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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 ...
All languages using the Arabic alphabet are written right-to-left. A number of other languages have been written in the Arabic alphabet in the past, but now are more commonly written in Latin characters; examples include Turkish, Somali and Swahili.
[5] [6] The Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of multiple writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, northern Africa, and South Asia, mainly through Phoenician and the closely related Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, and later Aramaic (derived from the Phoenician alphabet) and the Nabatean—derived from the Aramaic alphabet and developed into ...
The word alphabet is derived from alpha and beta, the names for the first two letters in the Greek alphabet. [42] An abjad is an alphabet whose letters only represent the consonantal sounds of a language.
notes by Johann Flierl, Wilhelm Poland and Georg Schwarz, culminating in Walter Roth's The Structure of the Koko Yimidir Language in 1901. [207] [208] A list of 61 words recorded in 1770 by James Cook and Joseph Banks was the first written record of an Australian language. [209] 1891: Galela: grammatical sketch by M.J. van Baarda [210] 1893: Oromo
Egyptian hieroglyphs, examples of logograms. In a written language, a logogram (from Ancient Greek logos 'word', and gramma 'that which is drawn or written'), also logograph or lexigraph, is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme.
The old Roman letters were retained for formal inscriptions and for emphasis in written documents. The languages that use the Latin alphabet generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and for proper nouns. The rules for capitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for capitalization.
An alphabet is a standard set of letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from another in a given language. [1] Not all writing systems represent language in this way: a syllabary assigns symbols to ...