphabet

A tribe known as the Latins, who became known as the Romans, also lived in the Italian peninsula like the Western Greeks. From the Etruscans, a tribe living in the first millennium B.C.E. in central Italy, and the Western Greeks, the Latins adopted writing in about the fifth century. In adopted writing from these two groups, the Latins dropped four characters from the Western Greek alphabet. They also adapted the Etruscan letter F, pronounced 'w,' giving it the 'f' sound, and the Etruscan S, which had three zigzag lines, was curved to make the modern S. To represent the G sound in Greek and the K sound in Etruscan, the Gamma was used. These changes produced the modern alphabet without the letters G, J, U, W, Y, and Z, as well as some other differences. [6]

C, K, and Q in the Romans’ alphabet could all be used to write the k sound, and C could also be used to write the sound 'g.' The Romans invented the letter G and inserted it into the alphabet between F and H for an unknown reason. Over the few centuries after Alexander the Great conquered the Eastern Mediterranean and other areas in the third century B.C.E., the Romans began to borrow Greek words, so they had to adapt their alphabet again in order to write these words. From the Eastern Greek alphabet, they borrowed Y and Z, which were added to the end of the alphabet because the only time they were used was to write Greek words. [7]

The Anglo-Saxon language began to be written using Roman letters after Britain was invaded by the Normans in the eleventh century. Because the Runic wen, which was first used to represent the sound 'w' and looked like a p that is narrow and triangular, was easy to confuse with an actual p, the 'w' sound began to be written using a double u. Because the u at the time looked like a v, the double u looked like two v's, W was placed in the alphabet by V. U developed when people began to use the rounded U when they meant the vowel u and the pointed V when the meant the consonant V. J began as a variation of I, in which a long tail was added to the final I when there were several in a row. People began to use the J for the consonant and the I for the vowel by the fifteenth century, and it was fully accepted in the mid-seventeenth century. [8]

Letter Names and Sequence of Some Alphabets

The order of the letters of the alphabet is attested from the fourteenth century B.C.E., in a place called Ugarit located on Syria’s northern coast. Tablets found there bear over one thousand cuneiform signs, but these signs are not Babylonian, and there are only thirty distinct characters. About twelve of the tablets have the signs set out in alphabetic order. There are two orders found, one which is nearly identical to the order used for Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and a second order very similar to that used for Ethiopian.

It is not known how many letters the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet had, nor what their alphabetic order was. Among its descendants, the Ugaritic alphabet had 27 consonants, the South Arabian alphabets had 29, and the Phoenician alphabet was reduced to 22. These scripts were arranged in two orders, an ABGDE order in Phoenician, and an HMĦLQ order in the south; Ugaritic preserved both orders. Both sequences proved remarkably stable among the descendants of these scripts.

The letter names proved stable among many descendants of Phoenician, including Samaritan, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew, and Greek alphabet. However, they were abandoned in Arabic and Latin. The letter sequence continued more or less intact into Latin, Armenian, Gothic, and Cyrillic, but was abandoned in Brahmi, Runic, and Arabic, although a traditional abjadi order remains or was re-introduced as an alternative in the latter. ^{[citation needed]}

These 22 consonants account for the phonology of Northwest Semitic.

Graphically independent alphabets

The only modern national alphabet that has not been graphically traced back to the Canaanite alphabet is the Maldivian script, which is unique in that, although it is clearly modeled after Arabic and perhaps other existing alphabets, it derives its letter forms from numerals. The Osmanya alphabet devised for Somali in the 1920s was co-official in Somalia with the Latin alphabet until 1972, and the forms of its consonants appear to be complete innovations.

Among alphabets that are not used as national scripts today, a few are clearly independent in their letter forms. The Zhuyin phonetic alphabet derives from Chinese characters. The Santali alphabet of eastern India appears to be based on traditional symbols such as "danger" and "meeting place," as well as pictographs invented by its creator. (The names of the Santali letters are related to the sound they represent through the acrophonic principle, as in the original alphabet, but it is the final consonant or vowel of the name that the letter represents: le "swelling" represents e, while en "thresh grain" represents n.)

