Talk:Alphabet

Is it just me, or has some moron changed all the 6s into bs? They also seem to have done away with capital Bs, and there is no link to Z at the bottom of the page, instead another A... Gee Eight 19:12 UTC 16 March 2006

What a mess! 6 changed into b and z into a. And some Michael Jackson ref. I had to revert quite a bit back. It undid the edit by YurikBot, that I cannot judge, as well. −Woodstone 21:08, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

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I would find it hard to support the statement that the letters of the alphabet represent (or approximate) phonemes. In English, due to its historical development, this is hardly the case. There are, supposedly, at least seven phonemes represented by "gh." In Italian, this statement has more validity.

The language ends up being very far from phonetic, but it's evidently organized on such principles. The letters generally have one or two primary sounds associated with them, so that when we see a new word we can usually guess about how it sounds, or transcribe foreign words into English. There are exceptions a lot of the time, but they are still the exceptions rather than the rule, I'd say. Maybe the best way to sum it up is: English is written with the Roman alphabet. ;)

PS - a quick search finds /g/ as in ghost, /gh/ as in doghouse, /f/ as in enough, /p/ as in hiccough, /w/ as in plough, /h/ as in Callaghan, and if you accept them, /k/ as in lough, /θ/ as in Keighley. Also it can show up as part of /ng/ or /ngh/ or as //, as in light. Tolkien used it to represent /γ/, but he was clearly being ridiculous.

• Not ridiculous at all. This is how Swahili and many other transcription systems for languages with that sound (like most Arabic transliterations for example) use the digraph "gh", so that k:g::kh:gh, i.e. "k" has the same relation to "g" (phonation) as "kh" (/x/) has to "gh". In fact, I don't believe there is any other frequently-used way to write that phoneme in the Latin alphabet (excluding IPA). Livajo 16:21, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

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Someone should add something here about George Bernhard Shaws alphabet proposals.----Are we referring to the "Fresh Fish" spelling item?

See Shavian alphabet. Brion VIBBER, Friday, May 17, 2002

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Question: Anybody know what this alphabet is called, and if it's already included:

A Alpha B Bravo C Charlie D Delta E Echo F Foxtrot

Answer: Nato phonetic alphabet. It is a so-called "phonetic" alphabet, not to be confused with the IPA. There are various "phonetic" alphabets of that kind. See http://www.bckelk.uklinux.net/able.html for a few. --Stephen Gilbert

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I don't think Tolkien was being that ridiculous when choosing "gh" to represent the voiced "kh" or the fricative of "g". A couple other languages do that. Besides, it fits: k voices to g; kh voices to gh. I was kidding - I think it is completely reasonable, far more so than any of the actual options except g+h.

If syllabaries cannot have parallelism between sound and symbol (otherwise they would be called abugidas), can alphabets have parallelism between sound and symbol (such as a predictable mutation of the symbol from stop to fricative to nasal to semivowel or from voiced to voiceless)? --Damian Yerrick

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Can hiragana and katakana be called an alphabet? There are some usages such as the kyo as in Tokyo which is used like an alphabet instead of syllable.

No, the kana are definitely syllabaries. They just happen to have some digraphs. — Gwalla | Talk 20:16, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)

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There are lots more alphabets remaining on the Unicode consortium list that could be added to the link farm at the end of this article -- The Anome

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The examples in 'collating order' seem to be broken - shouldn't there be a few more characters in the examples than I can see?

-- The Anome

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It appears the user 216.250.162.xxx's software has inserted a load of extra whitespace throughout the article -- I have edited it back out. The Anome

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How about mentioning the Phoenicians? Their name was adopted for the word "phonetic" and other similar words, much like "alpha" and "beta" for "alphabet".

Also, why is the alphabet ordered "abcdefg..." and not "etoani..." or some other arrangement? From what I have read, the symbols were associated with objects. For instance, A is upsidedown from the original Phoenician symbol which was a line drawing of an ox's head, B ("beta" in Greek, "beth" in Phoenician) was for "house", C came from "gimel" which is "camel" and is a line drawing of a camel's head (Greek letter "Gamma"), and D is for "door", as in the triangular shaped door of a tent (Greek letter "Delta"), and so on. These symbols were grouped according to subject matter presumably to make memorization of the alphabet easier. The first group is for domestic objects. Other groups concerned travel, especially on the sea, or monetary ideas, for some 5(?) groups in all. (Don't recall how many groups and what categories they were.)

