View source for Alphabets

{{LangPsy}}

[[Image:Caslon-schriftmusterblatt.jpeg|thumb|right|320px|''A Specimen'' of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 ''Cyclopaedia''.]]

An alphabet can be thought of as one of two types. The world's most popular type arbitarily assigns symbols to phonemes or group of phonemes. The second type, also called ezuthu (e.g. Tamil), assigns symbols to each physical place of articulation and scales these symbols into related groups of phonemes.  An '''alphabet''' is a complete standardized set of ''[[letter (alphabet)|letters]]'' &mdash; basic written symbols &mdash; each of which roughly represents a [[phoneme]] of a [[spoken language]], either as it exists now or as it may have been in the past. There are other [[writing system|systems of writing]] such as logosyllabic writing, in which each symbol represents a [[morpheme]], or word or syllable or places the word within a category, and [[syllabary|syllabaries]], in which each symbol represents a [[syllable]].

The [[etymology]] of the word "alphabet" itself came to Middle English from the Late Latin '''Alphabetum''' which in turn originates from the Ancient Greek '''Alphabetos''', from ''alpha'' and ''beta,'' the first two letters of the [[Greek alphabet]].<ref>[http://www.britannica.com/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=alphabet&query=alphabet/ Encyclopædia Britannica Online - Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary]</ref> There are dozens of alphabets in use today.  Most of them are '[[linear writing|linear]]', which means that they are made up of lines.  Notable [[non-linear writing|exceptions]] are [[Braille]], [[Fingerspelling|manual alphabet]]s, and [[Morse code]].

==Linguistic definition and context==
{{WStypes}}
The term '''alphabet''' refers to a writing system that has [[grapheme]]s for representing both consonant and vowel sounds, even though there may not be a complete one-to-one correspondence between symbol and sound.

A [[grapheme]] is an abstract entity which may be physically represented by different styles of [[glyph]]s.  There are many written entities which do not form part of the alphabet, including [[numeral]]s, [[mathematical symbol]]s, and [[punctuation]]. Some human languages are commonly written by using a combination of [[logograms]] (which represent [[morphemes]] or [[word]]s) and [[syllabograms]] instead of an alphabet. [[Egyptian hieroglyph]]s and [[Chinese character]]s are two of the best-known writing systems with predominantly non-alphabetic representations.

Non-written languages may also be represented alphabetically. For example, linguists researching a non-written language (such as some of the indigenous Amerindian languages) will use the International Phonetic Alphabet to enable them to write down the sounds they hear.

Most, if not all, linguistic writing systems have some means for phonetic approximation of foreign words, usually using the native character set.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Ohso |first=Mieko | title=A Phonological Study of Some English Loan Words in Japanese. Working Papers in Linguistics, No. 14, Studies in Phonology and Methodology  | journal=Studies in Phonology and Methodology | date=April 1973 | issue=14 | pages= 27 pages  | accessdate=2006-11-07 | language=English | id=ERIC # ED122593 }}</ref>

==History==
{{main|History of the alphabet}}
===Middle Eastern Scripts===
[[Image:Ba`alat.png|thumb|left|200px|A specimen of Proto-Sinaitic script, one of the earliest (if not the very first) phonemic scripts]]
The history of the alphabet starts in [[ancient Egypt]]. By [[2700 BC|2700 <small>BCE</small>]] Egyptian writing had a set of some [[Egyptian uniliteral signs|22 hieroglyphs]] to represent syllables that begin with a single [[consonant]] of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for [[logogram]]s, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names.<ref>Daniels and Bright (1996), pp. 74-75.</ref>

However, although seemingly alphabetic in nature, the original Egyptian uniliterals were not a system and were never used by themselves to encode Egyptian speech.<ref>Daniels and Bright (1996), pp. 74.</ref> In the [[Middle Bronze Age]] an apparently "alphabetic" system known as the [[Middle Bronze Age alphabets#The Proto-Sinaitic script|Proto-Sinaitic script]] is thought by some to have been developed in central [[Egypt]] around 1700 BCE for or by [[Semitic]] workers, but only one of these early writings has been deciphered and their exact nature remains open to interpretation.<ref name="Coulmas 140">Coulmas (1989), p. 140.</ref> Based on letter appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs.<ref name="Coulmas 140" />

This script eventually developed into the [[Proto-Canaanite alphabet]], which in turn was refined into the [[Phoenician alphabet]].<ref>Daniels and Bright (1996), pp. 92-94.</ref> Note that the scripts mentioned above are not considered proper alphabets, as they all lack characters representing vowels. These early vowelless alphabets are called [[abjad]]s, and still exist in scripts such as the [[Arabic alphabet|Arabic]] and [[Hebrew alphabet|Hebrew]] scripts.

