There are dozens of alphabets in use today, the most common being the Latin alphabet ( which was derived from the Greek ).

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.

Writing systems that indicate consonants but do not indicate most vowels ( like the Aramaic one ) or indicate them with added diacritical signs, have been called abjads by Peter T. Daniels to distinguish them from later alphabets, such as Greek, that represent vowels more systematically.

In most of the alphabets of India and Southeast Asia, vowels are indicated through diacritics or modification of the shape of the consonant.

Though later Greeks like Herodotus dated Cadmus's role in the founding myth of Thebes to well before the Trojan War ( or, in modern terms, during the Aegean Bronze Age ), this chronology conflicts with most of what is now known or thought to be known about the origins and spread of both the Phoenician and Greek alphabets.

For most of the next several hundred years, the significance of using multiple substitution alphabets was missed by almost everyone.

The principle ( particularly Alberti's unlimited additional substitution alphabets ) was a major advance — the most significant in the several hundred years since frequency analysis had been developed.

The chart below shows the most common phonemic transcription romanization used for several different alphabets.

Salish is most commonly written using the Americanist phonetic notation to account for the various vowels and consonants that do not exist in most modern alphabets.

The International Phonetic Alphabet ( IPA ) is one of the most popular and well-known phonetic alphabets.

Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for all four of its postalveolar consonants, as do most Latin-based Slavic alphabets ( Polish is the most notable exception ).

It is the first letter of Indic alphabets and, as a sound on its own, can be seen as the most neutral and basic of speech sounds.

In most cases, alphabets are adopted, i. e. a language is written in another language's script at first, and gradually develops peculiarities specific to its new environment over the centuries ( such as the letters w and j added to the Latin alphabet over time ).

mu ), which is the first letter of Indic alphabets ; and that, as a sound on its own, is the most neutral / basic of speech sounds ( cf Aum and bija ).

Since most alphabets do reside in blocks of contiguous Unicode codepoints, texts that use small alphabets and either ASCII punctuation or punctuation that fits within the window for the main alphabet can be encoded at one byte per character ( plus setup overhead, which for common languages is often only 1 byte ), most other punctuation can be encoded at 2 bytes per symbol through non-locking shifts.

In 1939 the Bolsheviks imposed the Cyrillic script on most of the non-Russian languages, including the languages of Central Asia that in the late 1920s had been given Latin alphabets to replace Arabic ones.

Zhe is used in the alphabets of all Slavic languages using a Cyrillic alphabet, and of most non-Slavic languages which use a Cyrillic alphabet.

Although use of Ä ä ( also used in Tatar, Turkmen, and Gagauz ) seems to be a simpler alternative as the schwa is absent in most character sets, particularly Turkish encoding, it was reintroduced ; the schwa had existed continuously from 1929 to 1991 to represent Azeri's most-common vowel, in both post-Arabic alphabets ( Latin and Cyrillic ) of Azerbaijan.

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 ).

The Greek alphabet evolved into the modern western alphabets, such as Latin and Cyrillic, while Aramaic became the ancestor of many modern abjads and abugidas of Asia.

There are two families of manual alphabets used for representing the Latin alphabet in the modern world.

This sound was regularly realized in Old English as the voiced fricative between voiced sounds, but either letter could be used to write it ; the modern use of in phonetic alphabets is not the same as the Old English orthographic use.

The acute accent ( ´ ) is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.

This applies to Old Church Slavonic, as well as modern Slavic languages which use these alphabets.

The Etruscan alphabet ( itself based on an early version of the western Greek alphabet ) was the source for later Italian alphabets, including the modern Latin alphabet.

* Œ or œ, a ligature of o and e used in the modern French and medieval Latin alphabets

The area to the south, including what was to become the Insubrian capital Mediolanum ( modern Milan ), was Etruscan around 600-500 BC, when the Lepontii began writing tombstone inscriptions in their alphabet, one of several Etruscan-derived alphabets in the Rhaetian territory.

With the increased support for other languages and alphabets in modern computing, and the resulting improved digital typesetting techniques such as OpenType, ligatures are slowly coming back into use.

In Greek loanwords in Latin and modern languages with Latin alphabets, Psi is usually transliterated as " ps ".

It generally uses traditional Cyrillic script ( poluustav ); however, certain texts ( mostly prayers ) can be printed in modern alphabets with the spelling adapted to rules of local languages ( for example, in Russian / Ukrainian / Bulgarian / Serbian Cyrillic or in Hungarian / Slovak / Polish Latin ).