As far as I can tell, the word "phonetic" is unrelated to "Phoenician". The element "phone" means sound or speach, as in "telephone", and has Indo-European roots. Josh Cherry

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Is there a 'family tree' of alphabets available somewhere? I'd like to see a graph of which alphabet is derived from which. -- Kimiko 22:10, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

It's not the "Latin Alphabet", it's the "English alphabet"

The following from this article seems to me erroneous, or at least incomplete:

In modern linguistic usage, the term Latin alphabet is usually used to refer to the modern derivations from the alphabet used by the Romans (i.e. the Roman alphabet).

       A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z

"Modern variations from the alphabet used by the Romans" include Norwegian (30 characters), Italian (22 characters), Spanish (29 characters), etc. And, for that matter, I'm pretty sure, the actual "Latin" alphabet had no J, no U, no Y, no Z. Every single article on a character uses this phrase Latin alphabet, but this is nothing but the English alphabet. Ortolan88 03:41, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Fair point, but easily corrected. - Mustafaa 04:55, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)

You may have some logic on your side - but not all. The important thing is actual use in the field, and in this case, the term latin alphabet is widely used for these 26. The alphabets with more letters which blend into this sets, are called Latin-derived alphabets, see also Category:Alphabetic writing systems and List of writing systems. In a wider sense Latin Alphabet is used for the union of all these latin-derived alphabets, for example in the naming scheme of Unicode.

The point that that not all 26 were used at the times of Caesar is addressed at Latin alphabet and the individual letter articles, see J.

Pjacobi 06:25, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Not to say, that there is no room for improvement. The information in the articles Alphabet, Latin alphabet, English alphabet, and Collation would profit from some alignment and more rational distribution between these four (Roman alphabet is also in the mix, but currently redirects to Latin alphabet; and there is also Alphabets derived from the Latin). So if you are interested in enhancing these articles, you are most welcome. Pjacobi 06:32, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Quite correct. The Latin alphabet has evolved. One can refer to the Latin alphabet meaning characters used only in writing Latin words. But modern Church Latin and legal Latin writing normally distinguishes u from v and j from i and may use w and ø and other characters for spelling of personal names and place names. There are various extended Latin alphabets used for different languages. If I were comparing Norwegian to Russian, I might say that Norwegian is normally written using the Latin alphabet and Russian is normally written using the Cyrillic alphabet. That would usually be good enough. I might more pedantically say that the Norwegian alphabet is an extended form of the old Latin alphabet and the Russian alphabet is derived from the original Cyrillic alphabet.

There is a tendency in modern discussion to be more precise by using the word script rather than alphabet when referring to styles of characters and to use alphabet to refer to particular sets of letters within that script, to say that the Norwegian alphabet uses the Latin script and the Russian alphabet uses the Cyrillic script. The Unicode standard uses script in this way.

The 26-letter alphabet given in this article is indeed the standard English alphabet but it is not only the English alphabet.

It is also the French alphabet as taught in French schools (even though k and w are not used in modern spelling of native French words) and it is the German alphabet (ß is not counted as a separate letter and is not used at all in Swiss German). It is also the alphabet used in international standards for codes intended for international use. It is obviously a Latin alphabet in the sense that it is not a Greek alphabet or a Cyrillic alphabet or a runic alphabet or an ogham alphabet or any other kind of alphabet.

The International Phonetic Alphabet is similarly usually classed as a Latin alphabet, even though it includes some Greek characters, because it primarily uses Latin script letter forms or forms obviously derived from Latin script letter forms.

See Evertype: The alphabets of Europe.

Jallan 16:02, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)

If I remember things right, I looked up when I was wondering about this, it was decided to use alphabet over script for articles about writing systems (Tamil alphabet, Hebrew alphabet), because it is the most common term and users would search for it more often. I'd prefer to have "script" there, but not strong enough, to fight for the change. -- Pjacobi 16:23, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I think the edit I've just made should cover Ortolan88's quite reasonable comments. It is confusing that "Latin alphabet" can mean both the alphabet in which Latin is written and any variation of that alphabet. That should be explained. One would like a term like "Latinoid alphabet" or "Latinate alphabet" or "Latinish alphabet". I don't really like tagging on that discussion of ligatures and diacritics. But without it some readers are going to quite reasonably start asking about French œ and German ß and about diacritics, questioning the claim that the English, French, and German alphabets are identical.

Script is indeed a bothersome term which I think is only beginning to work its way into general consciousness in phrases like "Latin script" and "Arabic script". But alphabets can also be written in scripts, for example the Latin alphabet can be written in the Lombardic script, Carolingian script, Uncial script (and various variety scripts within those scripts). We don't have good heirarchical teriminology in English in this area.

