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Some scholars treat Tartessian as a redundant semi-syllabary, others treat it as a redundant alphabet. Other scripts, such as Bopomofo, are semi-syllabic in a different sense: they transcribe half syllables. That is, they have letters for syllable onsets and rimes (kan = "k-an") rather than for consonants and vowels (kan = "k-a-n").
The letters used for non-existent phonemes were dropped. [35] Afterwards, however, the alphabet went through many different changes. The final classical form of Etruscan contained 20 letters. Four of them are vowels— a, e, i, u —six fewer letters than the earlier forms. The script in its classical form was used until the 1st century CE.
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. By the 16th century, the present set of 26 letters had largely stabilised:
The lists and tables below summarize and compare the letter inventories of some of the Latin-script alphabets.In this article, the scope of the word "alphabet" is broadened to include letters with tone marks, and other diacritics used to represent a wide range of orthographic traditions, without regard to whether or how they are sequenced in their alphabet or the table.
Letters are associated with specific names, which may differ between languages and dialects. Z, for example, is usually called zed outside of the United States, where it is named zee. Both ultimately derive from the name of the parent Greek letter zeta Ζ . In alphabets, letters are arranged in alphabetical order, which also may vary by language.
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 and Malay: the term derives from the traditional order of the Arabic alphabet 's letters 'alif , bā' , jīm , dāl , though ...
The Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets, like their Egyptian prototype, represented only consonants, a system called an abjad. The Aramaic alphabet, which evolved from the Phoenician in the 7th century BC, to become the official script of the Achaemenid Empire, appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia:
The names of the letters are typically just the consonant sound plus the inherent vowel অ ô. Since the inherent vowel is assumed and not written, most letters' names look identical to the letter itself (the name of the letter ঘ is itself ghô, not gh).