Page "Alphabet" Paragraph 25

The term " alphabet " is used by linguists and paleographers in both a wide and a narrow sense.

In the wider sense, an alphabet is a script that is segmental at the phoneme level — that is, it 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 ancestor of modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin ( via the Old Italic alphabet ), Cyrillic ( via the Greek alphabet ) and Hebrew ( via Aramaic ).