Phoenician was the first major phonemic script.<ref name="Daniels 9496">Daniels and Bright (1996), pp. 94-96.</ref><ref>Coulmas (1989), p. 141.</ref> In contrast to two other widely used writing systems at the time, [[Cuneiform]] and [[Egyptian hieroglyphs]], each of which contained thousands of different characters, it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for common traders to learn. Another advantage to Phoenician was that it could be used to write down many different languages, since it recorded words phonemically.

The script was spread by the Phoenicians, whose [[Thalassocracy]] allowed the script to be spread across the Mediterranean.<ref name="Daniels 9496" /> In Greece, the script was modified to add the vowels, giving rise to the first true alphabet. The Greeks took letters which did not represent sounds that existed in Greek, and changed them to represent the vowels. This marks the creation of a "true" alphabet, with the presence of both vowels and consonants as explicit symbols in a single script. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, a situation which caused so many different alphabets to evolve from it.

===European alphabets===
[[Image:ZographensisColour.jpg|thumb|[[Codex Zographensis]] in the Glagolitic alphabet from Medieval [[Bulgaria]].]]
The [[Cumae alphabet|Cumae form]] was carried over to the Italian peninsula, where it gave way to a variety of alphabets used to inscribe the [[Italic languages]]. One of these became the [[Latin alphabet]], which was spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their empire. Even after the fall of the Roman state, the alphabet survived in intellectual and religious works. It eventually became used for the descendant languages of Latin (the [[Romance languages]]), and then for the other languages of Europe.

Another notable script is [[Elder Futhark]], and is believed to have evolved out of one of the [[Old Italic alphabet]]s. Elder Futhark gave rise to a variety of alphabets known collectively as the [[Runic alphabet]]s. The Runic alphabets were used for Germanic languages from 100 AD to the late middle ages. Its usage was mostly restricted to engravings on stone and jewelry, although inscriptions have also been found on bone and wood. 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]] was the script of the liturgical language [[Old Church Slavonic]], and became the basis of the [[Cyrillic alphabet]]. The Cyrillic alphabet is one of the most widely used modern alphabets, and is notable for its use in Slavic languages and languages formerly part of the Soviet Union, such as the [[Bulgarian alphabet|Bulgarian]] and [[Russian alphabet]]s. 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]].

===Asian alphabets===

Beyond the logographic [[Chinese writing]], many phonetic scripts are in existence in Asia. The [[Arabic alphabet]], [[Hebrew alphabet]], [[Syriac alphabet]], and other [[abjad]]s of the Middle East are developments of the [[Aramaic alphabet]], but because these writing systems are largely [[consonant]]-based they are often not considered true alphabets.

Most alphabetic scripts of India and Eastern Asia are descended from the [[Brahmi script]], which is often believed to be a descendent of Aramaic, but this link is controversial. These scripts are [[abugida]]s, that is, they write syllables instead of individual sounds, so their status as alphabets is disputed.

[[Image:Zhuyin on cell phone detail.jpg|200px|thumb|left|Zhuyin on a cell phone]]
In Korea, the [[Hangeul]] alphabet was created, although it may also have been derived from the Mongolian [[Phagspa script]], which in turn was derived from the Brahmi script. Hangeul is a unique alphabet in a variety of ways: many of the letters are designed off of a sound's place of articulation, it was consciously designed by the government at the time, and it situates individual letters into syllable clusters with equal dimensions as [[Chinese characters]] to allow for mixed script writing. 