In the ancient world, Ogham consisted of tally marks, and the monumental inscriptions of the Old Persian Empire were written in an essentially alphabetic cuneiform script whose letter forms seem to have been created for the occasion. However, while all of these systems may have been graphically independent of the other alphabets of the world, they were devised from their example. ^{[citation needed]}

Alphabets in other media

Changes to a new writing medium sometimes caused a break in graphical form, or make the relationship difficult to trace. It is not immediately obvious that the cuneiform Ugaritic alphabet derives from a prototypical Semitic abjad, for example, although this appears to be the case. And while manual alphabets are a direct continuation of the local written alphabet (both the British two-handed and the French/American one-handed alphabets retain the forms of the Latin alphabet, as the Indian manual alphabet does Devanagari, and the Korean does Hangul), Braille, semaphore, maritime signal flags, and the Morse codes are essentially arbitrary geometric forms. The shapes of the English Braille and semaphore letters, for example, are derived from the alphabetic order of the Latin alphabet, but not from the graphic forms of the letters themselves. Modern shorthand also appears to be graphically unrelated. If it derives from the Latin alphabet, the connection has been lost to history. ^{[citation needed]}

Middle Eastern Scripts

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

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 known as the Proto-Sinaitic script is thought by some to have been developed in central Egypt around 1700 B.C.E. for or by Semitic workers, but only one of these early writings has been deciphered and their exact nature remains open to interpretation. Based on letter appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs.

This script eventually developed into the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, which in turn was refined into the Phoenician alphabet. Note that the scripts mentioned above are not considered proper alphabets, as they all lack characters representing vowels. These early vowelless alphabets are called abjads, and still exist in scripts such as the Arabic and Hebrew scripts.

Phoenician was the first major phonemic script. In contrast to two other widely used writing systems at the time, Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, each of which contained thousands of different characters, it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for common traders to learn. Another advantage to Phoenician was that it could be used to write down many different languages, since it recorded words phonemically.

The script was spread by the Phoenicians, whose Thalassocracy allowed the script to be spread across the Mediterranean. In Greece, the script was modified to add the vowels, giving rise to the first true alphabet. The Greeks took letters which did not represent sounds that existed in Greek, and changed them to represent the vowels. This marks the creation of a "true" alphabet, with the presence of both vowels and consonants as explicit symbols in a single script. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, a situation which caused so many different alphabets to evolve from it.

European alphabets

Codex Zographensis in the Glagolitic alphabet from Medieval Bulgaria.

The Cumae form was carried over to the Italian peninsula, where it gave way to a variety of alphabets used to inscribe 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 the other languages of Europe.

Another notable script is Elder Futhark, and 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 100 C.E. to the late Middle Ages. Its usage was 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 Glagolitic alphabet was the script of the liturgical language Old Church Slavonic, and became the basis of the Cyrillic alphabet. The Cyrillic alphabet is one of the most widely used modern alphabets, and is notable for its use in Slavic languages and languages formerly part of the Soviet Union, such as the Bulgarian and Russian alphabets. The Glagolitic alphabet is believed to have been created by Saints Cyril and Methodius, while the Cyrillic alphabet was invented by the Bulgarian scholar 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.

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, but because these writing systems are largely consonant-based they are often not considered true alphabets.

Most alphabetic scripts of India and Eastern Asia are descended from the Brahmi script, which is often believed to be a descendent of Aramaic, but this link is controversial. These scripts are abugidas, that is, they write syllables instead of individual sounds, so their status as alphabets is disputed.

In Korea, the Hangeul alphabet was created, although it may also have been derived from the Mongolian Phagspa script, which in turn was derived from the Brahmi script. Hangeul is a unique alphabet in a variety of ways: many of the letters are designed off of a sound's place of articulation, it was consciously designed by the government at the time, and it situates individual letters into syllable clusters with equal dimensions as Chinese characters to allow for mixed script writing.

