Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet are augmented with ligatures, such as æ in Old English and Icelandic and Ȣ in Algonquian ; by borrowings from other alphabets, such as the thorn þ in Old English and Icelandic, which came from the Futhark runes ; and by modifying existing letters, such as the eth ð of Old English and Icelandic, which is a modified d. Other alphabets only use a subset of the Latin alphabet, such as Hawaiian, and Italian, which uses the letters j, k, x, y and w only in foreign words.

The Glagolitic alphabet was the initial script of the liturgical language Old Church Slavonic and became, together with the Greek uncial script, the basis of the Cyrillic script.

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 ).

* Saint Cyril the Philosopher ( link to Saints Cyril and Methodius ), 9th century Greek missionary, co-invented the Slavic alphabet, translated the Bible into Old Church Slavonic

Unlike Proto-Norse, which was written with the Elder Futhark alphabet, Old Norse was written with the Younger Futhark alphabet, which only had 16 letters.

The Latin script owes its existence to the Etruscan alphabet, which was adapted for Latin in the form of the Old Italic alphabet.

In this function, it was borrowed in the 8th century BC by the Etruscan and other Old Italic alphabets, which were based on the Euboean form of the Greek alphabet.

The Old Hungarian script, the so-called " Rovás alphabet " The country switched to using the Latin language and alphabet under king Stephen I of Hungary ( reigned: 997-1038 ), and as late as 1844, Latin remained the official language of Hungary.

The alphabets used are based on the Old Italic alphabet, which is itself based on the Greek alphabet.

The Roman alphabet, or Latin alphabet, was adapted from the Old Italic alphabet to represent the phonemes of the Latin language.

The Old Italic alphabet had in turn been borrowed from the Greek alphabet, itself adapted from the Phoenician alphabet.

The Glagolitic alphabet is believed to have been created by Saints Cyril and Methodius, while the Cyrillic alphabet was invented by the Bulgarian scholar Clement of Ohrid, who was their disciple.

In 886 AD, the Bulgarian Empire introduced the Glagolitic alphabet which was devised by the Saints Cyril and Methodius in the 850s.

Several Cyrillic alphabets with 28 to 44 letters were used in the beginning and the middle of the 19th century during the efforts on the codification of Modern Bulgarian until an alphabet with 32 letters, proposed by Marin Drinov, gained prominence in the 1870s.

The following table gives the letters of the Bulgarian alphabet, along with the IPA values for the sound of each letter:

Nevertheless, particular passages or words written with the Glagolitic alphabet appeared in Bulgarian Cyrillic manuscripts till the end of the 14 century.

A corresponding term is sometimes used in Slavic languages, in Serbian is otadžbina or отаџбина in Serbian Cyrillic alphabet, Bosnian Otadžbina ( Отаџбина ), Macedonian татковина ( tatkovina ), Bulgarian татковина ( tatkovina ) as well as otechestvo, Czech otčina ( although the normal Czech term for " homeland " is vlast ), in Polish ojczyzna ( besides macierz " motherland "), Russian otechestvo ( отечество ) or otchizna ( отчизна ) ( although rodina " motherland " is more common ).

Cyrillic gradually replaced Glagolitic as the alphabet of the Old Church Slavonic language, which became the official language of the Bulgarian Empire and later spread to the Eastern Slav lands of Kievan Rus '.

The early Cyrillic alphabet was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire as a simplification of the Glagolitic alphabet which more closely resembled the Greek alphabet.

* In Bulgaria it is celebrated on 24 May and is known as the " Bulgarian Education and Culture, and Slavonic Literature Day " ( Bulgarian: Ден на българската просвета и култура и на славянската писменост ), a national holiday celebrating Bulgarian culture and literature as well as the alphabet.

* The Glagolitic alphabet, devised by Cyril and Methodius, missionaries from Constantinople, is adopted in the Bulgarian Empire.

Its ethnically and culturally diverse people united under a common religion, language and alphabet which formed and preserved the Bulgarian national consciousness despite foreign invasions and influences.

Missionaries from Constantinople, Cyril and Methodius, devised the Glagolitic alphabet, which was adopted in the Bulgarian Empire around 886.

An alternative theory is that the alphabet was devised at the Ohrid Literary School by Saint Climent of Ohrid, a Bulgarian scholar and disciple of Cyril and Methodius.

Students of the two apostles, who were expelled from Great Moravia in 886, brought the Glagolitic alphabet and the Old Church Slavonic language to the Bulgarian Empire.

Initially Old Church Slavonic was written with the Glagolitic alphabet, but later Glagolitic was replaced by Cyrillic., which was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire by a decree of Tsar Boris I in the IX century.

Cyrillic alphabet of the medieval Old Bulgarian language

The Belarusian Lacinka alphabet also contains the digraph ( as a separate letter ), and Latin transctiptions of Bulgarian and Macedonian may also use them at times for transcription of the letter-combination ДЖ ( Bulgarian ) and the letter Џ ( Macedonian ).

From there, it was adopted into the Croatian alphabet by Ljudevit Gaj in 1830, and other alphabets of languages, such as Bosnian, Belarusian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Slovak, Slovene, Serbian, Karelian, Sami, Veps, Sorbian and some forms of Bulgarian.

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.

A true alphabet has letters for the vowels of a language as well as the consonants.

The alphabet in the Polish language contains 32 letters.

When an alphabet is adopted or developed for use in representing a given language, an orthography generally comes into being, providing rules for the spelling of words in that language.

In accordance with the principle on which alphabets are based, these rules will generally map letters of the alphabet to the phonemes ( significant sounds ) of the spoken language.

The pronunciation of a language often evolves independently of its writing system, 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.

However, with an international language 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.

The word " alphabet " in English has a source in Greek language in which the first two letters were " A " ( alpha ) and " B " ( beta ), hence " alphabeta ".

The earliest inscriptions in the Aramaic language use the Phoenician alphabet.

Its widespread usage led to the gradual adoption of the Aramaic alphabet for writing the Hebrew language.

Today, Biblical Aramaic, Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects and the Aramaic language of the Talmud are written in the Hebrew alphabet.

The Arabic alphabet ( ) or Arabic abjad is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing the Arabic language.

" () or " A. B. C's " () is one of the best-known English language alphabet songs, and perhaps the one most frequently referred to as " the alphabet song ", especially in the United States.

Software may also be written in an assembly language, essentially, a mnemonic representation of a machine language using a natural language alphabet.

However, elements that are practical to sell in bulk in many countries often still have locally used national names, and countries whose national language does not use the Latin alphabet are likely to use the IUPAC element names.

The set of terminals is the alphabet of the language defined by the grammar.