Alphabet Types and History

The History and Types of Alphabets

• An alphabet is a set of standardized written graphemes representing phonemes, used to write certain spoken languages.

• Alphabets are associated with a standard ordering of letters, making them useful for collation and numbering.

• The first alphabet in a technical sense was created by the Egyptians, using short uniliteral signs to write pronunciation guides for logograms.

• The Proto-Sinaitic script, developed into the Phoenician alphabet, is considered to be the first true alphabet and the ancestor of most modern alphabets.

• Peter T. Daniels distinguishes an abugida, an abjad, and an alphabet based on their use of consonants and vowels.

• The Greek alphabet was the first alphabet with independent letter forms for vowels.

• The Latin alphabet, derived from the Etruscan alphabet, spread across Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and is now the most widely used script in the world.

• The Old Hungarian script was the writing system of the Hungarians and is becoming more popular.

• The Glagolitic alphabet was the initial script of the liturgical language Old Church Slavonic and became the basis of the Cyrillic script.

• Alphabetic scripts in Asia mostly descend from the Brahmi script.

• Hangul is a unique featural alphabet created in Korea.

• Zhuyin is a semi-syllabary used to transcribe Mandarin phonetically in Taiwan.

• Alphabets can be broadly defined as a segmental script at the phoneme level, and narrowly defined as "true" alphabets, distinguished from abjads and abugidas.Summary Title: Types of Alphabets and Their Characteristics

• There are three types of segmental scripts: abjads, true alphabets, and abugidas.

• The Canadian Aboriginal syllabics are an abugida, not a syllabary, because each glyph stands for a consonant and is modified by rotation to represent the following vowel.

• The boundaries between the three types of segmental scripts are not always clear-cut.

• For tonal languages, further classification can be based on their treatment of tone.

• Alphabets often come to be associated with a standard ordering of their letters for collation.

• In French, accented letters such as é, à, and ô are not considered additional letters for collation.

• The Danish and Norwegian alphabets end with æ—ø—å, whereas the Swedish conventionally put å—ä—ö at the end.

• Some alphabets today, such as the Hanuno'o script, are learned one letter at a time, in no particular order, and are not used for collation where a definite order is required.

• When an alphabet is adopted or developed to represent a given language, an orthography generally comes into being, providing rules for spelling words.

• Languages can come close to a perfectly phonemic orthography, such as Spanish and Finnish.

• The pronunciation of a language often evolves independently of its writing system.

• Sometimes, countries have the written language undergo a spelling reform to realign the writing with the contemporary spoken language.