[[Zhuyin]] (sometimes called ''Bopomofo'') is an alphabet used to phonetically transcribe [[Mandarin (linguistics)|Mandarin Chinese]] in Mainland China and Taiwan, though its use in Mainland China today is limited. It developed out of a form of Chinese shorthand based on Chinese characters in the early 1900s. While Zhuyin is not used as a mainstream writing system, it is still often used in ways similar to a [[romanization]] system&mdash;that is, for aiding in pronunciation and as an input method for Chinese characters on computers and cell phones.

European alphabets, especially Latin and Cyrillic, have been adapted for many languages of Asia. Arabic is also widely used, sometimes as an abjad (as with [[Urdu alphabet|Urdu]] and [[Persian alphabet|Persian]]) and sometimes as a complete alphabet (as with [[Kurdish alphabet|Kurdish]] and [[Uyghur alphabet|Uyghur]]).

==Types==
[[Image:Writing systems worldwide.png|500px|thumb|'''Alphabets:'''
<span style="background-color:#AAAAAA;color:black;">&nbsp;Latin&nbsp;</span>, 
<span style="background-color:#008080;color:white;">&nbsp;Cyrillic&nbsp;</span>, 
<span style="background-color:cyan;color:black;">&nbsp;Latin and Cyrillic&nbsp;</span>, 
<span style="background-color:blue;color:white;">&nbsp;Greek&nbsp;</span>, 
<span style="background-color:darkblue;color:white;">&nbsp;Georgian or Armenian&nbsp;</span> 
<br>
'''Abjads:''' 
<span style="background-color:green;color:white;">&nbsp;Arabic&nbsp;</span>, 
<span style="background-color:#66FF00;color:black;">&nbsp;Arabic and Latin&nbsp;</span>, 
<span style="background-color:#00ff7f;color:black;">&nbsp;Hebrew and Arabic&nbsp;</span>
<br>
'''Abugidas:'''
<span style="background-color:#FFC000;color:black;">&nbsp;North Indic&nbsp;</span>, 
<span style="background-color:orange;color:black;">&nbsp;South Indic&nbsp;</span>, 
<span style="background-color:#800000;color:white;">&nbsp;Ethiopic&nbsp;</span>, 
<span style="background-color:olive;color:white;">&nbsp;Thaana&nbsp;</span>
<span style="background-color:#FFFF80;color:black;">&nbsp;Canadian Syllabic&nbsp;</span>, 
<br>
'''Logographic+syllabic:'''
<span style="background-color:red;color:white;">&nbsp;Pure logographic&nbsp;</span>, 
<span style="background-color:#DC143C;color:white;">&nbsp;Mixed logographic and syllabaries&nbsp;</span>, 
<span style="background-color:#FF00FF;color:black;">&nbsp;Featural-alphabetic syllabary + limited logographic&nbsp;</span>
<span style="background-color:#800080;color:white;">&nbsp;Featural-alphabetic syllabary&nbsp;</span> ]]
{{alphabet}}

The term "alphabet" is used by [[Linguistics|linguists]] and [[paleographer]]s in both a wide and narrow sense. In the wider sense, an alphabet is a script that is ''segmental'' on the [[phoneme]] level, that is, that 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, [[abjad]]s and [[abugida]]s. 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 [[diacritic]]s 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 [[Middle Bronze Age alphabets|Wadi el-Hol script]], believed to be an [[abjad]], which through its successor [[Phoenician alphabet|Phoenician]] is the ancestor of modern alphabets, including [[Arabic alphabet|Arabic]], [[Greek alphabet|Greek]], [[Latin alphabet|Latin]] (via the [[Old Italic alphabet]]), [[Cyrillic alphabet|Cyrillic]] (via the Greek alphabet) and [[Hebrew alphabet|Hebrew]] (via Aramaic).

Examples of present-day abjads are the [[Arabic script|Arabic]] and [[Hebrew script]]s; true alphabets include [[Latin alphabet|Latin]], [[Cyrillic]], and Korean [[Hangul]]; and abugidas are used to write [[tigrinya language|Tigrinya]] [[Amharic language|Amharic]], [[Hindi language|Hindi]], and [[Thai language|Thai]]. The [[Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics]] are also an abugida rather than a syllabary as their name would imply, since each glyph stands for a consonant which is modified by rotation to represent the following vowel. (In a true syllabary, each consonant-vowel combination would be represented by a separate glyph.)

