Questions tagged [alphabets]
A set of letters that represent phonemes, used to write one or more languages.
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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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Is music a language?
I am a musician. I read an article in the NY Times that suggested both words and musical melodies follow Zipf's Law. I had never really thought about it before, but I started wondering do linguists ...
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Is there any point in the current ordering of the letters in the alphabet?
I know we inherit our alphabets (including its ordering) from the Romans, and if we trace it further we will end up with the Phoenicians or some other civilizations in the ancient Middle East. Do (or ...
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Do all non-syllabic, non-logographic scripts have pronounceable names for their letters for spelling?
If you ask an English speaker to spell a word, there are specific, widely-known names for all the letters to fill this need. The same appears to be true for all Phoenician-derived alphabets that I can ...
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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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Seeking details of Lao orthographic reforms
The Lao script was originally used as an abugida (consonants have implied vowels) for the Lao language, just as most of the writing systems related to it.
The Lao script is now used as an alphabet ...
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Thai alphabet romanizations?
Is there any standard system of romanization for the Thai alphabet (including consonants, vowels, tones, numbers, and their combinations), or is any such romanization system quite arbitrary? Can ...
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Was there an evolution of the Greek alphabet in the Middle East?
I recently visited Jordan and noticed that many mosaic are commented
with included text. The text seems mostly ancient Greek alphabet, but
it also contains non Greek characters such as C, obviously
...
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Are there any scripts which have more than 127 characters?
This is not a question about software or tools. Please don't comment if you think that's what I'm asking about.
Parsing Unicode-encoded text is a major pain for a software developer, so I thought ...
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Phonetic english alphabet using diacritical marks?
Does there exist a phonetic english alphabet constructed from standard english letters plus diacritical marks?
For example, fine might be written fínė, such that í = aɪ and a letter with a dot is ...
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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 ...
