1.
Bet (letter)
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This letters name means house in various Semitic languages, and appears to derive from an Egyptian hieroglyph of a house by acrophony. The Phoenician letter gave rise to, among others, the Greek Beta, Latin B, the Arabic letter ب is named باء bāʾ. For /p/, it may be used interchangeably with the Persian letter پ - pe in this case, Hebrew spelling, בֵּית The Hebrew letter represents two different phonemes, a b sound and a v sound. The two are distinguished by a dot in the centre of the letter for /b/ and no dot for /v/ and it is also named beth, following the Tiberian Hebrew pronunciation, in academic circles. In modern Hebrew the frequency of the usage of bet, out of all the letters, is 4. 98%, when the Bet has a dot in its center, known as a dagesh, then it represents /b/. There are various rules in Hebrew grammar that stipulate when and why a dagesh is used, when this letter appears as ב without the dagesh in its center then it represents a voiced labiodental fricative, /v/. Bet in gematria symbolizes the number 2, as a prefix, the letter bet may function as a preposition meaning in, at, or with. Bet is the first letter of the Torah, as Bet is the number 2 in gematria, this is said to symbolize that there are two parts to Torah, the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. In set theory, the numbers stand for powers of infinite sets. In the Syriac alphabet, the letter is ܒ — Beth. It is one of six letters that represents two associated sounds, when Beth has a hard pronunciation it is a. When Beth has a soft pronunciation it is pronounced as a. However, in dialects, the soft Beth is more often pronounced as a. Whether Beth should be pronounced as a hard or soft sound is determined by its context within a word. However, wherever it is traditionally geminate within a word, even in dialects that no longer distinguish double consonants, in the West Syriac dialect, some speakers always pronounce Beth with its hard sound. Beth, when attached to the beginning of a word, represents the preposition in, with, as a numeral, the letter represents the number 2, and, using various systems of dashes above or below, can stand for 2,000 and 20,000
2.
Phoenician alphabet
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The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, is the oldest verified alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad consisting of 22 letters, all consonants and it was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia. The Phoenician alphabet is derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs and it became one of the most widely used writing systems, spread by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean world, where it evolved and was assimilated by many other cultures. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet was derived from Phoenician. Another derivative script is the Aramaic alphabet, which was the ancestor of the modern Arabic script, the Modern Hebrew script is a stylistic variant of the Aramaic script. The Greek alphabet was derived from Phoenician. Phoenician was usually written from right to left, although there are texts written in boustrophedon. The earliest known inscriptions are the so-called Proto-Sinaitic script sporadically attested in the Sinai and in Canaan in the late Middle. The script was not widely used until the rise of new Semitic kingdoms in the 13th and 12th centuries BC, the Phoenician alphabet is a direct continuation of the Proto-Canaanite script of the Bronze Age collapse period. Beginning in the 9th century BC, adaptations of the Phoenician alphabet -- such as Greek, Old Italic, Anatolian, and the Paleohispanic scripts -- were very successful. This simple system contrasted with the scripts in use at the time, such as cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Another reason for its success was the trading culture of Phoenician merchants. Phoenician inscriptions have been found in sites at a number of former Phoenician cities and colonies around the Mediterranean, such as Byblos. Later finds indicate earlier use in Egypt, Phoenician had long-term effects on the social structures of the civilizations that came in contact with it. As mentioned above, the script was the first widespread phonetic script and its simplicity not only allowed it to be used in multiple languages, but it also allowed the common people to learn how to write. The Phoenician alphabet was first uncovered in the 17th century, and it was at first believed that the script was a direct variation of Egyptian hieroglyphs. This idea was popular due to the recent decipherment of hieroglyphs. However, scholars could not find any link between the two writing systems, nor to hieratic or cuneiform, the theories of independent creation ranged from the idea of a single man conceiving it, to the Hyksos people forming it from corrupt Egyptian
3.
