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These are other alphabets composed of something other than lines on a surface. Braille (Unified) – an embossed alphabet for the visually impaired, used with some extra letters to transcribe the Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabets, as well as Chinese; Braille (Korean) Braille (American) (defunct)
Many pure alphabets were derived from abjads through the addition of dedicated vowel letters, as with the derivation of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician alphabet c. 800 BC. Abjad is the word for "alphabet" in Arabic: the term derives from the traditional order of letters in the Arabic alphabet ('alif, bā', jīm, dāl). [46]
The American manual alphabet, an example of letters in fingerspelling. Before alphabets, phonograms, graphic symbols of sounds, were used.There were three kinds of phonograms: verbal, pictures for entire words, syllabic, which stood for articulations of words, and alphabetic, which represented signs or letters.
In a broader sense, an alphabet is a segmental script at the phoneme level—that is, it 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, abjads, and abugidas. These three differ in how they ...
During the late metal type period, many fonts (particularly in American typefounding) were issued to "common line". [12] This meant that they were made to standardised proportions, so that fonts of different typefaces could be mixed with no difficulty.
Among the types of diacritic used in alphabets based on the Latin script are: accents (so called because the acute, grave, and circumflex were originally used to indicate different types of pitch accents in the polytonic transcription of Greek) ́ – acute (Latin: apex); for example ó ̀ – grave; for example ò ̂ – circumflex; for example ô
Serifs originated from the first official Greek writings on stone and in Latin alphabet with inscriptional lettering—words carved into stone in Roman antiquity.The explanation proposed by Father Edward Catich in his 1968 book The Origin of the Serif is now broadly but not universally accepted: the Roman letter outlines were first painted onto stone, and the stone carvers followed the brush ...
The word alphabet is a compound of alpha and beta, the names of the first two letters in the Greek alphabet. Old English was first written down using the Latin alphabet during the 7th century. During the centuries that followed, various letters entered or fell out of use.