Alphabet - Wikipedia

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

An alphabet is a standard set of letters (basic written symbols or graphemes) that is used to write one or
more languages based on the general principle that the letters represent phonemes (basic significant sounds)
of the spoken language. This is in contrast to other types of writing systems, such as syllabaries (in which each
character represents a syllable) and logographies (in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or
semantic unit).
The Proto-Canaanite script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is the first fully phonemic script. Thus the
Phoenician alphabet is considered to be the first alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is the ancestor of most
modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and possibly Brahmic.[1][2] According to
terminology introduced by Peter T. Daniels, an "alphabet" is a script that represents both vowels and consonants
as letters equally. In this narrow sense of the word the first "true" alphabet was the Greek alphabet,[3][4] which
was developed on the basis of the earlier Phoenician alphabet. In other alphabetic scripts such as the original
Phoenician, Hebrew or Arabic, letters predominantly or exclusively represent consonants; such a script is also
called an abjad. A third type, called abugida or alphasyllabary, is one where vowels are shown by diacritics or
modifications of consonantal base letters, as in Devanagari and other South Asian scripts.
There are dozens of alphabets in use today, the most popular being the Latin alphabet[5] (which was derived
from the Greek). Many languages use modified forms of the Latin alphabet, with additional letters formed using
diacritical marks. While most alphabets have letters composed of lines (linear writing), there are also exceptions
such as the alphabets used in Braille.
Alphabets are usually associated with a standard ordering of letters. This makes them useful for purposes of
collation, specifically by allowing words to be sorted in alphabetical order. It also means that their letters can be
used as an alternative method of "numbering" ordered items, in such contexts as numbered lists and number
placements.

The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum, which in turn
originated in the Greek (alphabtos), from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek
alphabet.[6] Alpha and beta in turn came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet, aleph which
meant ox and bet which meant house.
Informally the term "ABCs" is sometimes used for the alphabet as in the alphabet song (Now I know my ABCs
...), and knowing one's ABCs for literacy, or as a metaphor for knowing the basics about anything.[7]

Ancient Northeast African and Middle Eastern scripts

The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. By the 27th century BC Egyptian writing had a set of some
24 hieroglyphs that are called uniliterals,[8] 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

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