Hebrew alphabet
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Historically, there have been two separate abjad scripts to write Hebrew. In the remainder of this article, the term Hebrew alphabet refers to the Jewish square script unless otherwise indicated, the Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters. It does not have case, but five letters have different forms used at the end of a word. Hebrew is written right to left. Originally, the alphabet was an abjad consisting only of consonants, as with other abjads, such as the Arabic alphabet, scribes later devised means of indicating vowel sounds by separate vowel points, known in Hebrew as niqqud. In both biblical and rabbinic Hebrew, the letters א ה ו י are also used as matres lectionis to represent vowels. There is a trend in modern Modern Hebrew toward the use of matres lectionis to indicate vowels that have traditionally gone unwritten, the paleo-Hebrew alphabet was used in the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The Samaritans, who remained in the Land of Israel, continued to use the paleo-Hebrew alphabet, after the fall of the Persian Empire in 330 BCE, Jews used both scripts before settling on the Assyrian form. The square Hebrew alphabet was adapted and used for writing languages of the Jewish diaspora – such as Karaim, the Judeo-Arabic languages, Judaeo-Spanish. In the traditional form, the Hebrew alphabet is an abjad consisting only of consonants and it has 22 letters, five of which use different forms at the end of a word. Also, a system of points to indicate vowels, called niqqud, was developed. In modern forms of the alphabet, as in the case of Yiddish and to some extent Modern Hebrew, today, the trend is toward full spelling with the weak letters acting as true vowels. When used to write Yiddish, vowels are indicated, using letters, either with or without niqqud-diacritics, except for Hebrew words. To preserve the proper vowel sounds, scholars developed several different sets of vocalization, one of these, the Tiberian system, eventually prevailed. Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, and his family for generations, are credited for refining and maintaining the system. These points are used only for special purposes, such as Biblical books intended for study. The Tiberian system also includes a set of marks, called trope. These are shown below the normal form in the following table, although Hebrew is read and written from right to left, the following table shows the letters in order from left to right
4.
Aramaic alphabet
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The ancient Aramaic alphabet is adapted from the Phoenician alphabet and became distinctive from it by the 8th century BCE. It was used to write the Aramaic language and had displaced the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet for the writing of Hebrew, the letters all represent consonants, some of which are also used as matres lectionis to indicate long vowels. Rather, it is a different type, the earliest inscriptions in the Aramaic language use the Phoenician alphabet. Over time, the alphabet developed into the form shown below, Aramaic gradually became the lingua franca throughout the Middle East, with the script at first complementing and then displacing Assyrian cuneiform, as the predominant writing system. Imperial Aramaic was highly standardised, its orthography was based more on historical roots than any spoken dialect and was influenced by Old Persian. Both were in use through the Achaemenid Persian period, but the cursive form steadily gained ground over the lapidary, the Aramaic script would survive as the essential characteristics of the Iranian Pahlavi writing system. A group of 30 Aramaic documents from Bactria has been recently discovered, an analysis was published in November 2006. The texts, which were rendered on leather, reflect the use of Aramaic in the 4th century BC in the Persian Achaemenid administration of Bactria, the widespread usage of Achaemenid Aramaic in the Middle East led to the gradual adoption of the Aramaic alphabet for writing Hebrew. Formerly, Hebrew had been using an alphabet closer in form to that of Phoenician. After the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, the unity of the Imperial Aramaic script was lost, the Hebrew and Nabataean alphabets, as they stood by the Roman era, were little changed in style from the Imperial Aramaic alphabet. A cursive Hebrew variant developed from the early centuries AD, the Old Turkic script is generally considered to have its ultimate origins in Aramaic, in particular via the Pahlavi or Sogdian alphabets, as suggested by V. Thomsen, or possibly via Karosthi. Aramaic is also considered to be the most likely source of the Brahmi script, ancestor of the Brahmic family of scripts, today, Biblical Aramaic, Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects and the Aramaic language of the Talmud are written in the Hebrew alphabet. Syriac and Christian Neo-Aramaic dialects are written in the Syriac alphabet, Mandaic is written in the Mandaic alphabet. The near-identity of the Aramaic and the classical Hebrew alphabets caused Aramaic text to be mostly in the standard Hebrew script in scholarly literature. In Maloula, one of few surviving communities in which a Western Aramaic dialect is still spoken and they started to use the Syriac alphabet instead. In Aramaic writing, Waw and Yodh serve a double function, originally, they represented only the consonants w and y, but they were later adopted to indicate the long vowels ū and ī respectively as well. In the latter role, they are known as matres lectionis or mothers of reading. Ālap, likewise, has some of the characteristics of a mater lectionis because in initial positions, it indicates a glottal stop, among Jews, the influence of Hebrew often led to the use of Hē instead, at the end of a word
5.
