Encyclopedia
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 a syllable or places the word within a category, and syllabaries, in which each symbol represents a
syllable.
The word "alphabet" itself is popularly believed to come from
alpha and
beta, the first two letters of the
Greek alphabet, but some etymologists argue that instead the word derives from
aleph and
bet, the first two letters of the
Phoenician alphabet which later gave rise to the Hebrew alphabet. The true origin of the word is unclear. 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 city of
Ugarit.
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 numbers, mathematical symbols, and punctuation. Some human languages are commonly written by using a combination of
logograms 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 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.
Over the next five centuries this Semitic "alphabet" seems to have spread north. All subsequent alphabets around the world with the sole possible exception of Korean
Hangul have either descended from it, or been inspired by one of its descendants.
Types
The term "alphabet" is used by linguists and paleographers in a wider and a narrower sense. In the wider sense, an alphabet is a script that is
segmental on the phoneme level, that is, that has separate glyphs for individual sounds and not for larger units such as syllables or words. In the narrower sense, some scholars distinguish "true" alphabets from two other types of segmental script, abjads and abugidas. These three differ from each other in the way they treat vowels: Abjads have letters for consonants and leave most vowels unexpressed; abugidas are also consonant-based, but indicate vowels with diacritics to or a systematic graphic modification of the consonants. In alphabets in the narrow sense, on the other hand, consonants and vowels are written as independent letters. The earliest known alphabet in the wider sense is the
Wadi el-Hol script, believed to be an abjad, which through its successor
Phoenician is the antcester of modern alphabets, including
Arabic,
Greek,
Latin ,
Cyrillic and Hebrew .
The basic
Latin alphabet consists of 26 letters:
A,
B,
C,
D,
E,
F,
G,
H,
I,
J,
K,
L,
M,
N,
O,
P,
Q,
R,
S,
T,
U,
V,
W,
X,
Y and
ZExamples of present-day abjads are the
Arabic and Hebrew scripts; true alphabets include
Latin,
Cyrillic, and Korean
Hangul; and abugidas are used to write Tigrinya
Amharic,
Hindi, and Thai. The
Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics are also an abugida rather than a syllabary as their name would imply, since each glyph stands for a consonant which is modified by rotatation to represent the following vowel.
The boundaries between the three types of segmental scripts are not always clear-cut. For example, Iraqi
Kurdish is written in the
Arabic script, which is normally an abjad. However, in Kurdish, writing the vowels is mandatory, and full letters are used, so the script is a true alphabet. Other languages may use a Semitic abjad with mandatory vowel diacritics, effectively making them abugidas. On the other hand, the
Phagspa script of the
Mongol Empire was based closely on the
Tibetan abugida, but all vowel marks were written after the preceding consonant rather than as diacritic marks. Although short
a was not written, as in the Indic abugidas, one could argue that the linear arrangement made this a true alphabet. Conversely, the vowel marks of the
Tigrinya abugida and the
Amharic abugida have been so completely assimilated into their consonants that the modifications are no longer systematic and have to be learned as a syllabary rather than as a segmental script. Even more extreme, the Pahlavi abjad eventually became
logographic.
Thus the primary classification of alphabets reflects how they treat vowels. For tonal languages, further classification can be based on their treatment of tone, though there are as yet no names to distinguish the various types. Some alphabets disregard tone entirely, especially when it does not carry a heavy functional load, as in Somali and many other languages of Africa and the Americas. Such scripts are to tone what abjads are to vowels. Most commonly, tones are indicated with diacritics, the way vowels are treated in abugidas. This is the case for
Vietnamese and
Thai . In Thai, tone is determined primarily by the choice of consonant, with diacritics for disambiguation. In the Pollard script, an abugida, vowels are indicated by diacritics, but the placement of the diacritic relative to the consonant is modified to indicate the tone. More rarely, a script may have separate letters for tones, as is the case for Hmong and
Zhuang. For most of these scripts, regardless of whether letters or diacritics are used, the most common tone is not marked, just as the most common vowel is not marked in Indic abugidas.
Alphabets can be quite small. The Book
Pahlavi script, an abjad, had only twelve letters at one point, and may have had even fewer later on. Today the Rotokas alphabet has only twelve letters. While Rotokas has a small alphabet because it has few phonemes to represent , Book Pahlavi was small because many letters had been
conflated, that is, the graphic distinctions had been lost over time, and diacritics were not developed to compensate for this as they were in
Arabic, another script that lost many of its distinct letter shapes. For example, a comma-shaped letter represented
g, d, y, k, or
j. However, such apparent simplifications can perversely make a script more complicated. In later Pahlavi
papyri, up to half of the remaining graphic distinctions of these twelve letters were lost, and the script could no longer be read as a sequence of letters at all, but instead each word had to be learned as a whole – that is, they had become
logograms as in Egyptian
Demotic.
