Questions tagged [alphabets]
A set of letters that represent phonemes, used to write one or more languages.
97 questions
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The connection between the English I and Arabic ع
I'm asking this question as a bilingual Arabic/English speaker but a complete linguistics layman. But I noticed that the letters "I" in English and "ع" in Arabic are both ...
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Why do we need both lowercase letters and uppercase letters?
So we all know that in English (and many other languages such as Spanish), lowercase letters are used more often than uppercase letters which are restricted to proper names, first letters of first ...
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Is there a language in which "K" comes first in alphabet?
Our instructor of a group project I was a part of has asked us to arrange the authors' names in alphabetical order. Since he hasn't specified which alphabetical order to use, and my name happens to ...
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How many dimensions do phonemes have?
I was wondering if there was a better or alternative ordering for the letters of the English alphabet, than the standard “a b c d e …”.
This led me to wonder by what parameters they would be ordered.
...
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How would vowel-heavy names be written in a pure abjad?
There are a lot of names like "Ai", "Kai", "Anita", or "Amari" that would be quite tricky to infer based on the consonants. Disregarding abjads with matres ...
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Did the Phoenician letter 𐤄 have any meaning on its own or in earlier writing systems?
Obviously Phoenician was an alphabetical writing system, where characters combine phonetically to build words. But Wikipedia claims (implies?) both that the Phoenician letter "he" evolved ...
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Are there clear exceptions to the alleged universality of "alphabet" as a term used in all languages
In the book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick there is a bold claim:
In all the languages of earth there is only one word for alphabet (alfabet, alfabeto, алфавит, ...
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The vowel used when pronouncing a consonant/reciting the alphabet
While this answer talks about how the names of letters are pronounced, my question is how we came up with this way of naming consonants. Is there an official term for the standard vowels used in the ...
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Is "alpha-" and "-bet", in the word "alphabet", related to the first two letters "A" (alpha) and "B" (beta)? [closed]
I was reading the book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick.
Towards the beginning (third paragraph) of chapter three, titled Two Wordbooks, the author writes -
The alphabet, ...
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What subdiscipline of linguistics studies the relationship between writing and pronunciation?
Most European languages use some variation of the Latin alphabet. However, while most of them seem to broadly agree on what sounds most of the individual letters represent (with some minor differences,...
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Why isn't there a letter for /b/ sound in Greek alphabet while they have the sound?
In Greek the letter B sounds /v/; for example we have Vanadium which is Βανάδιο in Greek which in turn is transliterated as Vanάdio in English.
But what about when we have a /b/ sound? For example, we ...
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Why did the consonant clusters /ks/ and /ps/ merit their own designated letters in Ancient Greek?
Ancient Greek had many consonant clusters, like /pn/ in pneuma, /bd/ in bdellion, and /pt/ in pteron. But for some reason, /ks/ (ξ) and /ps/ (ψ) received special real estate in the 24-letter Greek ...
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How many people of the world does the "switch language" icon cover?
I've noticed this icon popping up in a few places, to mean "languages":
I'm curious how many languages of the world this icon covers. Of course it would cover English, and indeed any ...
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There are roughly 46 speech sounds in the English language, however only 26 letters. Why?
There are roughly 44-46 speech sounds in the English language. However, we just have 26 letters which denote some of those 44-46 sounds. Why is that? Why we don't represent each of those 44-46 sounds ...
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What letters are used in different European languages for naming things by letters? [closed]
What letters are used in different European languages for naming things by letters? In Finnish, all 29 letters (also Å, Ä, Ö) are used in naming. But in Czech, letters with diacritics (e.g. Á, Š, Ů) ...
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Are there any more optimal tactile alphabets than Braille?
Sorry if this is the wrong stackexchange to ask this.
Consider how QWERTY was the first keyboard layout, but isn't nearly optimal (e.g. Dvorak is much better and used overwhelmingly by top speed-...
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What is the linguistical terminology for (and if) letters of a given alphabet have(ing) their inherent meaning?
