Page "Alphabet" Paragraph 30

The number of letters in an alphabet 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.

( The Hawaiian alphabet is sometimes claimed to be as small, but it actually consists of 18 letters, including the ʻokina and five long vowels.

) While Rotokas has a small alphabet because it has few phonemes to represent ( just eleven ), 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 alphabet in the Polish language contains 32 letters.