Syriac alphabet
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The Syriac alphabet is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language from the 1st century AD. Syriac is written right to left. It is a script where some, but not all. The alphabet consists of 22 letters, all of which are consonants, the vowel sounds are supplied either by the readers memory or by optional diacritic marks. In addition to the sounds of the language, the letters of the Syriac alphabet can be used to represent numbers in a similar to Hebrew. When Arabic began to be the dominant spoken language in the Fertile Crescent, Malayalam was also written with Syriac script and was called Suriyani Malayalam. These writings are usually called Karshuni or Garshuni, Garshuni is often used today by Neo-Aramaic speakers in written communication such as letters and fliers. There are three variants of the Syriac alphabet, ʾEsṭrangēlā, Maḏnḥāyā, and Serṭā. The oldest and classical form of the alphabet is ʾEsṭrangēlā, although ʾEsṭrangēlā is no longer used as the main script for writing Syriac, it has received some revival since the 10th century. It is often used in publications, in titles and inscriptions. In some older manuscripts and inscriptions it is possible for any letter to join to the left, vowel marks are usually not used with ʾEsṭrangēlā. The East Syriac dialect is written in the Maḏnḥāyā form of the alphabet. Other names for the script include Swāḏāyā, ʾĀṯūrāyā, Kaldāyā, the Eastern script resembles ʾEsṭrangēlā more closely than the Western script, being somewhat a midway point between the two. Some transliteration schemes find its inclusion necessary for showing spirantization or for historical reasons, whether because its distribution is mostly predictable or because its pronunciation was lost, neither the East nor West variants of the alphabet have a sign to represent the schwa. The West Syriac dialect is written in the Serṭā form of the alphabet, also known as the Pšīṭā, Maronite. Most of the letters are derived from ʾEsṭrangēlā, but are simplified. A cursive, chancery hand is evidenced in the earliest Syriac manuscripts, from the 8th century, the simpler Serṭā style came into fashion, perhaps because of its more economical use of parchment. The Nabataean alphabet was based on this form of Syriac handwriting, lowercase Omega, used only in the vocative interjection ʾō
6.
Arabic alphabet
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The Arabic alphabet or Arabic abjadiyah is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written right to left, in a cursive style. Originally, the alphabet was an abjad consisting only of consonants, as with other abjads, such as the Hebrew alphabet, scribes later devised means of indicating vowel sounds by separate vowel points. The basic Arabic alphabet contains 28 letters, there are no distinct upper and lower case letter forms. Many letters look similar but are distinguished from one another by dots above or below their central part and these dots are an integral part of a letter, since they distinguish between letters that represent different sounds. For example, the Arabic letters transliterated as b and t have the basic shape, but b has one dot below, ب. Both printed and written Arabic are cursive, with most of the letters within a word connected to the adjacent letters. There are two main collating sequences for the Arabic alphabet, abjad and hija, in this order, letters are also used as numbers, Abjad numerals, and possess the same alphanumeric code/cipher as Hebrew gematria and Greek isopsephy. The hijā’ī or alifbā’ī order, used where lists of names and words are sorted, as in phonebooks, classroom lists, and dictionaries, groups letters by similarity of shape. Loss of sameḵ was compensated for by the split of shin ש into two independent Arabic letters, ش and ﺱ which moved up to take the place of sameḵ, the six other letters that do not correspond to any north Semitic letter are placed at the end. This is commonly vocalized as follows, abjad hawwaz ḥuṭṭī kalaman sa‘faṣ qarashat thakhadh ḍaẓagh, the hijā’ī order is never used as numerals. Another kind of order was used widely in the Maghreb until recently when it was replaced by the Mashriqi order. The Arabic alphabet is always cursive and letters vary in shape depending on their position within a word, letters can exhibit up to four distinct forms corresponding to an initial, medial, final, or isolated position. While some letters show considerable variations, others remain almost identical across all four positions, generally, letters in the same word are linked together on both sides by short horizontal lines, but six letters can only be linked to their preceding letter. For example, أرارات has only isolated forms because each letter cannot be connected to its following one, in addition, some letter combinations are written as ligatures, notably lām-alif. Notes See the article Romanization of Arabic for details on various schemes, however. Also names are transcribed as pronounced locally, not as pronounced in Literary Arabic. Regarding pronunciation, the values given are those of Modern Standard Arabic
7.