Letters or phonemes.
Letters, like runes according to this article:
https://sonsofvikings.com/apps/fireamp/blogs/history/viking-runes-guide-runic-alphabet-meanings-nordic-celtic-letters
At least that'...
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Why does lower case "a" look so different from capital "A"?
Despite my best efforts, I can not find the answer specifically for "a" online. For the rest of the letters of the Latin alphabet, I can see the connection between the different forms (...
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Why do the Hebrew characters look so different from Greek, Latin, even Phoenician?
Why do the Hebrew characters look so different?
See, for example: chart of letters
If I look at Greek, Phoenician, etc. I can still see similarities (maybe with rotations or flipping of characters) ...
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Why isn’t the letter “G” immediately after “C” in the alphabet?
I have absolutely no formal linguistics background, but I enjoy learning about it a lot. I’ve seen multiple times before how the alphabet mutated from Roman times to our own:
The letter “J” was a ...
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What's the name of the principle that derives the sound of a symbol from the name of the thing that that the symbol depicts?
What do we call it when the Initial sound of a word, eg. beth vel sim. "house", is assigned to a symbol of that word, eg. the floorplan of a house(?), to use the sign as the unique ...
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Where did the Greek consonant cluster "ps" come from
Where did the Greek consonant cluster "ps" come from? I tried finding resources to track down this fun-sounding consonant cluster but came with no information. I was thinking about a voicing ...
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Is the Latin alphabet the most widely known in the world?
Note: By "Latin alphabet," I'm referring to the 26 letters (A-Z) that English uses. Sorry if this is the wrong term (I don't want to call it the "English alphabet" since it's used ...
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Is there a collective term for the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabets?
I was just wondering if such a term exists, since they are very similar to each other, and all of them derive from the Greek alphabet, so I thought perhaps there might be a collective term for the ...
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Why are E and É both part of the Hungarian and Icelandic alphabets but the English and French alphabets only have E?
The letters "E" and "É" occur in English, French, Hungarian, Icelandic, and other languages. However, the Hungarian and Icelandic alphabets include both "E" and "É&...
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Middle English: y or ȝ
Lately I've been looking up the Middle English of many Modern English words via Wiktionary. It was my understanding that by this point in the history of English ȝ was in heavy use. Yet these ...
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Were there pictographic glyph variants of letters, like multiocular O (ꙮ) for the word 'many-eyed' etc. in Cyrillic, in any other alphabets?
Were there pictographic glyphs of letters that were used in some special words in any other alphabets and languages?
Like multiocular O (ꙮ) in word 'many-eyed', double monocular O (Ꙭ) for the plural ...
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Why are J, U, W considered part of the basic Latin Alphabet?
J, U, W are included in ISO basic Latin alphabet which consists of 26 letters. However,
The classic Latin has only 23 letters, and J was only used as a variant of I as σ do to ς.
J, U were not ...
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Evolution of the latin capital and small letters [closed]
So, let us divide the letters into four categories.
Ii Kk Ll Vv Ww Xx Zz are all made of straight lines.
Cc Oo Ss are all made of curves.
Bb Dd Gg Jj Pp Qq Rr Uu are made of both straight lines and ...
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Generic name for Hànzì/Kanji/Hanja/Chữ nôm/Sawndip?
So I was thinking about how to talk about these characters in a culturally-neutral way. Chinese seems to be used, but it implies a particular way of writing characters (not to mention it makes it ...
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What part of speech is a letter?
I wanted to know what part of speech a letter might be or I wanted to see if I understand letters. Do people ask this question in this place? Or am I in the place where people would ask this?
I asked ...
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Evolution of Greek San from Phoenician Tṣadē
It is generally agreed that the Greek letter San developed from the Phoenician Tṣadē, but I'm not sure I see the graphical similarity. The Phoenician form does bear some resemblance to the Greek form ...
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Why did Χ and Ψ have such different sounds in early Eastern and Western Greek?
