The alphabets of the world

There are over 46 different alphabets used in the world today. An alphabet can be defined as a given set of letters or symbols which are used to write a language. These letters or symbols represent a sound in the spoken language. The letters in an alphabet are normally ordered in a certain way. A true alphabet has vowels as well as consonants. The Greek alphabet is considered to be the first true alphabet. The Greek alphabet was a modification of the Phoenicia alphabet. Other alphabets which do not fall in this category do not have any vowels at all or the vowels are represented in diacritics. Other types of alphabets includes those written using syllabaries. In this case, a letter stands for a group of words, made up of a single consonant and vowel or a single vowel. There are also Ideograms alphabets. In this case each character is used to stand for something eg food. Chinese is an example of a language that uses Ideograms. There are also writing systems which have been made up. These are mostly used in popular media such as in movies or books.

The most popular and widely used alphabets includes the Cyrillic, Greek and Latin alphabets. Latin is the most widely used alphabet. It was derived from the Greek alphabet. Most languages use a modified version of the Latin alphabet, often including diacritical marks. Some languages are normally written using more than one alphabet. The alphabets are normally changed over a period of time, as the language speakers try to find the best alphabet that will communicate various things within the community.

When a language adopts an alphabet, the next thing is to come up with a suitable writing system. The principles and rules of using the alphabet and forming words and sentences are then outlined. The pronunciation of the words generally evolves on its own. Some languages have borrowed writing systems which were not designed for their languages. This means that the way the words are written will differ from how they should be pronounced. This is moreso in international languages like English, as it may not be possible to indicate language variations using just one alphabet.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.