Questions tagged [alphabets]
A set of letters that represent phonemes, used to write one or more languages.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Is there an active alphabetic writing system not based on the Phoenician or the Brahmic lineage?
The vast majority of alphabetic writing systems are part of the Phoenician lineage (e.g. Latin, Cyrillic and friends) or Brahmic (Devanagari and friends). Is there an active alphabetic system outside ...
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Are there any "simple" languages?
In all the languages I know, at least one of the following aspects is complex/difficult:
Alphabet: Complex meaning a large alphabet like in Chinese.
Pronunciation: Complex meaning that, for example, ...
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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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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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Which language was regularly written in the most alphabets?
There are a number of languages which have historically been written in more than one alphabet (Hindi/Urdu, Serbo-Croatian, Uzbek and so on). I am wondering which single language has been regularly ...
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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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What gave rise to the manual alphabet for Latin characters in Japanese Sign Language?
I am aware of the fact that this question is rather specific, but anyway I would like to give it a try.
Japanese Sign Language has three manual alphabets: one for representing kana-characters, and ...
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Two questions about Sappho's name
The Greek poeter Ψάπφω/Ψάπφα beared an interesting name, probably not Greek. I have two questions, about the first and the last letter of her name :
(1) what was the value of the initial Ψ ? This ...
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Why do some alphabets have special final forms for some letters?
Some alphabets, e.g. the Greek, Hebrew and Arabic alphabets, have different forms for some letters when they appear at the end of the word.
E.g. in Greek, the letter sigma (σ) appears as a ς when ...
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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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How did it happen that K was introduced to Latin alphabet in place of C and C started to mark /t͡s/ or /s/ in many languages?
I know that K has been derived from Greek kappa and C from gamma.
But how did it happen that people started to use K in place of C? From what I know there were already C and G in the Latin alphabet ...
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What sounds do the graphemes ⟨ś⟩ and ⟨ź⟩ represent in Montenegrin?
As of 2009 the Montenegrin alphabet was adopted in Montenegro. It consists of the same alphabet as used in Serbia, with the addition of two graphemes.
The graphemes ⟨ś⟩/⟨с́⟩ and ⟨ź⟩/⟨з́⟩ are said ...
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Are there any latin-alphabet languages written right-to-left?
Are there any languages using the Latin alphabet characters which are written right-to-left?
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What is the origin of letters corresponding to consonant clusters?
The Greek alphabet has ψ (psi) and ξ (ksi) , both letters correspond to a bi-consonantal sequence. Latin has X, Cyrillic alphabet has Щ which in some languages corresponds to ʃt͡ʃ, etc.
Normally, an ...
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Why are some scripts' names derived from their first few characters?
The name of the Old English runic alphabet Fuþorc (or transliterated into Furthark or Furthorc) is, just like the word alphabet formed by a portmanteau of its first few letters.
The Scandinavian ...
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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 ...
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Is the Ampersands a Letter in the Latin Alphabet?
My understanding is that, until fairly recently, recitation of the English alphabet was often suffixed by saying "and per se and", roughly translating to "and, by itself, '&'". This suggests that ...
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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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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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In which script(s) is the Kazakh language actually written in Kazakhstan?
According to the Wikipedia article on the Kazakh language it can be written in Cyrillic, Latin and Perso-Arabic scripts as it's a language that does not have its own native script like Armenian or ...
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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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Are the orthographies of the Slavic languages generally consistent?
I need to learn two Slavic languages, any two initially, and eventually at least one each from the East, West, and South Slav groups. I understand that each language has its own version of the ...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Which writing script can represent all human sounds?
Being a Nepali language speaker, I can easily produce most sounds in Devanagari script as every letter has the same sound despite the place of use.
But there may be many sounds that are not ...
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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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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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Why is the letter "Q" visually simillar to "O"?
G was created out of C by adding an additional line, for an obvious reason as they represented similar sounds in Latin.
But why is Q pretty much O with an additional line? These two letter do not ...
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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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Origin of Alphabetic/Phonemic Scripts
Dixon (the Australianist) has claimed that the Phoenician/Canaanite script is the ultimate source of all known alphabetic (purely essentially-phonemic) scripts on Earth; all other scripts are not ...
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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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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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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 ...
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Do Azeri people actually use Ə instead of A in names?
I have two spellings of an Azeri name: Alakbar and Ələkbər.
In official contexts (ID or passport), do both forms of the name appear or just the latter?
Why do Azeris still transcribe their names if ...
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Transliteration of Cyrillic
I have created a language that uses the Cyrillic alphabet, but I'm unsure as to how I can transliterate these letters for English-speaking readers:
Ii - this is pronounced as a hard letter 'i', as in ...
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Is there any method of assigning a numeral score to the extent to which a given alphabet is phonemic?
Is there any method of assigning a numerical score to the extent to which a given alphabet is phonemic? If so, then obviously, the score for a given alphabet would vary across the languages that it ...
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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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Is English the only language (except classical Latin, Cyrillic, symbol languages and auxiliary languages) that has no diacritic symbols/accents?
What I mean by no diacritics.
Czech has: ř, ů, á, š ...
Spanish has: Ñ, á ...
German: ä, ö, ü...
Italian: è, ò, ...
...
At least in Europe, I am not aware of a language that ...
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