The boundaries between the three types of segmental scripts are not always clear-cut. For example, Iraqi [[Kurdish language|Kurdish]] is written in the [[Arabic script]], which is normally an abjad. However, in Kurdish, writing the vowels is mandatory, and full letters are used, so the script is a true alphabet. Other languages may use a Semitic abjad with mandatory vowel diacritics, effectively making them abugidas. On the other hand, the [[Phagspa script]] of the [[Mongol Empire]] was based closely on the [[Tibetan script|Tibetan abugida]], but all vowel marks were written after the preceding consonant rather than as diacritic marks. Although short ''a'' was not written, as in the Indic abugidas, one could argue that the linear arrangement made this a true alphabet. Conversely, the vowel marks of the [[Ge'ez alphabet|Tigrinya abugida]] and the [[Ge'ez alphabet|Amharic abugida]] (ironically, the original source of the term "abugida") have been so completely assimilated into their consonants that the modifications are no longer systematic and have to be learned as a [[syllabary]] rather than as a segmental script. Even more extreme, the Pahlavi abjad eventually became [[logogram|logographic]]. (See below.)

Thus the primary [[Categorisation|classification]] of alphabets reflects how they treat vowels. For [[Tone (linguistics)|tonal languages]], further classification can be based on their treatment of tone, though names do not yet exist to distinguish the various types. Some alphabets disregard tone entirely, especially when it does not carry a heavy functional load, as in [[Somali language|Somali]] and many other languages of Africa and the Americas. Such scripts are to tone what abjads are to vowels. Most commonly, tones are indicated with diacritics, the way vowels are treated in abugidas. This is the case for [[Vietnamese alphabet|Vietnamese]] (a true alphabet) and [[Thai alphabet|Thai]] (an abugida). In Thai, tone is determined primarily by the choice of consonant, with diacritics for disambiguation. In the [[Sam Pollard|Pollard script]], an abugida, vowels are indicated by diacritics, but the placement of the diacritic relative to the consonant is modified to indicate the tone.  More rarely, a script may have separate letters for tones, as is the case for [[Hmong pronunciation|Hmong]] and [[Zhuang language|Zhuang]]. For most of these scripts, regardless of whether letters or diacritics are used, the most common tone is not marked, just as the most common vowel is not marked in Indic abugidas.

The number of different 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 language|Hawaiian]] alphabet is sometimes claimed to be as small, but it actually consists of 18 letters, including the [[Okina|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 alphabet|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 [[papyrus|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 &ndash; that is, they had become [[logogram]]s as in Egyptian [[Demotic Egyptian|Demotic]].

The largest segmental script is probably an abugida, [[Devanagari]]. 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 largest known abjad is [[Sindhi language|Sindhi]], with 51 letters. The largest alphabets in the narrow sense include [[Kabardian language|Kabardian]] and [[Abkhaz language|Abkhaz]] (for [[Cyrillic]]), with 58 and 56 letters, respectively, and [[Slovak language|Slovak]] (for the [[Latin alphabet]]), with 46. However, these scripts either count [[digraph (orthography)|di- and tri-graphs]] as separate letters, as Spanish did with ''ch'' and ''ll'' up to a recent time, or uses [[diacritic]]s like Slovak ''č''. The largest true alphabet where each letter is graphically independent is probably [[Georgian alphabet|Georgian]], with 41 letters.

Syllabaries typically contain 50 to 400 glyphs (though the [[Múra-Pirahã]] language of [[Brazil]] would require only 24 if it did not denote tone, and Rotokas would require only 30), and the glyphs of logographic systems typically number from the many hundreds into the thousands. Thus a simple count of the number of distinct symbols is an important clue to the nature of an unknown script.