The largest segmental script is probably an abugida,
Devanagari. When written in Devanagari, Vedic
Sanskrit has an alphabet of 53 letters, including the
visarga mark for final aspiration and special letters for
kš and
jñ, though one of the letters is theoretical and not actually used. The Hindi alphabet must represent both Sanskrit and modern vocabulary, and so has been expanded to 58 with the
khutma letters to represent sounds from Persian and English.
The largest known abjad is
Sindhi, with 51 letters. The largest alphabets in the narrow sense include Kabardian and Abkhaz , with 58 and 56 letters, respectively, and Slovak , with 46. However, these scripts either count di- and tri-graphs as separate letters, as Spanish does with
ch and
ll, or uses diacritics like Slovak
c. The largest true alphabet where each letter is graphically independent is probably
Georgian, with 41 letters.
Syllabaries typically contain 50 to 400 glyphs , and the glyphs of logographic systems typically number from the many hundreds into the thousands. Thus a simple count of the number of distinct symbols is an important clue to the nature of an unknown script.
It is not always clear what constitutes a distinct alphabet.
French uses the same basic alphabet as English, but many of the letters can carry additional marks, such as é, à, and ô. In French, these combinations are not considered to be additional letters. However, in Icelandic, the accented letters such as á, í, and ö are considered to be distinct letters of the alphabet. Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet are augmented with ligatures, such as
æ in
Old English and
? in
Algonquian; by borrowings from other alphabets, such as the thorn þ in
Old English and Icelandic, which came from the
Futhark runes; and by modifying existing letters, such as the
eth ð of Old English and Icelandic, which is a modified
d. Other alphabets only use a subset of the Latin alphabet, such as Hawaiian, or
Italian, which only uses the letters
j, k, x, y and
w in foreign words.
There are some alphabets which are invented by people for the purpose of writing a story, making a movie, or just for fun.
J. R. R. Tolkein was one who did this. Tolkein based one of his alphabets on the
runic alphabet. The other was completely inmprovised. Sometimes these false alphabets are called ciphers.
Spelling
Each language may establish certain general rules that govern the association between letters and phonemes, but, depending on the language, these rules may or may not be consistently followed. In a perfectly
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. Kabardian 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.
- 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
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. 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 cannot always be predicted from spelling because certain letters are pronounced in more than one way. In standard Spanish, it is 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 and
Irish, where the spelling of many words simply has to be memorized as they do not 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 rules that predict pronunciation from spelling, and these rules are successful most of the time.
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.
The Alphabet effect
Some communication theorists have advanced hypotheses to the effect that alphabetic scripts in particular have served to promote and encourage the skills of analysis, coding, decoding, and classification. This set of hypotheses may be known as "the Alphabet effect", after the title of Logan's 1986 work.
The theory claims that a greater level of abstraction is required due to the greater economy of symbols in alphabetic systems; and this abstraction needed to interpret phonemic symbols in turn has contributed in some way to the development of the societies which use it. Proponents of this theory hold that the development of alphabetic writing systems has made a significant impact on "Western" thinking and development because it introduced a new level of abstraction, analysis, and classification. McLuhan and Logan postulates that, as a result of these skills, the use of the alphabet created an environment conducive to the development of codified law, monotheism, abstract science, deductive logic, objective history, and individualism. According to Logan, "All of these innovations, including the alphabet, arose within the very narrow geographic zone between the Tigris-Euphrates river system and the Aegean Sea, and within the very narrow time frame between 2000 B.C. and 500 B.C." .
However, many of these abstractions first occurred in societies which did not use an alphabet, such as the codified law of
Hammurabi in Babylonia, which predated similar codes in societies with the alphabet. Since the alphabet quickly spread to become nearly ubiquitous, it is difficult to trace cause and effect in this matter.
Nonetheless,
Paul Levinson argues in his 1997
The Soft Edge that the alphabet facilitated the rise and dissemination of monotheism, by providing an easy way to write about a deity that is omnipotent, omnipresent, yet invisible. In contrast, monotheism did not succeed when
Ikhnaton attempted to promulgate it via hieroglyphics in
Ancient Egypt, nor did it even arise in places such as
China, which relied on an ideographic writing system.
See also
...
References
— .
— .
- McLuhan, Marshall; Logan, Robert K. . Alphabet, Mother of Invention. Etcetera. Vol. 34, pp. 373-383.
— .
External links
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- Michael Everson's
- The
- animation by Prof. Robert Fradkin at the University of Maryland
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