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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.
In a writing system, a letter is a grapheme that generally corresponds to a phoneme—the smallest functional unit of speech—though there is rarely total one-to-one correspondence between the two. An alphabet is a writing system that uses letters.
A language may represent a given phoneme by combinations of letters rather than just a single letter. Two-letter combinations are called digraphs, and three-letter groups are called trigraphs. German uses the tetragraphs (four letters) "tsch" for the phoneme German pronunciation: and (in a few borrowed words) "dsch" for [dʒ]. [87]
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.
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 ...
For example, the alphabet of lowercase letters "a" through "z" can be used to form English words like "iceberg" while the alphabet of both upper and lower case letters can also be used to form proper names like "Wikipedia". A common alphabet is {0,1}, the binary alphabet, and a "00101111" is an example of a binary string.
Alphabetic writing systems that use an (in principle) almost perfectly phonemic orthography have a single letter (or digraph or, occasionally, trigraph) for each individual phoneme and a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and the letters that represent them, although predictable allophonic alternation is normally not shown.
English contains, depending on dialect, 24–27 consonant phonemes and 13–20 vowels. However, there are only 26 letters in the modern English alphabet, so there is not a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. Many sounds are spelled using different letters or multiple letters, and for those words whose pronunciation is ...