Alphabet

From ArticleWorld

An Alphabet is a writing system using a set of written symbols or letters, each representing a sound or phoneme of a language. Alphabet comes originally from the words alpha and beth, meaning ox and house in the Proto-Sinaitic script.

Contents 1 Writing systems 2 Origins 3 Alphabets 4 Direction and style 5 Phonological spelling

Writing systems

Out of about 6800 spoken languages of the world, only 2261 have a writing system, and of those who have, not all use an alphabet to communicate in writing. Other systems of writing are;

• the logographic system, where each word or morpheme has its own symbol (such as Chinese),
• the syllabic system is made up of syllables (separate symbols for different combinations of consonant and vowel). Most of the time, those with the same or similar phonetic value, but differing vowels, do not even resemble each other,
• and the featural system, where small elements of a phoneme are represented (Korean Hangul).

Origins

In the Proto-Sinaitic script, alpha and beth meant ox and house, respectively. They were also symbols for the beginning sounds or phonemes of those words. Together with a set of other words, they formed the first known Alphabet. Later the Greeks took the two words alpha and beth, as meaningless names for the first letters in their alphabet, alpha and beta. They took the complete set of letters and only modified the alphabet to include some of their own unique sounds. Hence the word Alphabet was formed with the two first letters.

Alphabets

The alphabetic system, in turn, can be divided into three groups;

1. Abjads: an Abjad is an alphabet with only consonants. Examples of Abjads are the alphabets of Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Phoenician, Proto-Sinaitic, Samaritan and Ugaritic. But sometimes diacritical markings are added for vowels (such as in Arabic), making it an Abugida,
2. Abugidas; an Abugida is an alphabet of changing consonants, either by changing the consonants form to represent a combination with differing vowels or by adding vowel markings. Many South Asian languages, like Brahmi, fit in here. They may also be called Syllabic Alphabets, as they are alphabets with a vowel attached to each letter, which then changes through slight modification,
3. C&V Alphabet; separate characters for every consonant and vowel. Here we find the Cyrillic and Roman alphabets, descended from Greek and Latin.

Some call them true or full alphabets, but they are not truer or fuller than any other alphabets, only adjusted to the languages they serve. A learned in Arabic, for example, does not need vowels to know the correct pronunciation of a word, while that could not be the case with Latin. Also here, there are languages with extra markings, such as French with its “accents” for differentials in tone.

Direction and style

Most alphabets have letters made up of lines, so called linear alphabets. Two exceptions are Morse and Braille alphabets. The ancient script of the Ugarit was in cuneiform, which is written with wedges. The direction of the writing is mainly left to right in Western and European languages, where Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are used.

Phonological spelling

Although the Alphabets were originally formed to represent phonemes, they do not necessarily do so in every language. Spoken languages evolve separately from their written counterparts, and many of the languages did not have the Alphabet made specifically for them. Added to that is the fact that many languages borrow words from foreign languages. Therefore one may find that a language does not always have their letters correspond perfectly with their phonemes. Meaning, the general rules for spelling does not give a on-to-one match between sounds and letters. Examples are digraphs and trigraphs, two-letter and three-letter combinations, for a certain sound, letters that no longer are pronounced, but written due to historical reasons, and letters with the same sound. Pronunciation may also change because of the letters surrounding a phoneme in a word. These inconsistencies occur not only from language to language, but also within a language, as dialects can be very distinct, to such a degree that they could form a new language all together. When a language does have one-to-one correspondence between the sounds and letters, it is called phonological.