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Modern English is written with a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 letters, with each having both uppercase and lowercase forms. 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 ...
The Tartessian or Southwestern script is typologically intermediate between a pure alphabet and the Paleohispanic full semi-syllabaries. Although the letter used to write a stop consonant was determined by the following vowel, as in a full semi-syllabary, the following vowel was also written, as in an alphabet. Some scholars treat Tartessian as ...
A totem ambigram is an ambigram whose letters are stacked like a totem, most often offering a vertical axis mirror symmetry. This type helps when several letters fit together, but hardly the whole word. For example, in the Maria monogram , the letters M, A and I are individually symmetrical, and the pairing R/A is almost naturally mirroring ...
Cuneiform is the earliest known writing system [5] [6] and was originally developed to write the Sumerian language of southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). Over the course of its history, cuneiform was adapted to write a number of languages in addition to Sumerian.
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.
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 ).
The Greek alphabet, in Euboean form, was carried over by Greek colonists to the Italian peninsula c. 800–600 BCE giving rise to many different alphabets used to write the Italic languages, like the Etruscan alphabet. [33] One of these became the Latin alphabet, which spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their republic.
A digraphic Latin/Cyrillic street sign in Gaboš, Croatia. In sociolinguistics, digraphia refers to the use of more than one writing system for the same language. [1] Synchronic digraphia is the coexistence of two or more writing systems for the same language, while diachronic digraphia or sequential digraphia is the replacement of one writing system by another for a particular language.