Questions tagged [alphabets]
A set of letters that represent phonemes, used to write one or more languages.
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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 an alphabet containing exactly 25 letters?
I am looking for an alphabet containing exactly 25 letters. As we all know, the standard Latin alphabet contains some more letters than 25. As I would like the alphabet to contain exactly 25 letters, ...
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Where to start with deciphering this language? [closed]
I do apologize if this question has been asked before or has a better place on a different part of the StackExchange network, but I've run out of places to ask this.
While playing through one of my ...
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What is the difference between "میگفت" and "میگفت"?
I read in WP's entry on Persian alphabet that the "ye" final form is 'ﯽ', and its medial form is 'ﯿ'.
Logically, when typing "میگفت", most software automagically write "میگفت".
However, the ...
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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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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 is the Arabic alif maksura sometimes read as a ya
Why is the final alif maksura of Habibullaah Kalakaani read as a ya? If so, then why doesn't it have two dots beneath, or is the transcription wrong?
Thanks.
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How many Arabic(-derived) alphabets exist?
I would like to know, besides Modern Standard Arabic as spoken in Egypt, how many distinct Arabic alphabets (I assume each Arabic-speaking country will have its own Arabic alphabet, with a lot of ...
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Diacritics and Ashanti/Twi alphabet?
Ashanti Proverbs (The Primitive Ethics Of A Savage People), by Robert Sutherland Rattray, 1916, uses the following notation :
I read that Ashanti people speak Twi, yet the Twi alphabet does not seem ...
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Can a new alphabet be created and added to the English language? [closed]
Does the English language, or any other language for that matter provide the flexibility to add or remove new alphabets?
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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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Is there a word for variety of letters used in a language?
To suggest either/both readability or efficiency in typing?
English is less [is there a term to fill in here?] than Japanese: compared to English alphabets, the number of letters in hiragana + ...
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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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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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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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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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Which official document defines the English alphabet?
This page says that standardization took place in year ~1700
So, where is it stated that English language has 26 letters and where are all letters defined?
This link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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Why does *h* have two different names in Welsh?
Why does h have two different names in Welsh, namely âets and hâ (variants: ha, he, hi, hy)? And what other examples are there of letters known in a language under two or more names for the same ...
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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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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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Why don't some Arabic letters appear in the alphabet list?
I've got a printout of the Arabic alphabet, reproduced below.
The trouble is when I look at certain words, I can't make out what letters are in there.
For example, the Arabic word for camel is جمل.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Correlation between vowel sounds and compact alphabet used in English and its acceptance
English is the preferred language in many fields of study and in international communications, it has more vowel sounds than many languages, but a compact alphabet, which in my opinion is why English ...
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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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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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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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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 "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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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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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 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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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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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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