Why did Χ and Ψ have such different sounds in early Eastern and Western Greek? Which sounds are older? If the Western, why were both Ξ and Χ created to denote [ks] (note that they both appear in the ...
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Is there a reconstruction of the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet that's consistent with meaningful translations of all known Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions?
Including those from Wadi el-Ḥol, Serabit el-Khadim, Lahun, and Bir en-Naṣb. I know that we can't yet prove that any reconstruction is accurate, but is there one that is at least consistent with ...
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Will we ever decipher the Wadi el-Ḥol and Serabit el-Khadim inscriptions? [closed]
In his book Letter perfect: the marvelous history of our alphabet from A to Z, David Sacks says that we'll probably never decipher the Wadi el-Ḥol inscriptions (and he was probably implying the same ...
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Where does the letter <j> come from to some Cyrillic alphabets?
Most South-West languages of Slavic language family, like Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, include the Latin letter in their alphabets, which has not been a part of Cyrillic writing system they're ...
user24306
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Why are the names of the letters different across languages using the Latin script?
I have noticed that the Spanish alphabet has the 26 letters + the consonant ñ, which is pronounced like the "ny" in "canyón". But out of the remaining 26 letters, I have noticed ...
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Why do we make a distinction between letters and punctuation marks?
In English, for example, the word "don't" is made up of 4 letters ("d", "o", "n" and "t"), and one punctuation mark ("'").
However, there seems to me to be no reason for this distinction. Without any ...
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Extract strings of a certain language from a dataframe in python
I have a pandas DataFrame that contains a column with sentences from different languages (6 languages). The DataFrame also contains a column which states which language the corresponding sentence ...
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Why does the NATO Spelling alphabet contain words with more than two syllables
I always wondered why the NATO Spelling Alphabet has words with three syllables in it. I know it was extensively researched, so there must be a reason, but it seems odd to me.
One syllable seems ...
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(Why) did the Thai script convert Sanskrit द /d/ to /th/ and then introduce its own character for /d/?
The first section of the Thai alphabet/abugida seems to follow Sanskrit pretty closely, with just a couple of additions.
I believe that Sanskrit had the consonant /d/, which is represented by द in ...
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Where do I get a list of all/many alphabets as strings or JSON or CSV data?
I have this manually typed in for "English:
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
I'm trying to find a nice, authoritative source for "all" or "many" other alphabets. For example, ...
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Estimating the number of words in a language before invention of alphabet
Here is my question from the title:
Given a (natural) language with its writing system based on an
alphabet, are there any theories giving (quantitative) estimates on
the number of words the ...
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Do multi-dimensional writing systems exist?
I am not sure whether linguistics board is the right place to ask this question, but since I couldn't find any better place here is the question:
Most (all?) of the writing systems are using the ...
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Does an alphabet with the uniform letter frequency distribution exist?
A language employs some kind of alphabet for writing. One could naïvely expect that each letter bears the same amount of entropy. But in reality that is not the case. For example in English each ...
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Is left-to-right scripting better than right-to-left?
I'm Iranian and here, Arabic script is what is used. many litterateurs believe that this script is not good for the Persian language and many of them think that it should be changed.
one of the ...
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Why is Greek alphabet left-to-right?
The Greek alphabet and all of its child systems such as Roman, Cyrillic, and Gothic are conventionally left-to-right writting systems. But why is that, considering it comes from the Phoenician ...
user22430
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Density of information/semantic of Chinese and Korean language versus european languages
Some years ago I had read an interesting article about how much information chinese people could put in one tweet of 140 characters. But I cannot find again this article.
I'm interested in having ...
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Arabic word for door from root d-l-t or d-l-th
I know that the Hebrew letter 'daleth' originates from the word for 'door', indeed the Modern Hebrew word for door is 'dalet'.
Is there an Arabic word for door from this same root - d-l-t or d-l-th? ...
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Alphabet size affects complexity of written ideas?
Do relatively simple alphabets (Rotokas, Hawaiian) limit the complexity of written ideas? Example: could Rotokas be used to write a technical manual for the space shuttle?
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