Saturday, November 04, 2006

Alphabets

Alphabets

Alphabets

Alphabets, or phonemic alphabets, are sets of letters, usually arranged in a fixed order, each of which represents one or more phonemes, both consonants and vowels, in the language they are used to write. In some case combinations of letters are used to represent single phonemes, as in the English sh, ch and th.

The Greeks were the first people to create a phonemic alphabet when they adapted the Phoenican alphabet to write their language. They used a number of Phoenician letter that represented sounds with no equivalent in Greek to write Greek vowels.

The word alphabet comes, via Latin Latin alphabētum, from the Greek word αλφάβητος (alphabētos), which itself comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, α (άλφα/alpha) and β (βήτα/beta).

The best-known and most widely-used alphabets are the Latin or Roman alphabet and the Cyrillic alphabet, which have been adapted to write numerous languages. Most other alphabets are used for a single language or just a few languages.

Please note

transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) are used extensively throughout this website. The IPA transcriptions are the letters and other symbols which appear in square bracketts, like this [b], [p]. etc.

You can learn which sounds are represented by these letters and symbols at:
http://www.unil.ch/ling/page30184.html
http://www.unil.ch/ling/page12580.html (en français)

Other types of script

Abjads, Alphabets, Syllabic alphabets, Syllabaries, Complex writing scripts, Undeciphered scripts, Alternative writing systems, Your con-scripts, A-Z index | Direction index

[ Дивіться цю сторінку українською / See this page in Ukrainian ]

Ucing sim kuring

Ucing sim kuring

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