Alphabet

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. more...

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There are other systems of writing such as logosyllabic writing, in which each symbol represents a morpheme, or word or a syllable or places the word within a category, and syllabaries, in which each symbol represents a syllable.

The etymology of the word "alphabet" itself comes to Middle English from the Late Latin Alphabetum which in turn originates from the Ancient Greek Alphabetos, from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. There are dozens of alphabets in use today. Most of them are 'linear', which means that they are made up of lines. Notable exceptions are Braille, manual alphabets, Morse code, and the cuneiform alphabet of the ancient civilization Sumer.

Linguistic definition and context

In spite of its imprecision, the term "alphabet" is commonly used to refer to any writing system whose graphemes represent both consonant and vowel sounds.

A grapheme is an abstract entity which may be physically represented by different styles of glyphs. There are many written entities which do not form part of the alphabet, including numerals, mathematical symbols, and punctuation. Some human languages are commonly written by using a combination of logograms (which represent morphemes or words) and syllabograms instead of an alphabet. Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters are two of the best-known writing systems with predominantly non-alphabetic representations.

Non-written languages also have alphabetic and non-alphabetic representations. For example, in American Sign Language one can spell words using the character set borrowed from the English language alphabet. Experienced ASL signers express most concepts using ideomatic hand signs which either correspond to English words or are original to the signed language.

Most, if not all, linguistic writing systems have some means for phonetic approximation of foreign words, usually using the native character set.

History

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 is thought by some to have been developed in central Egypt around 1700 BCE for or by Semitic workers, but we cannot read these early writings and their exact nature remain open to interpretation.

Read more at Wikipedia.org