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

Others suggest the alphabet was developed in central Egypt during the 15th century BC for or by Semitic workers, but only one of these early writings has been deciphered and their exact nature remains open to interpretation.

Zhuyin developed out of a form of Chinese shorthand based on Chinese characters in the early 1900s and has elements of both an alphabet and a syllabary.

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.

) Cyrillic is basically a true alphabet, but has syllabic letters for ( я, е, ю ); Coptic has a letter for.

Today the Rotokas alphabet has only twelve letters.

) 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.

When written in Devanagari, Vedic Sanskrit has an alphabet of 53 letters, including the visarga mark for final aspiration and special letters for kš and jñ, though one of the letters is theoretical and not actually used.

The Hindi alphabet must represent both Sanskrit and modern vocabulary, and so has been expanded to 58 with the khutma letters ( letters with a dot added ) to represent sounds from Persian and English.

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 ".

Other terms that have been used include neosyllabary ( Février 1959 ), pseudo-alphabet ( Householder 1959 ), semisyllabary ( Diringer 1968 ; a word which has other uses ) and syllabic alphabet ( Coulmas 1996 ; this term is also a synonym for syllabary ).

Ammonius asks Plutarch what he, being a Boeotian, has to say for Cadmus, the Phoenician who reputedly settled in Thebes and introduced the alphabet to Greece, placing alpha first because it is the Phoenician name for ox — which, unlike Hesiod, the Phoenicians considered not the second or third, but the first of all necessities.

This alphabet has influenced development of orthographies of many African languages ( serving " as the basis for the transcription " of about 60, by one count ), but not all, and discussions of harmonization of systems of transcription that led to, among other things, adoption of the African reference alphabet.

The Arabic alphabet has 28 basic letters.

A single constellation may contain fifty or more stars, but the Greek alphabet has only twenty-four letters ; when these ran out, Bayer began using lower-case Latin letters: hence s Carinae ( s of the Keel ) and d Centauri ( d of the Centaur ).

In fact, the English alphabet has fewer consonant letters than English has consonant sounds, so digraphs like " ch ", " sh ", " th ", and " zh " are used to extend the alphabet, and some letters and digraphs represent more than one consonant.

In Lebanon, the right-wing Guardians of the Cedars, a fiercely nationalistic ( mainly Christian ) political party which opposes the country's ties to the Arab world, is agitating for " Lebanese " to be recognized as a distinct language from Arabic and not merely a dialect, and has even advocated replacing the Arabic alphabet with a revival of the ancient Phoenician alphabet, which lacks a number of characters to write typical Arabic phonemes present in Lebanese, and lost by Phoenician ( and Hebrew ) in the second millennium BC.

English has a comparatively deep orthography within the Latin alphabet writing system, with a complex orthographic structure that employs spelling patterns at several levels: principally, letter-sound correspondences, syllables, and morphemes.

These alphabets have since been replaced with the Latin alphabet, except for decorative usage for which the runes remained in use until the 20th century.

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.

They feature many letters that appear to have been borrowed from or influenced by the Greek alphabet and the Hebrew alphabet.

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.

Formerly, Hebrew had been written using an alphabet closer in form to that of Phoenician ( the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet ).

Many songs have been written to teach phonemic awareness and they are usually referred to as alphabet songs.

Efforts have been made to create internationalized domain names that further extend the English alphabet ( e. g., " pokémon. com ").

This has been termed the model alphabet.

In addition to being the source of the Roman alphabet, it has been suggested that it passed northward into Venetia and from there through Raetia into the Germanic lands, where it became the Elder Futhark alphabet, the oldest form of the runes.

Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history ; other systems, such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary, were previously used.

Greek has been written in the Greek alphabet since approximately the 9th century BC.

" According to some records, the original seventh letter, ⟨ z ⟩, had been purged from the Latin alphabet somewhat earlier in the 3rd century BC by the Roman censor Appius Claudius, who found it distasteful and foreign.

The number of letters in the original Glagolitic alphabet is not known, but may have been close to its presumed Greek model.

Twenty-four of the 41 original Glagolitic letters ( see table below ) probably derive from graphemes of the medieval cursive Greek small alphabet, but have been given an ornamental design.

The tradition that the alphabet was designed by Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius has not been universally accepted.

For example, in most languages written in any variety of the Latin alphabet the dot on a lower-case " i " is not a glyph because it does not convey any distinction, and an i in which the dot has been accidentally omitted is still likely to be read as an " i ".

The Samaritan Pentateuch, sometimes called Samaritan Torah, ( Hebrew: תורה שומרונית torah shomroniyt ), is a version of the Hebrew language Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, traditionally written in the Samaritan alphabet and used by the Samaritans.

Unlike most other encyclopedias, it is traditionally published in nonuniform volumes sized to match the letters of the alphabet.

The Georgian alphabet is traditionally said to have been invented in the 5th century BC and reformed by King Parnavaz I of Iberia in 284 BC.

According to Thai history, Ramkhamhaeng is traditionally credited with developing the Thai alphabet ( Lai Sue Thai ) from Sanskrit, Pali and Grantha script.

The Danish alphabet has traditionally seen " W " as a variant of " V ", but today " W " is considered a separate letter.

# < span id =" n-es ">↑↑↑</ span > Spanish uses several digraphs to represented single sounds: ch, gu ( preceding e or i ), ll, qu, rr ; of these, the digraphs ch and ll were traditionally considered individual letters with their own name ( che, elle ) and place in the alphabet ( after c and l, respectively ), but in order to facilitate international compatibility the Royal Spanish Academy decided to cease this practice in 1994 and all digraphs are now collated as combinations of two separate characters.

The better-known " square script " Hebrew alphabet traditionally used by Jews is a stylized version of the Aramaic alphabet which they adopted from the Persian Empire ( which in turn was adopted from the Arameans ).

Smarties in the UK were traditionally sold in cylindrical cardboard tubes, capped with a colourful plastic lid usually having a letter of the alphabet on it.

The number of words can vary depending upon aspects such as whether the Hebrew alphabet in Psalm 119, the superscriptions listed in some of the Psalms, and the subscripts traditionally found at the end of the Pauline epistles, are included.

This makes Junicode useful for a wide range of languages that utilize the Latin alphabet, including scholarly texts and publications that require special diacritics not traditionally found in conventional fonts.

Blaj was the first place to have Romanian written with Latin alphabet instead of Cyrillic in which it had traditionally been written.

Shimaore was traditionally written with an informal French-based Latin alphabet.

In Russian typography, the capital form of izhitsa has traditionally been used instead of the Roman numeral V, the tradition survived several decades longer than izhitsa as a letter of the alphabet.

Although traditionally boys start learning the Hebrew alphabet the day they turned three, boys typically entered cheder school around the age of 5.

Like most Jewish languages, traditionally, Bukhori uses the Hebrew alphabet.

Thanks to the Russian alphabet, it was first after Greece ( which has traditionally, since 1928, led the Parade of Nations, as the birthplace of the Olympics ) in the Parade of Nations.

In Saraiki, it is traditionally pronounced with dāl ( د ) rather than ḍāl ( ڈ ) ( see Urdu alphabet for details ).