Zhuyin (sometimes called Bopomofo) is an alphabet used to phonetically transcribe Mandarin Chinese in Mainland China and Taiwan, though its use in Mainland China today is limited. It developed out of a form of Chinese shorthand based on Chinese characters in the early 1900s. 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 cell phones.

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

Alphabets:  Latin ,  Cyrillic ,  Latin and Cyrillic ,  Greek ,  Armenian or Georgian 
Abjads:  Arabic ,  Arabic and Latin ,  Hebrew and Arabic 
Abugidas:  North Indic ,  South Indic ,  Ethiopic ,  Thaana   Canadian Syllabic ,
Logographic+syllabic:  Pure logographic ,  Mixed logographic and syllabaries ,  Featural-alphabetic syllabary + limited logographic   Featural-alphabetic syllabary 

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 names do not yet exist 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; it Zhuyin not only is one of the tones unmarked, but there is a diacritic to indicate lack of tone, like the virama of Indic.

The number of letters in an alphabet 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 did with ch and ll up to a recent time, 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. In Spanish, ñ is considered a separate letter, but accented vowels such as á and é are not. 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. German uses the tesseragraphs (four letters) "tsch" for the phoneme [tʃ] and "dsch" for [dʒ], although, the latter is rare (IPA). 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. 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, 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.

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.

Bibliography

• Daniels, Peter T.; Bright, William (1996). The World's Writing Systems. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-507993-0.  — (Overview of modern and some ancient writing systems).
• Driver, G.R. (1976). Semitic Writing (Schweich Lectures on Biblical Archaeology S.) 3Rev Ed. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-725917-0. 
• Hoffman, Joel M. (2004). In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language. NYU Press. ISBN 0-8147-3654-8.  — (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 1-57-273523-6. 
• McLuhan, Marshall; Logan, Robert K. (1977). Alphabet, Mother of Invention. Etcetera. Vol. 34, pp. 373-383.
• Ouaknin, Marc-Alain; Bacon, Josephine (1999). Mysteries of the Alphabet: The Origins of Writing. Abbeville Press. ISBN 0-7892-0521-1. 
• Powell, Barry (1991). Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet. Cambridge Universityh Press. ISBN 0-521-58907-X. 
• Sacks, David (2004). Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet from A to Z. Broadway Books. ISBN 0-7679-1173-3. 
• Saggs, H.W.F (1991). Civilization Before Greece and Rome. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-05031-3.  — (Chapter 4 traces the invention of writing).
• Coulmas, Florian (1989). The Writing Systems of the World. Blackwell Publishers Ltd.. ISBN 0-631-18028-1. 

• David Diringer, History of the Alphabet, 1977, ISBN 0-905418-12-3.
• Peter T. Daniels, William Bright (eds.), 1996. The World's Writing Systems, ISBN 0-19-507993-0.
• Joel M. Hoffman, In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language, 2004, ISBN 0-8147-3654-8.
• Robert K. Logan, The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western Civilization, New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1986.
• B.L. Ullman, "The Origin and Development of the Alphabet," American Journal of Archaeology 31, No. 3 (Jul., 1927): 311-328.
• Stephen R. Fischer, A History of Writing 2005 Reaktion Books CN 136481

External links

• Alphabetic Writing Systems
• Michael Everson's Alphabets of Europe
• Evolution of alphabets animation by Prof. Robert Fradkin at the University of Maryland
• History of alphabet
• Online Video: The Alphabet's Big Bang

• Animated examples of how the English alphabet evolved
• BBC site for the Greek alphabet
• Site by a scholar about the Greek alphabet
• Article republished from an Athenian newspaper
• Information about the alphabet’s evolution from a site about Lebanon
• Information about the Georgian Script
• An alphabetic 'family tree'.

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