Greek alphabet
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It is the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. In its classical and modern forms, the alphabet has 24 letters, Modern and Ancient Greek use different diacritics. In standard Modern Greek spelling, orthography has been simplified to the monotonic system, examples In both Ancient and Modern Greek, the letters of the Greek alphabet have fairly stable and consistent symbol-to-sound mappings, making pronunciation of words largely predictable. Ancient Greek spelling was generally near-phonemic, among consonant letters, all letters that denoted voiced plosive consonants and aspirated plosives in Ancient Greek stand for corresponding fricative sounds in Modern Greek. This leads to groups of vowel letters denoting identical sounds today. Modern Greek orthography remains true to the spellings in most of these cases. The following vowel letters and digraphs are involved in the mergers, Modern Greek speakers typically use the same, modern, in other countries, students of Ancient Greek may use a variety of conventional approximations of the historical sound system in pronouncing Ancient Greek. Several letter combinations have special conventional sound values different from those of their single components, among them are several digraphs of vowel letters that formerly represented diphthongs but are now monophthongized. In addition to the three mentioned above, there is also ⟨ου⟩, pronounced /u/, the Ancient Greek diphthongs ⟨αυ⟩, ⟨ευ⟩ and ⟨ηυ⟩ are pronounced, and respectively in voicing environments in Modern Greek. The Modern Greek consonant combinations ⟨μπ⟩ and ⟨ντ⟩ stand for and respectively, ⟨τζ⟩ stands for, in addition, both in Ancient and Modern Greek, the letter ⟨γ⟩, before another velar consonant, stands for the velar nasal, thus ⟨γγ⟩ and ⟨γκ⟩ are pronounced like English ⟨ng⟩. There are also the combinations ⟨γχ⟩ and ⟨γξ⟩ and these signs were originally designed to mark different forms of the phonological pitch accent in Ancient Greek. The letter rho, although not a vowel, also carries a rough breathing in word-initial position, if a rho was geminated within a word, the first ρ always had the smooth breathing and the second the rough breathing leading to the transiliteration rrh. The vowel letters ⟨α, η, ω⟩ carry an additional diacritic in certain words, the iota subscript. This iota represents the former offglide of what were originally long diphthongs, ⟨ᾱι, ηι, ωι⟩, another diacritic used in Greek is the diaeresis, indicating a hiatus. In 1982, a new, simplified orthography, known as monotonic, was adopted for use in Modern Greek by the Greek state. Although it is not a diacritic, the comma has a function as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό. There are many different methods of rendering Greek text or Greek names in the Latin script, the form in which classical Greek names are conventionally rendered in English goes back to the way Greek loanwords were incorporated into Latin in antiquity. In this system, ⟨κ⟩ is replaced with ⟨c⟩, the diphthongs ⟨αι⟩ and ⟨οι⟩ are rendered as ⟨ae⟩ and ⟨oe⟩ respectively, and ⟨ει⟩ and ⟨ου⟩ are simplified to ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩ respectively
8.
