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, letter founder; from the 1728 '' Cyclopaedia ''.]] An alphabet can be thought of as one of two varieties. Most popular one widely used around the world arbitrarily assigns symbols for phonemes or group of phonemes. The second definition, also called ezuthu (eg, Tamil), assigns symbols for each physical place of articulation and scales these symbols into related groups of phonemes. An alphabet is a complete 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 may have been in the past. There are other Systems Of Writing such as logosyllabic writing, in which each symbol represents a Morpheme , or word or syllable or places the word within a category, and Syllabaries , in which each symbol represents a Syllable . The ', which means that they are made up of lines. Notable Exceptions are Braille , Manual Alphabet s, and Morse Code . LINGUISTIC DEFINITION AND CONTEXT The term alphabet refers to a writing system that has Grapheme s 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 Glyph s. There are many written entities which do not form part of the alphabet, including Numeral s, Mathematical Symbol s, and Punctuation . Some human languages are commonly written by using a combination of Logograms (which represent Morphemes or Word s) and Syllabograms instead of an alphabet. Egyptian Hieroglyph s and Chinese Character s 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.1 HISTORY See Also: History of the alphabet 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 Logogram s, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names.Daniels and Bright (1996), pp. 74-75. However, although seemingly alphabetic in nature, the original Egyptian uniliterals were not a system and were never used by themselves to encode Egyptian speech.Daniels and Bright (1996), pp. 74. 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.Coulmas (1989), p. 140. 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 .Daniels and Bright (1996), pp. 92-94. Note that the scripts mentioned above are not considered proper alphabets, as they all lack characters representing vowels. These early vowelless alphabets are called Abjad s, and still exist in scripts such as the Arabic and Hebrew scripts. Phoenician was the first major phonemic script.Daniels and Bright (1996), pp. 94-96.Coulmas (1989), p. 141. 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 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 Alphabet s. Elder Futhark gave rise to a variety of alphabets known collectively as the Runic Alphabet s. The Runic alphabets were used for Germanic languages from 100 AD 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 Alphabet s. 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 Abjad s 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 Abugida s, that is, they write syllables instead of individual sounds, so their status as alphabets is disputed. In Korea, the 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 |
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