It is not always clear what constitutes a distinct alphabet. [[French language|French]] uses the same basic alphabet as English, but many of the letters can carry additional marks, such as é, à, and ô. In French, these combinations are not considered to be additional letters.  However, in [[Icelandic language|Icelandic]], the accented letters such as á, í, and ö are considered to be distinct letters of the alphabet. In Spanish, ñ is considered a separate letter, but accented vowels such as á and é are not. Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet are augmented with [[ligature (typography)|ligatures]], such as [[æ]] in [[Old English language|Old English]] and [[Ou (letter)|Ȣ]] in [[Algonquian language|Algonquian]]; by borrowings from other alphabets, such as the [[thorn (letter)|thorn]] þ in [[Old English language|Old English]] and [[Icelandic language|Icelandic]], which came from the [[Runic alphabet|Futhark]] runes; and by modifying existing letters, such as the [[Eth (letter)|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, or [[Italian language|Italian]], which only uses the letters ''j, k, x, y'' and ''w'' in foreign words.

==Spelling==
{{Unreferenced|date=May 2007}}
{{details|Spelling}}

Each language may establish certain general rules that govern the association between letters and phonemes, but, depending on the language, these rules may or may not be consistently followed. In a perfectly [[phonology|phonological]] alphabet, the phonemes and letters would correspond perfectly in two directions: a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a speaker could predict the pronunciation of a word given its spelling.  However, languages often evolve independently of their writing systems, 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.

Languages may fail to achieve a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds in any of several ways:

* A language may represent a given phoneme with a combination of letters rather than just a single letter. Two-letter combinations are called [[digraph (orthography)|digraph]]s and three-letter groups are called [[trigraph (orthography)|trigraph]]s. [[German language|German]] uses the tetragraphs (four letters) "tsch" for the phoneme [tʃ] and "dsch" for [dʒ], although the latter is rare ([[International Phonetic Alphabet|IPA]]). [[Kabardian language|Kabardian]] also uses a tetragraph for one of its phonemes.
* A language may represent the same phoneme with two different letters or combinations of letters.
* A language may spell some words with unpronounced letters that exist for historical or other reasons.
* Pronunciation of individual words may change according to the presence of surrounding words in a sentence ([[sandhi]]).
* Different dialects of a language may use different phonemes for the same word.
* A language may use different sets of symbols or different rules for distinct sets of vocabulary items, such as the Japanese [[hiragana]] and [[katakana]] syllabaries, or the various rules in English for spelling words from Latin and Greek, or the original [[Germanic languages|Germanic]] vocabulary.

National languages generally address the problem of dialects by simply associating the alphabet with the national standard.  However, with an international language with wide variations in its dialects, such as [[English language|English]], it would be impossible to represent the language in all its variations with a single phonetic alphabet.

Some national languages like [[Finnish language|Finnish]] have a very regular spelling system with a nearly one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes.  The [[Italian language|Italian]] verb corresponding to 'spell', ''compitare'', is unknown to many Italians because the act of spelling itself is almost never needed: almost all the phonemes of Standard Italian are represented in only one way. However, pronunciation cannot always be predicted from spelling because certain letters are pronounced in more than one way. In standard Spanish, it is possible to tell the pronunciation of a word from its spelling, but not vice versa; this is because certain phonemes can be represented in more than one way, but a given letter is consistently pronounced. [[French language|French]], with its [[silent letter]]s and its heavy use of [[nasal vowel]]s and [[elision]], may seem to lack much correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, but its rules on pronunciation are actually consistent and predictable with a fair degree of accuracy.

At the other extreme are languages such as English, where the spelling of many words simply has to be memorized as they do not correspond to sounds in a consistent way. Reasons for this include the [[Great Vowel Shift]], which occurred after the orthography was established, and the number of loanwords English has acquired at different times, most of which have retained their original spelling. However, even English has general rules that predict pronunciation from spelling, and these rules are successful most of the time.

Sometimes, countries have the written language undergo a [[spelling reform]] in order to realign the writing with the contemporary spoken language. These can range from simple spelling changes and word forms to switching the entire writing system itself, as when [[Turkey]] switched from the Arabic alphabet to the Roman alphabet.

The sounds of speech of all languages of the world can be written by a rather small universal phonetic alphabet. The standard for this is the [[International Phonetic Alphabet]].