Latin script
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Latin script is used as the standard method of writing in most Western and Central European languages, as well as in many languages in other parts of the world. Latin script is the basis for the largest number of alphabets of any writing system and is the most widely adopted writing system in the world, Latin script is also the basis of the International Phonetic Alphabet. The 26 most widespread letters are the contained in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The script is either called Roman script or Latin script, in reference to its origin in ancient Rome, in the context of transliteration, the term romanization or romanisation is often found. Unicode uses the term Latin as does the International Organization for Standardization, the numeral system is called the Roman numeral system, and the collection of the elements, Roman numerals. The numbers 1,2,3. are Latin/Roman script numbers for the Hindu–Arabic numeral system, the Latin alphabet spread, along with Latin, from the Italian Peninsula to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The Latin script also came into use for writing the West Slavic languages and several South Slavic languages, the speakers of East Slavic languages generally adopted Cyrillic along with Orthodox Christianity. The Serbian language uses both scripts, with Cyrillic predominating in official communication and Latin elsewhere, as determined by the Law on Official Use of the Language and Alphabet. As late as 1500, the Latin script was limited primarily to the languages spoken in Western, Northern, the Orthodox Christian Slavs of Eastern and Southeastern Europe mostly used Cyrillic, and the Greek alphabet was in use by Greek-speakers around the eastern Mediterranean. The Arabic script was widespread within Islam, both among Arabs and non-Arab nations like the Iranians, Indonesians, Malays, and Turkic peoples, most of the rest of Asia used a variety of Brahmic alphabets or the Chinese script. It is used for many Austronesian languages, including the languages of the Philippines, Latin letters served as the basis for the forms of the Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah, however, the sound values are completely different. In the late 19th century, the Romanians returned to the Latin alphabet, under French rule and Portuguese missionary influence, a Latin alphabet was devised for the Vietnamese language, which had previously used Chinese characters. In 1928, as part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürks reforms, the new Republic of Turkey adopted a Latin alphabet for the Turkish language, kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Iranian-speaking Tajikistan, and the breakaway region of Transnistria kept the Cyrillic alphabet, chiefly due to their close ties with Russia. In the 1930s and 1940s, the majority of Kurds replaced the Arabic script with two Latin alphabets, although the only official Kurdish government uses an Arabic alphabet for public documents, the Latin Kurdish alphabet remains widely used throughout the region by the majority of Kurdish-speakers. In 2015, the Kazakh government announced that the Latin alphabet would replace Cyrillic as the system for the Kazakh language by 2025. In the course of its use, the Latin alphabet was adapted for use in new languages, sometimes representing phonemes not found in languages that were written with the Roman characters. These new forms are given a place in the alphabet by defining an alphabetical order or collation sequence, a digraph is a pair of letters used to write one sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters in sequence. Examples are ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ng⟩, ⟨rh⟩, ⟨sh⟩ in English, a trigraph is made up of three letters, like the German ⟨sch⟩, the Breton ⟨c’h⟩ or the Milanese ⟨oeu⟩
9.