Jallan 01:19, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)

 

Sorry, that was my mistake. It's a thin space. I was probably still holding the shift key down when I hit the space bar—my keyboard layout has that character for shift+space—and didn't notice the mistake in preview. — Gwalla | Talk 19:43, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Problem when using Firefox

This topic has a compatibility problem when using the Firefox browser. The first 100(?) lines contain the message Warning: array_pop(): The argument should be an array in /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-new/includes/Setup.php on line 30.

It's not FireFox. I've never had a problem with this article (or any other one, for that matter). kwami 05:01, 2005 Jun 3 (UTC)

Suggest 10 possible wiki links for Alphabet.

An automated Wikipedia link suggester has some possible wiki link suggestions for the Alphabet article:

• Can link for languages: ...eir writing systems, and writing systems have been borrowed for languages they were not designed for, so the degree to which letters ... (link to section)
• Can link one-to-one correspondence: ... within a single language. Languages may fail to achieve a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds in any of several ways:... (link to section)
• Can link Two-letter combinations: ... a combination of letters rather than just a single letter. Two-letter combinations are called [[digraph (orthography)|digraph]]s and three-let... (link to section)
• Can link phonetic alphabet: ...ges of the world can be written by a rather small universal phonetic alphabet. A standard for this is the [[International Phonetic Alphab... (link to section)
• Can link Egyptian hieroglyphs: ...emitic workers within Egyptian society. The inventors took Egyptian hieroglyphs and applied new names and phonetic sounds to the images, in... (link to section)
• Can link middle Persian: ...[Jordan]]. The [[Pahlavi alphabet]] was adapted for writing middle Persian, and is the ancestor of the [[Armenian alphabet]], which is... (link to section)
• Can link northern Asia: ...rd century]] AD, and was adapted to create the alphabets of northern Asia, including the [[Sogdian alphabet|Sogdian]], [[Manichean al... (link to section)
• Can link vowel sound: ...ch letter represents a consonant and vowel combination; the vowel sound is modified using [[diacritic]] marks above the letters.... (link to section)
• Can link classical Latin: ...e Latin alphabets generally drop some of the letters of the classical Latin alphabet or add additional letters.... (link to section)
• Can link Latin alphabet: ...Latin alphabet or add additional letters. The most popular Latin alphabet in use today is the 26-letter alphabet normally used for [[... (link to section)

Notes: The article text has not been changed in any way; Some of these suggestions may be wrong, some may be right.
Feedback: I like it, I hate it, Please don't link to — LinkBot 11:31, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Hangul

What about Hangul? Why isn't it included "other alphabet" things?

Hangul is included in several places.

Khmer

Cbdorsett, you keep trying to say that the Khmer alphabet is the largest in the world. It's hard for me to see that, no matter how I count. Please justify your claim here, so we all know what you mean. kwami 04:35, 2005 Jun 3 (UTC)

Two senses of alphabet

The article uses "alphabet" in two senses: one that includes e.g. abjads like Arabic, and one that requires explicit vowels. At Harakat i've invented some wording to work around that ambiguity, but this article needs mention something more than such original research as an accepted means of making the distinction. (And, uh, needs to use it in the lead.) --Jerzy (t) 17:15, 2005 Mar 25 (UTC)

eszett

The article currently claims Additional letters may be formed as ligatures, ... eszett ß from SS, .... It is true that many German-speaking people today consider the letter eszett and double-esses to be interchangeable. But from the shape of the letter, and from it's name(s) ("eszett" in German, "szlig" ß in the HTML entities list http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html), it seems obvious to me that it is a ligature of "sz". --DavidCary 3 July 2005 13:42 (UTC)

It's also clearly sz in Fraktur and older scripts. Since there is no capital eszett, it is usually replaced by SS when writing in all caps. However, SZ may be used to disambiguate from words with a true SS, and some people use SZ exclusively. kwami 2005 July 3 19:43 (UTC)

The alphabet effect

I have recast this section more along the lines of a hypothesis, rather than something widely accepted as fact- unless anyone can demonstrate that this is accepted as rote by academics in the field. I had not previously been familiar with this theory, which at first glance read like something dated and Eurocentric in outlook (though Logan himself apparently takes some pains to deny the Eurocentrism charge, and the implication that Western achievements are superior to non-Western). A quick skim through one of the texts quoted (for some reason, available online in full here) reveals a few egrarious errors (perhaps casually made, not necessarily fatal to the thesis) such as The Mesoamerican writing system, only four hundred years old at the time the conquistadors arrived in the sixteenth century, is thought to have never evolved beyond its original pictographic/ideographic stage(p.9), and generalisations like It is a fact, however, that Chinese thinking is considerably more concrete and practical and less abstract than Western thought which has been one of the factors that allowed it to contribute as much to world culture as it has...(p.43) which seem to be challengeable to me. I have no objection at all to this theory being documented here, but the content could probably be updated to reflect more precisely what is claimed, and in addition annotate any academic criticisms. Does anyone know of any such critiques? --cjllw | TALK 02:30, 2005 July 26 (UTC)