# < span id =" n-lv ">↑↑↑↑</ span > Latvian also has the digraphs: dz, dž, ie, as well as the triphthongal letter o. Dz and dž are occasionally considered separate letters of the alphabet in more archaic examples ( which have been published as recently as the 1950s ,) however modern alphabets and teachings discourage this due to an ongoing effort to set decisive rules for Latvian ( and eliminate barbaric words accumulated during the Soviet occupation.

I ( И и ; italics: < span style =" font-family: times, ' Times New Roman ', serif ; font-size: larger "> И и </ span >) is a letter used in almost all ancient and modern Cyrillic alphabets.

For several of the small nationalities in Russia that had no literary language, a " Committee of the North " helped to create alphabets so that the national languages could be taught in schools and literacy could be brought to the people in their native languages — and the minorities would thereby be brought from backwardness to the modern world.

The letter yer ( Ъ, ъ, italics < span style =" font-family: times, ' Times New Roman ', serif ; font-size: larger "> Ъ, ъ </ span >) of the Cyrillic script, also spelled jer or er, is known as the hard sign ( твёрдый знак ) in the modern Russian and Rusyn alphabets and as er golyam ( ер голям, " big er ") in the Bulgarian alphabet.

Compared to other Cyrillic alphabets, the modern Ukrainian alphabet has most in common with those of the other East Slavic languages, Belarusian, Russian, and Rusyn.

Used along with Arabic ( Uyghur Ereb Yëziqi ), « New Script » ( Uyghur Yëngi Yëziqi, Pinyin-based ), and modern Latin ( Uyghur Latin Yëziqi ) alphabets.

Dalet (, also spelled Daleth or Daled ) is the fourth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic ( in abjadi order ; 8th in modern order ).

( also Teth, Tet ) is the ninth letter of many Semitic abjads ( alphabets ), including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew Tet, Syriac and Arabic ; it is 9th in abjadi order and 16th in modern Arabic order.

The Phoenician letter may continue a glyph from the Middle Bronze Age alphabets, either based on a hieroglyph for a tent peg / some kind of prop ( s ' mikhah,, or t ' mikhah,, in modern Hebrew means to support ), and thus may be derived from the Egyptian hieroglyph djed.

The Greek alphabet, in its Euboean form, was carried over by Greek colonists to the Italian peninsula, where it gave rise to a variety of alphabets used to write the Italic languages.

The Runic alphabets were used for Germanic languages from AD 100 to the late Middle Ages.

European alphabets, especially Latin and Cyrillic, have been adapted for many languages of Asia.

Some alphabets disregard tone entirely, especially when it does not carry a heavy functional load, as in Somali and many other languages of Africa and the Americas.

In this typographical system chemical symbols are not used as mere abbreviations – though each consists of letters of the Latin alphabet – they are symbols intended to be used by peoples of all languages and alphabets.

( The system is not limited to alphabets in the strict technical sense ; languages that use a syllabary or abugida, for example Cherokee, can use the same ordering principle provided there is a set ordering for the symbols used.

The permitted character set of the DNS prevented the representation of names and words of many languages in their native alphabets or scripts.

Jones helped develop new alphabets for African languages, and suggested systems of romanisation for Indian languages and Japanese.

These manual alphabets ( also known as finger alphabets or hand alphabets ), have often been used in deaf education, and have subsequently been adopted as a distinct part of a number of sign languages around the world.

False friends () are pairs of words or phrases in two languages or dialects ( or letters in two alphabets ) that look or sound similar, but differ significantly in meaning.

The following languages or alphabets use the macron to mark tones:

However, the name for the letter in the Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic alphabets is nun, which means " fish " in some of these languages.

Derived letters such as Ö and Ø have been created for the alphabets of some languages to distinguish values that were not present in Latin and Greek, particularly rounded front vowels.

Teleprinters for languages using other alphabets also use an additional third shift state, in which they print letters in the alternative alphabet.

Several cultures whose languages use writing systems other than alphabets do not share the Western notion of signatures per se: the " signing " of one's name results in a written product no different from the result of " writing " one's name in the standard way.

The Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets, based primarily on the Greek uncial writing of the 9th century, are the oldest known Slavic alphabets and were created by the two brothers and their students, in order to translate the Bible and other texts into the Slavic languages.

The character set allowed in the Domain Name System is based on ASCII and does not allow the representation of names and words of many languages in their native scripts or alphabets.

It has spawned several alphabets, either as attempts to fix its perceived shortcomings, or to allow the notation of other languages, such as Sanskrit and Tibetan.

Later developments in printing include the movable type, first developed by Bi Sheng in China, and the printing press, a more efficient printing process for western languages with their more limited alphabets, developed by Johannes Gutenberg in the fifteenth century.

There are also adapted Quikscript alphabets for other languages, using the same letters for sounds which do not exist in English.