Alphabet (redirected from Alphabets)

alphabet [Gr. alpha-beta, like Eng. ABC], system of writing, theoretically having a one-for-one relation between character (or letter) and phoneme (see phonetics). Few alphabets have achieved the ideal exactness. A system of writing is called a syllabary when one character represents a syllable rather than a phoneme; such is the kana, used in Japanese to supplement the originally Chinese characters normally used. The precursors of the alphabet were the iconographic and ideographic writing of ancient man, such as wall paintings, cuneiform, and the hieroglyphic writing of the Egyptians. The alphabet of modern Western Europe is the Roman alphabet, the base of most alphabets used for the newly written languages of Africa and America, as well as for scientific alphabets. Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, and many languages of the former Soviet Union are written in the Cyrillic alphabet, an augmented Greek alphabet. Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic all have their own alphabets. The most important writing of India is the Devanagari, an alphabet with syllabic features; this, invented probably for Sanskrit, is the source of a number of Asian scripts. The Roman is derived from the Greek, perhaps by way of Etruria, and the Greeks had imitated the Phoenician alphabet. The exact steps are unknown, but the Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic, and Devanagari systems are based ultimately on signs of the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. This writing was not alphabetic, but in the phonogram it bore the germ of phonemic writing; thus the sign "bear" might (to use an English analogy) mean also the sound b, and "dog" d. A similar development created the Persian cuneiform syllabary. Two European alphabets of the late Roman era were the runes and the ogham. An exotic modern system is the Cherokee syllabary created by Sequoyah, suggested by, but not based on, the Roman alphabet. Another was the short-lived Mormon Deseret alphabet.

Bibliography

See S. Mercer, The Origin of Writing and Our Alphabet (1959); D. Diringer, The Alphabet (2 vol., 3d ed. 1968); O. Ogg, The 26 Letters (rev. ed. 1971); C. Grafton, Historic Alphabets and Initials (1977); A. Gaur, A History of Writing (1984); D. Sacks, Language Visible (2003).

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alphabet

Set of symbols or characters that represent language's sounds in writing. Each character usually represents a simple vowel, a diphthong (two vowels), or one or two consonants. A writing system in which one character represents a whole syllable is called a syllabary. The first alphabet is believed to have been the North Semitic, which originated in the eastern Mediterranean region between 1700 and 1500 BC. Alphabets that arose in the next 500 years included the Canaanite and Aramaic, from which the modern Hebrew and Arabic alphabets descended, and the Greek (ancestor of the Latin alphabet), considered the first true alphabet because it includes both consonants and vowels. Scholars have attempted to establish an exact correspondence between each sound and its symbol in new alphabets such as the International Phonetic Alphabet.

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alphabet [′al·fə‚bet]

(science and technology)

Any ordered set of unique graphics called characters, such as the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet.

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Alphabet 

the aggregate of graphic signs—letters (for example, the Latin and Russian alphabets)—or of syllabic signs (for example, the Devanagari alphabet of India) arranged in a traditionally established order.

Alphabets came into being at the end of the second millennium B.C. in the most ancient phonetic writing systems—the Ugaritic and Phoenician. Earlier there apparently existed a system of enumerating Egyptian hieroglyphics. The majority of the modern letter alphabets and some of the syllabic alphabets are derived from the Phoenecian alphabet through the Aramaic (Hebrew and Arabic) and Greek alphabets (Latin, Georgian, Armenian, Cyrillic) and others. The majority of the modern national writing systems are based on (1) the Latin alphabet—the writing systems of all peoples of America and Australia, the majority of the peoples of Europe, and some countries of Asia and Africa (for example, Turkey and Indonesia); (2) the Cyrillic alphabet—the writing systems of the majority of the peoples of the USSR (except those of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which use the Latin alphabet, and Armenia and Georgia, which have their own alphabets) and the Bulgarian and Serbian writing systems; (3) the Arabic alphabet—the writing systems of all Arab countries as well as those of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Chinese province of Sinkiang; and (4) the syllabic alphabets used by many peoples of India.

REFERENCES

Struve, V. Proiskhozhdenie alfavita. St. Petersburg, 1923. Georgiev, V. “Proiskhozhdenie alfavita.” Vopr. iazykoznaniia, 1952, no. 6.
Iakovlev, N. [F.] “Matematich. formula postroeniia alfavita.” In the collection Kul’tura i pis’mennost’ Vostoka, book 1. Moscow. 1928.
Istrin, V. A. Vozniknovenie i razvitie pis’ma. Moscow, 1965.
Diringer, D. Alfavit. Moscow, 1963. (Translated from English.)
Cohen, M. L’écriture. Paris, 1953.
Gelb, I. J. A Study of Writing. Chicago, 1952.
Jensen, H. Geschichte der Schrift. Hannover, 1925.

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