Many of the great advances of Western civ. were Chinese; it was an arbitrary political decision in the Chinese court, plus the unity of China that allowed that decision to be enforced, that was the prime reason that China did not conquer the world beyond Eurasia rather than Europe. Attributing Europe's success to the alphabet or "concrete thinking" is silly; if China had conquered the world, that would be held as evidence that the simplistic alphabet is only suitable for inferior minds. There's another likely explanation for the connection (if there even is a connection): polities on the edge of civilization are diverse and not hampered by bureaucratic inertia, and so it is more likely that one of them will take an advance and run with it. Without a well educated elite to master a logography, they're also more likely to use alphabetic scripts. Coincidence, not cause and effect. To demonstrate this claim would require a good deal of historical investigation, and few departments, let alone individuals, would be up to the task even assuming such evidence has been preserved. kwami 04:50, 2005 July 26 (UTC)

kwami, I agree with you on every point. The theory as originally presented here seemed manifestly wrong-headed, and in researching Logan's work just now I still find it very unconvincing (although the actual claims made by Logan & his mentor McLuhan are more subtle and less black'n'white than its summary given here). The base idea seems to stem from Innis & McLuhan's theories that the medium of communication has an active (not just passive) contributary part towards the shaping of perception and thought processes ("the medium is the message"). Actually I don't doubt this is true to an extent, but I do doubt that the magnitude and scope of this influence could ever be reliably demonstrated, in isolation from the many other influences. Logan seems to then extend this pop analysis to award alphabetic systems a starring role in the formation of Western thought (whatever that is), alongside codified law, monotheism, abstract science, and deductive logic. His comparisons with non-Western (principally Chinese) "systems of thought" are based on gross generalisations, and omission of contrary views (such as the neat counterexample you have provided, the Hammurabai code). Amusingly, when explaining the result of studies which show that it takes no longer for a child to learn to write in Chinese systems (with many characters to learn) than it does a child to write in an alphabetic system (with few), he claims that this is because Western children are also learning "...the intellectual by-products of the alphabet, such as abstraction, analysis, rationality, and classification" - by implication, Chinese children do not (?!).

I should like to find some notable source which refutes these and other claims, even though their very enunciation should be enough to flag them as ill-formulated and incapable of being demonstrated. --cjllw | TALK 06:51, 2005 July 26 (UTC)

Yes, that would be nice. But then the reputable sources probably just ignore stuff like this as not worth their time.

As for your other points, I seriously doubt Chinese children learn to read as quickly as children learning an alphabet. (English is not a good exemplar, how about Spanish, Russian, Hindi, or Korean?) Certainly the time involved is much greater. Also, once people leave school they tend to forget how to write very quickly. Last I heard (10 yrs ago?), the literacy rate in China was about 10% (the standard being able to read a newspaper), while the rate in Cuba was 100%, and knowing how to read did not mean being able to write (I mean not even knowing how to form the characters needed to put words on paper, not how to organize a thesis). However, once you learn, it's much easier to read in Chinese than in Spanish (or so it seems to me). The script is very efficient that way, and we spend most of our time reading rather than writing, if that counts for anything. As only a small fraction of the population could read in any country, the years required to learn probably didn't matter as much as today, with our ideal of universal education. If reading is more efficient in a logographic script, don't you think people might read more? Wouldn't that advance civilization?

But abstraction? Bof. True, segmental scripts don't come as naturally as syllabaries, but a five-year-old can comfortably get the concept long before they're capable of much abstraction or rational thought, so it can't take much. I bet Hindu numerals made a far greater difference to Europe than the alphabet. And I notice people making these claims always seem to throw in monotheism. Do they honestly believe that Yahweh, riding in a storm cloud, breathing fire and throwing thunderbolts, is more abstract than the illusion of reality in Hinduism? Or more advanced morally, when you must convert to what I believe or die? (If fewer gods is more abstract and more advanced, then atheism should be the most advanced of all, but somehow atheistic and tolerant religions like Buddhism don't get top billing.)

