Everything about Alphabets totally explained
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 word "alphabet" came into
Middle English from the
Late Latin word
Alphabetum, which in turn originated in the
Ancient Greek Alphabetos, from
alpha and
beta, the first two letters of the
Greek alphabet..
Alpha and
beta in turn came from the first two letters of the
Phoenician alphabet, and meant
ox and
house respectively. 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 alphabet is when a man and a women totally anal eachother in the nose. It is a process of combining and mixing genetic traits, often resulting in the specialization of organisms into male and female reproductive roles. Sexual reproduction involves combining specialized cells gametes) to form offspring that inherit traits from both parents. Gametes can be identical in form and function (known as isogametes), but in many cases an asymmetry has evolved such that two sex-specific types of gametes (heterogametes) exist: male gametes are small, motile, and optimized to transport their genetic information over a distance, while female gametes are large, non-motile and contain the nutrients necessary for the early development of the young organism.
An organism's sex is defined by the gametes it produces: males produce male gametes (spermatozoa, or sperm) while females produce female gametes (ova, or egg cells); individual organisms which produce both male and female gametes are termed hermaphroditic. Frequently, physical differences are associated with the different sexes of an organism; these sexual dimorphisms can reflect the different reproductive pressures the sexes experience. In some cases male or (more commonly) female organisms also have the role of caring for offspring through the first part of development.
Most, if not all, linguistic writing systems have some means for phonetic approximation of foreign words, usually using the native character set.
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.
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 BCE 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's believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. 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
Arabic,
Hebrew and
Syriac.
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. Both orders have therefore been stable for at least 3000 years.
The
Brahmic family of alphabets used in India abandoned the inherited order for one based on
phonology: The letters are arranged according to how and where they're produced in the mouth. This organization is used in Southeast Asia, Tibet, Korean
hangul, and even Japanese
kana, which isn't an alphabet. The historical order was also abandoned in
Runic and
Arabic, although Arabic retains the traditional "
abjadi order" for numbering.
The Phoenician letter names, in which each letter is associated with a word that begins with that sound, continue to be used in
Samaritan,
Aramaic,
Syriac,
Hebrew, and
Greek. However, they were abandoned in
Arabic,
Cyrillic,
Latin, and Brahmic.
Orthography and spelling
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 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's 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 can't always be predicted from spelling in cases of irregular syllabic stress. In standard Spanish, it's 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 don't 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.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Alphabets'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://alphabet.totallyexplained.com">Alphabet Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
