An alphabet is a standard set of letters (basic written symbols or graphemes) which 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 logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme or semantic unit, and syllabaries, in which each character represents a syllable.
A true alphabet has letters for the vowels of a language as well as the consonants. The first "true alphabet" in this sense is believed to be the Greek alphabet, which is a modified form of the Phoenician alphabet. In other types of alphabet either the vowels are not indicated at all, as was the case in the Phoenician alphabet (such systems are known as abjads), or else the vowels are shown by diacritics or modification of consonants, as in the devanagari used in India and Nepal (these systems are known as abugidas or alphasyllabaries).
There are dozens of alphabets in use today, the most common being the Latin alphabet (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, fingerspelling, and Morse code.
Alphabets are usually associated with a standard ordering of their 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.
Read more about Alphabet: Etymology, Alphabetical Order, Names of Letters, Orthography and Pronunciation
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... An alphabet is an arbitrary set ... A word on an alphabet is a finite sequence of symbols from the alphabet the same symbol may be used more than once ... example, binary strings are exactly the words on the alphabet {0, 1} ...
... Origins Phoenician alphabet Greek alphabet Latin alphabet Cyrillic script Macedonian Cyrillic alphabet The following table provides the upper and lower case forms of the Macedonian ...
... When an alphabet is adopted or developed for use in representing a given language, an orthography generally comes into being, providing rules for the ... In accordance with the principle on which alphabets are based, these rules will generally map letters of the alphabet to the phonemes (significant sounds ... 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 ...
... is taken as a sequence of symbols from an alphabet, say an input alphabet χ, and an output alphabet ϒ ...
Famous quotes containing the word alphabet:
“Roger Thornhill: You’re police, aren’t you. Or is it FBI?
Professor: FBI, CIA, O–I—we’re all in the same alphabet soup.”
—Ernest Lehman (b.1920)
“I wonder, Mr. Bone man, what you’re thinking
of your fury now, gone sour as a sinking whale,
crawling up the alphabet on her own bones.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“I believe the alphabet is no longer considered an essential piece of equipment for traveling through life. In my day it was the keystone to knowledge. You learned the alphabet as you learned to count to ten, as you learned “Now I lay me” and the Lord’s Prayer and your father’s and mother’s name and address and telephone number, all in case you were lost.”
—Eudora Welty (b. 1909)