I grew up with the idea that the Greeks invented the alphabet, and this was one of the greatest acheivements of man. (According to my history books, there were no women before Betsy Ross.) Turns out all they did was be incapable of pronouncing pharyngeal and glottal consonants, so alif etc. ended up starting with a vowel rather than a consonant, which fit their language better. I'm not knocking Greek advances in mathematics and logic, which were fantastic, but the alphabet?? Anyway, it was the Egyptians who invented the alphabet, but it was relegated to uses like zhuyin in Taiwan. I think we should say something to the effect that this idea is unsupported, perhaps unsupportable, and might all be nonsense, like you suggest. Though, like you, I'd be more comfortable if I could present this as something more than my own prejudice. I think it's important to leave the hypothesis (not 'theory', which implies evidence) in, as I feel the article will be more informative with a debunking of it than without it being mentioned at all. kwami 10:24, 2005 July 26 (UTC)

Changed a line in the Spelling section

I changed a line in the Spelling section about the Italian language since it said a wrong fact: that there's no word for "to spell" in Italian . There actually is one, "compitare", but for the reason explained in the text , no one seem to know it :) This is the new sentence: The Italian language verb corresponding to 'spell', compitare is unbeknown to many Italians because the act of spelling itself is almost never nedeed: a correct pronunciation exactly corresponds to a correct orthography.

Please check if this change is ok. Bye, Gabriele (at its first contribution to wikipedia ^_^)

Touchups

Hi, i'm new to wikipedia, i hope i can be of help. i have added this article to my watchlist and i have been looking at the last changes made by User:Kwamikagami. They all look nice, but I don't thinks only this one looks better as it was before.

(see change in 'bold')

Current version

When written in Devanagari, Vedic Sanskrit has an alphabet of 53 letters, including the visarga mark for final aspiration and special letters for kš and jñ, though one of the letters is theoretical and not actually used.

Previous version

When written in Devanagari, Vedic Sanskrit has an alphabet of 53 letters, including the visarga mark for final aspiration and special letters for kš and jñ, though one of the long els is theoretical and not actually used

I hope I can be of some help.

(Note: User:Kwamikagami has been notified fo this entry)

--Cacuija 02:48, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

I suppose if we're going to be specific, we should actually name the letter. My phrase 'one of the long els' is bad style: It sounds specific, but doesn't have much actual content. The identity of the letter didn't seem important to me (people can always look it up on the Devanagari article), so I changed the comment, but please go ahead and specify the letter if you feel it would be of interest.

From Daniels & Bright: "Symbols exist for short and long syllabic laterals [here they give two el aksharas, one with a c-shaped diacritic under it and the other (the long one) with an epsilon-shaped diacritic under it], but in Sanskrit the former is rare and the latter never occurs, and they are irrelevant to the modern languages." kwami 05:03, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the response. I see what you mean, but i felt by removing the explanation you are going to the right opposite extreme (which is being too general), since we are listing only one letter. I have read it again and it looks fine, so let's just live it as it its. --Cacuija (my talk) 13:26, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

Does the letter X stop the 'English Alphabet' being an alphabet?

Considering it is almost always a cluster of k and s when it's not denoting a greek Z sound.--220.238.238.21 12:58, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

You could also argue that English is not an alphabet because it doesn't have letters for /θ/ or many of its other sounds. But no script is completely phonemic. Classical Greek is the prototype of a true alphabet, and it has unnecessary letters for /ks/ and /ps/, but is also missing letters for /a:/, /i:/, and /y:/. The defining feature of an alphabet is that it is segmental - that is, that it has symbols for consonants and-or vowels rather than syllables or morphemes. English (like Greek) clearly fits that definition. But English (like all other alphabets I know of) is also partially logographic: & (the '27th letter of the alphabet'), %, #, $, @, the numerals, and the letters themselves when used in words like HQ or T-shirt. But the essence of the system is still alphabetic. kwami 18:40, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Fair enough. But in a perfect world we would use something like:

• q = k
• j = j
• c = ch
• g = g
• k = th
• p = p
• x = sh
• h = h

--220.238.238.21 05:05, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

For a perfect world, see wikiquote:Mark Twain#Incorrectly attributed. —Michael Z. 2005-10-21 12:44 Z

That is very interesting.--220.238.238.21 13:49, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

Cyrillic in Wikipedia

Please see the new page at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Cyrillic), aimed at

1. Documenting the use of Cyrillic and its transliteration in Wikipedia
2. Discussing potential revision of current practices

—Michael Z. 2005-12-9 20:46 Z

Cultures without alphabets

Wouldn't this entry benefit from such a discussion? There's only mention of Mesoamerican writing (which isn't explained) but it seems that very few cultures in North America, southern Africa or Australia produced indigenous alphabets. Which were those that did? Sequoia invented the Cherokee syballary after seeing the European advantage, but I cannot find any similar references.