Alphabet

An alphabet is a small set of letters--basic written symbols--each of which
roughly represents or represented historically a phoneme of a spoken
language. This is distinguished from other writing systems such as
ideograms, in which symbols represent complete ideas, and syllabaries, in
which each symbol represents a syllable. The word alphabet itself is derived
from alpha and beta, the first two symbols of the Greek alphabet.

Among alphabets, one may distinguish the older abjads that only recorded
consonants, and the newer alphabet of the Greek type called simply alphabet
and the abugida.

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.
   * 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 pronounce different phonemes for
     the same word.

National languages generally elect to address the problem of dialects by
simply associating the alphabet with the national standard. However, with
international languages 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 and Spanish have a very regular
spelling system with close to a one-to-one correspondence between letters
and phonemes. In standard Spanish, it is possible to predict 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 represented. 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,
where the spelling of many words simply has to be memorized as they do not
correspond to sounds in a consistent way (though they may have at some
earlier time in the language's evolution). However, even English has general
rules that predict pronunciation from spelling, and these rules are
successful a majority of the time.

The first alphabet was probably developed by the Canaanites around 1700-1500
BC (see early Semitic alphabet), and nearly all subsequent alphabets are
derived from it or inspired by it, directly or indirectly. Of special note
among its descendants is the Greek alphabet, which was the first to have
separate symbols for vowels (Semitic didn't need them). Most subsequent
alphabets with vowels are derived from the early Greek alphabets. The most
popular alphabet in use today is a modern 26-letter version of the Roman
alphabet, used by the English language and most European languages. Writing
without letter(s) is a type of Constrained writing called the lipogram. In
modern linguistic usage, the term latin alphabet is usually used to refer to
the modern derivations from the alphabet used by the Romans (i.e. the Roman
alphabet).

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, Z

An alphabet also serves to establish an order among letters that can be used
for sorting entries in lists, called collating. Note that the order does not
have to be constant among different languages using this alphabet; for
examples see Latin alphabet, "Collating in other languages".

In recent years the Unicode initiative has attempted to collate most of the
world's known writing systems into a single character encoding. As well as
its primary purpose of standardising computer processing of non-Roman
scripts, the Unicode project has provided a focus for script-related
scholarship.

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 smallest known alphabet is the Rotokas alphabet, which contains only 11
letters. The largest known non-ideographic alphabet is Armenian with 39
letters. However, this depends on what is included in the alphabet, since
some languages represent syllables instead of individual sounds, and
therefore include many more symbols.

List of alphabets:

   * Africa
   * Albanian
   * Arabic
   * Aramaic
   * Armenian
   * Bengali
   * Bopomofo
   * Braille
   * Burmese
   * Catalan
   * Cherokee
   * Coptic
   * Cree
   * Cyrillic - Russian
   * Danish
   * Deseret
   * Devangari
   * Esperanto
   * Estonian
   * Ethiopic
   * Glagolitic
   * Gothic
   * Greek
   * Gujarati
   * Gurmukhi
   * Hawaiian
   * Hebrew
   * Hungarian
   * Iberian
   * Icelandic
   * Initial Teaching Alphabet
   * Inuktitut
   * Old Italic
   * Kannada
   * Khmer
   * Korean
   * Lao
   * Latin
   * Latvian
   * Malayalam
   * Manual
   * Meroitic
   * Mongolian
   * Morse code
   * NATO Phonetic
   * Norwegian
   * Ogham
   * Oriya
   * Phoenician
   * Rotokas
   * Roman alphabet
   * Runic
   * Scottish Gaelic
   * Shavian
   * Sinhala
   * Spanish
   * Swedish
   * Syriac
   * Tamil
   * Telugu
   * Thaana
   * Thai
   * Tibetan
   * Tengwar
   * Tifinagh
   * Old Turkic
   * Turkish
   * Ugaritic
   * Welsh