35 votes
Accepted

Why isn't there a letter for /b/ sound in Greek alphabet while they have the sound?

The last time the Greek alphabet was truly overhauled was millennia ago, when a version tuned for the Ionian dialect (known as the "Euclidean alphabet" after the archon who championed it) ...
Draconis's user avatar
  • 65.6k
20 votes
Accepted

Are there clear exceptions to the alleged universality of "alphabet" as a term used in all languages

This is rather a bizarre claim to make in a widely published book, since it’s so easily disproven. There are lots of words for ‘alphabet’ that are different from the English term.   Alphabet, abjad, ...
Janus Bahs Jacquet's user avatar
16 votes
Accepted

Why did the consonant clusters /ks/ and /ps/ merit their own designated letters in Ancient Greek?

There are multiple possible reasons. Synchronically, /ks/ & /ps/ are the only clusters that commonly occur word or syllable-finally and they also frequently occur as a result of inflection. Other ...
Tristan's user avatar
  • 8,199
11 votes
Accepted

How would vowel-heavy names be written in a pure abjad?

Sure. You'll find very few abjads in the world that don't have any way of representing vowels—in fact I'm not aware of a single one—but in Egyptian, about the closest you can get, a name like /...
Draconis's user avatar
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7 votes
Accepted

Did the Phoenician letter 𐤄 have any meaning on its own or in earlier writing systems?

In Phoenician writing, the letters were named after words in the language, but didn't mean those words. ʔalp (or something like it) was the Phoenician word for "ox", but the glyph ʔalp didn'...
Draconis's user avatar
  • 65.6k
6 votes

How would vowel-heavy names be written in a pure abjad?

It is important to make a distinction between spelling and pronunciation. Ai is written with a and i which normally represent vowels, but is in fact pronounced with a glide at the end; also, as ...
Keelan's user avatar
  • 4,214
4 votes

Are there clear exceptions to the alleged universality of "alphabet" as a term used in all languages

Plenty of languages have other words for it. Most Slavic languages, for example, use a word along the lines of azbuky, named after the first two letters of the Glagolitic alphabet instead of the Greek ...
Draconis's user avatar
  • 65.6k
4 votes
Accepted

What subdiscipline of linguistics studies the relationship between writing and pronunciation?

I think the term is graphematics. I found the following definition in a German textbook (Busch & Stenschke, Germanistische Linguistik, Tübingen 2013, p. 59): G. "Graphematik" = "the ...
Alazon's user avatar
  • 845
3 votes

How many dimensions do phonemes have?

The answer to the question in the title is "it depends". The concept you are referring to is called a "distinctive feature" (or just "feature") in phonology. I can't ...
brass tacks's user avatar
  • 18.1k
3 votes
Accepted

How many people of the world does the "switch language" icon cover?

An estimate based on the Ethnologue data. The Ethnologue (sourced from Wikipedia) lists languages with more than 50 million speakers. Most of these can be easily classified as either using A or using ...
James K's user avatar
  • 564
3 votes

The vowel used when pronouncing a consonant/reciting the alphabet

The names of letters in the Classical Latin alphabet are given here, along with proposed pronunciations in Classical Latin. The names of these letters in a given modern language are generally close to ...
user6726's user avatar
  • 83.1k
2 votes

Are there clear exceptions to the alleged universality of "alphabet" as a term used in all languages

There exists the word "das Abece" (often written as Abc) as a Germanisation of alphabet in German, and it has some currency in elementary school teaching.
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
2 votes
Accepted

Is "alpha-" and "-bet", in the word "alphabet", related to the first two letters "A" (alpha) and "B" (beta)?

Yep, you are right: the word "alphabet" comes from the first 2 letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. They got their alphabet from the Phoenicians, who had a different order and ...
Camera Man's user avatar
2 votes

How many people of the world does the "switch language" icon cover?

I understand your question to be "if you add up the speaker populations for all of the languages that have Wiki pages, what percentage of the world's population have their language (one of their ...
user6726's user avatar
  • 83.1k

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