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Letters w and k, are rare and used only in loanwords, most often from Germanic languages (e.g whisky). Ligatures œ and æ are conventional but are rarely used (a few words are well known, e.g. œil , œuf(s) , bœuf(s) , most other are scientific/technical and borrowed from Latin).
Writing systems are used to record human language, and may be classified according to certain common features. The usual name of the script is given first; the name of the languages in which the script is written follows (in brackets), particularly in the case where the language name differs from the script name. Other informative or qualifying ...
Chemical symbol – Abbreviations used in chemistry; Chinese punctuation – Punctuation used with Chinese characters; Currency symbol – Symbol used to represent a monetary currency's name; Diacritic – Modifier mark added to a letter (accent marks etc.) Hebrew punctuation – Punctuation conventions of the Hebrew language over time
For broader coverage of this topic, see Writing. A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a script, as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing was invented during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each writing system invented without prior knowledge of writing gradually evolved from a system of proto-writing that ...
Not all writing systems represent language in this way: a syllabary assigns symbols to spoken syllables, while logographies assign symbols to words, morphemes, or other semantic units. [ 2 ] [ 3 ] The first letters were invented in Ancient Egypt to serve as an aid in writing Egyptian hieroglyphs ; these are referred to as Egyptian uniliteral ...
Languages that treat accented letters as variants of the underlying letter usually alphabetize words with such symbols immediately after similar unmarked words. For instance, in German where two words differ only by an umlaut, the word without it is sorted first in German dictionaries (e.g. schon and then schön , or fallen and then fällen ).
ISO 639 is a standardized nomenclature used to classify languages. [1] Each language is assigned a two-letter (set 1) and three-letter lowercase abbreviation (sets 2–5). [ 2 ] Part 1 of the standard, ISO 639-1 defines the two-letter codes, and Part 3 (2007), ISO 639-3 , defines the three-letter codes, aiming to cover all known natural ...
As of Unicode version 16.0, there are 155,063 characters with code points, covering 168 modern and historical scripts, as well as multiple symbol sets.This article includes the 1,062 characters in the Multilingual European Character Set 2 subset, and some additional related characters.