Questions tagged [alphabets]
A set of letters that represent phonemes, used to write one or more languages.
89
questions
1
vote
1
answer
240
views
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, ...
5
votes
1
answer
251
views
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,...
- 153
16
votes
1
answer
3k
views
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 ...
- 377
18
votes
1
answer
2k
views
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 ...
- 461
1
vote
2
answers
129
views
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 ...
- 121
0
votes
2
answers
222
views
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 ...
- 123
1
vote
0
answers
101
views
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) ...
- 191
2
votes
0
answers
74
views
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-...
- 121
-1
votes
2
answers
76
views
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'...
3
votes
1
answer
437
views
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 (...
1
vote
2
answers
454
views
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) ...
- 31
34
votes
3
answers
7k
views
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 ...
- 443
2
votes
2
answers
229
views
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 ...
- 1,449
4
votes
1
answer
723
views
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 ...
- 75
0
votes
0
answers
82
views
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 ...
- 109
10
votes
4
answers
948
views
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 ...
1
vote
1
answer
186
views
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&...
- 21
0
votes
1
answer
272
views
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 ...
- 113
0
votes
0
answers
196
views
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 ...
- 111
13
votes
2
answers
4k
views
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 ...
- 293
-6
votes
1
answer
193
views
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 ...
4
votes
4
answers
295
views
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 ...
0
votes
1
answer
479
views
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 ...
- 43
0
votes
0
answers
93
views
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 ...
- 109
4
votes
1
answer
180
views
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 ...
- 109
1
vote
0
answers
81
views
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 ...
0
votes
1
answer
155
views
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 ...
4
votes
3
answers
695
views
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
-4
votes
3
answers
342
views
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 ...
4
votes
3
answers
390
views
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 ...
- 149
1
vote
0
answers
111
views
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 ...
- 111
3
votes
1
answer
301
views
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 ...
- 175
7
votes
2
answers
2k
views
(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 ...
- 462
1
vote
1
answer
1k
views
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, ...
- 11
4
votes
1
answer
246
views
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 ...
- 143
11
votes
6
answers
752
views
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 ...
- 111
1
vote
0
answers
256
views
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 ...
- 111
1
vote
3
answers
259
views
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 ...
- 131
11
votes
2
answers
2k
views
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
5
votes
2
answers
1k
views
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 ...
- 652
1
vote
2
answers
241
views
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? ...
- 63
0
votes
3
answers
438
views
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?
- 11
1
vote
1
answer
161
views
How common is it for languages using non-Latin alphabets to borrow English words while keeping both (transliterated) spelling and pronunciation?
To illustrate what I mean, hypothetically, Russian could borrow the word "peak" from English and transliterate it as "пеак", while still pronouncing it according to the English pronunciation [piːk]. ...
- 1,057
1
vote
2
answers
717
views
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 ...
- 121
3
votes
4
answers
6k
views
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 ...
- 157
1
vote
0
answers
132
views
Why does the English Alphabet sometimes function like a syllabary?
One of the things that I never really noticed growing up until I began learning about other languages and the elegance of writing systems is how, in America for sure, we use letters like syllabic ...
- 1,003
2
votes
1
answer
238
views
How do languages which prefix proper nouns (by case marking, clitic article, etc) do capitalization in Latin Alphabet?
There are languages which put a prefix or a clitic before a noun to mark definiteness or case. How different languages using Latin alphabet which have this declension or marking deals with ...
- 231
1
vote
1
answer
205
views
Discussions around symbols included/excluded in the IPA
Are there are IPA symbols which are the subject of some controversy? For example, I suppose there are some who would like to have a unitary"tS" t-esh sound as a unitary phoneme... but I bet there ...
- 2,701
1
vote
1
answer
851
views
What is the function of the *dot* diacritic, when it converts /ba/ to /ra/ (if it can be called so) in Bengali?
The dot diacritic works for [dzo] to [jo] , for [do] to [ro] and for [dho] to [rho]. But /ba/ and /ra/ are completely unrelated sounds, so what is the dot doing to /ba/?
- 1,251
5
votes
4
answers
2k
views
Is there some relationship between the modern u and μ?
I study Mathematics and Statistics and one of the most common symbols we tend to write is μ which obviously is the lower case 'Mu'. It is one of the easiest symbols to learn when first encountered ...
- 169