-----

==See also==

* [[Abecedarium]]
* [[Akshara]]
* [[Alphabet Effect]]
* [[Alphabetic principle]]
* [[Alphabetical order]]
* [[Collation]]
* [[Constructed script|Artificial script]]s
* [[Character set]]
* [[Initial teaching alphabet]]
* [[Letters (alphabet)]]
* [[Lipogram]]
* [[List of alphabets]]
* [[Orthography]]

==Notes==
<references/>

==Footnotes==
<div class="references-small">
<!--See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Footnotes for an explanation of how to generate footnotes using the <ref(erences/)> tags-->
<references/>
</div>

==Bibliography==
* {{cite book | author=Daniels, Peter T.; Bright, William | title=The World's Writing Systems | publisher=Oxford University Press | year=1996 | id=ISBN 0-19-507993-0 }} &mdash; (Overview of modern and some ancient  writing systems).
* {{cite book | author=Driver, G.R. | title=Semitic Writing (Schweich Lectures on Biblical Archaeology S.) 3Rev Ed | publisher=Oxford University Press | year=1976 | id=ISBN 0-19-725917-0 }}
* {{cite book | author=Hoffman, Joel M. | title=In the Beginning:  A Short History of the Hebrew Language | url = http://www.newjewishbooks.org/ITB/toc.html | publisher=NYU Press | year=2004 | id=ISBN 0-8147-3654-8 }} &mdash; (Chapter 3 traces and summarizes the invention of alphabetic writing).
* {{cite book | author=Logan, Robert K. | title=The Alphabet Effect: A Media Ecology Understanding of the Making of Western Civilization | publisher=Hampton Press | year=2004 | id=ISBN 1-57-273523-6 }} 
* McLuhan, Marshall; Logan, Robert K. (1977). Alphabet, Mother of Invention. Etcetera. Vol. 34, pp. 373-383. 
* {{cite book | author=Ouaknin, Marc-Alain; Bacon, Josephine | title=Mysteries of the Alphabet: The Origins of Writing | publisher=Abbeville Press | year=1999 | id=ISBN 0-7892-0521-1 }}
* {{cite book | author=Sacks, David | title=Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet from A to Z | publisher=Broadway Books | year=2004 | id=ISBN 0-7679-1173-3}}
* {{cite book | author=Saggs, H.W.F | title=Civilization Before Greece and Rome | publisher=Yale University Press | year=1991 | id=ISBN 0-300-05031-3}} &mdash; (Chapter 4 traces the invention of writing).
* {{cite book | author=Coulmas, Florian | title=The Writing Systems of the World | publisher=Blackwell Publishers Ltd. | year=1989 | id=ISBN 0-631-18028-1 }}




==References & Bibliography== 
<References/>
==Key texts==          
===Books===

===Papers===

==Additional material==
===Books===

===Papers===
*[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?sourceid=mozclient&num=50&scoring=d&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=Alphabets Google Scholar]

== External links ==
{{wiktionary|alphabet}}
* [http://omniglot.com/writing/alphabetic.htm Alphabetic Writing Systems]
* [[Michael Everson]]'s [http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/index.html Alphabets of Europe]
* The [http://www.unicode.org/cldr/data/diff/by_type/characters.html Unicode Consortium]
* [http://www.wam.umd.edu/~rfradkin/alphapage.html Evolution of alphabets] animation by Prof. Robert Fradkin at the University of Maryland
* [http://www.ancientscripts.com/alphabet.html History of alphabet]
* [http://hebrew4christians.com/Grammar/Unit_One/Aleph-Bet/aleph-bet.html The Hebrew Alphabet]
*[http://www.asl.ms/ American Sign Language alphabet] A free online tool to help you learn fingerspelling (dactylology). Also see: [http://asl.gs/ ASL Slider]


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[[sl:Abeceda]]
[[sr:Алфабет]]
[[su:Alpabét]]
[[fi:Aakkoset]]
[[sv:Alfabet]]
[[tl:Alpabeto]]
[[ta:நெடுங்கணக்கு]]
[[kab:Agemmay]]
[[th:อักษร]]
[[tr:Alfabe]]
[[uk:Алфавіт]]
[[ur:حروف تہجی]]
[[wa:Alfabet]]
[[zh:字母系統]]

-->{{enWP|Alphabet}}






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[[Category:Alphabetic writing systems| ]]
[[Category:Documents]]
[[Category:Orthography]]
[[Category:Written language]]