Cyrillic script
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The Cyrillic script /sᵻˈrɪlɪk/ is a writing system used for various alphabets across eastern Europe and north and central Asia. It is based on the Early Cyrillic, which was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 9th century AD at the Preslav Literary School. As of 2011, around 252 million people in Eurasia use it as the alphabet for their national languages. With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the official script of the European Union, following the Latin script. Cyrillic is derived from the Greek uncial script, augmented by letters from the older Glagolitic alphabet and these additional letters were used for Old Church Slavonic sounds not found in Greek. The script is named in honor of the two Byzantine brothers, Saints Cyril and Methodius, who created the Glagolitic alphabet earlier on, modern scholars believe that Cyrillic was developed and formalized by early disciples of Cyril and Methodius. In the early 18th century the Cyrillic script used in Russia was heavily reformed by Peter the Great, the new form of letters became closer to the Latin alphabet, several archaic letters were removed and several letters were personally designed by Peter the Great. West European typography culture was also adopted, Cyrillic script spread throughout the East and South Slavic territories, being adopted for writing local languages, such as Old East Slavic. Its adaptation to local languages produced a number of Cyrillic alphabets, capital and lowercase letters were not distinguished in old manuscripts. Yeri was originally a ligature of Yer and I, iotation was indicated by ligatures formed with the letter І, Ꙗ, Ѥ, Ю, Ѩ, Ѭ. Sometimes different letters were used interchangeably, for example И = І = Ї, there were also commonly used ligatures like ѠТ = Ѿ. The letters also had values, based not on Cyrillic alphabetical order. The early Cyrillic alphabet is difficult to represent on computers, many of the letterforms differed from modern Cyrillic, varied a great deal in manuscripts, and changed over time. Few fonts include adequate glyphs to reproduce the alphabet, the Unicode 5.1 standard, released on 4 April 2008, greatly improves computer support for the early Cyrillic and the modern Church Slavonic language. In Microsoft Windows, Segoe UI is notable for having complete support for the archaic Cyrillic letters since Windows 8, the development of Cyrillic typography passed directly from the medieval stage to the late Baroque, without a Renaissance phase as in Western Europe. Late Medieval Cyrillic letters show a tendency to be very tall and narrow. Peter the Great, Czar of Russia, mandated the use of westernized letter forms in the early 18th century, over time, these were largely adopted in the other languages that use the script. The development of some Cyrillic computer typefaces from Latin ones has also contributed to the visual Latinization of Cyrillic type, Cyrillic uppercase and lowercase letter forms are not as differentiated as in Latin typography
10.
Letter (alphabet)
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A letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters also appear in abjads and abugidas, letters broadly denote phonemes in the spoken form of the language, although there is rarely a consistent exact correspondence between letters and phonemes. Written signs in writing systems are best called syllabograms or logograms. Letter, borrowed from Old French lettre, entered Middle English around AD1200, letter derives from Latin littera, which may have derived, via Etruscan, from the Greek διφθέρα. The Middle English plural lettres could refer to an epistle or written document, use of the singular letter to refer to a written document emerged in the 14th century. As symbols that denote segmental speech, letters are associated with phonetics, in a purely phonemic alphabet, a single phoneme is denoted by a single letter, but in history and practice letters often denote more than one phoneme. A pair of letters designating a single phoneme is called a digraph, examples of digraphs in English include ch, sh and th. A phoneme can also be represented by three letters, called a trigraph, an example is the combination sch in German. A letter may also be associated more than one phoneme. As an example of positional effects, the Spanish letter c is pronounced before a, o, or u, letters also have specific names associated with them. These names may differ with language, dialect and history, Z, for example, is usually called zed in all English-speaking countries except the U. S. where it is named zee. Letters, as elements of alphabets, have prescribed orders and this may generally be known as alphabetical order though collation is the science devoted to the complex task of ordering and sorting of letters and words in different languages. In Spanish, for instance, ñ is a letter being sorted after n. In English, n and ñ are sorted alike, letters may also have numerical value. This is true of Roman numerals and the letters of other writing systems, in English, Arabic numerals are typically used instead of letters. Letters may be used as words, the words a and I are the most common English letter-words. Sometimes O is used for Oh in poetic situations, in extremely informal cases of writing individual letters may replace words, e. g. u may be used instead of you in English, when the letter name is pronounced as a homophone of the word. Nearly all alphabets in the world today either descend directly from development or were inspired by its design
11.
Abjad
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An abjad is a type of writing system where each symbol stands for a consonant, leaving the reader to supply the appropriate vowel. The name abjad is derived from pronouncing the first letters of the Arabic alphabet in order, the ordering of Arabic letters used to match that of the older Hebrew, Phoenician and Semitic alphabets, ʾ b g d. According to the formulations of Daniels, abjads differ from alphabets in that only consonants, abugidas mark the vowels with a diacritic, a minor attachment to the letter, or a standalone glyph. Some abugidas use a symbol to suppress the inherent vowel so that the consonant alone can be properly represented. In a syllabary, a grapheme denotes a syllable, that is. This caused fatal effects on terminology in general and especially in Semitic philology, the first abjad to gain widespread usage was the Phoenician abjad. Unlike other contemporary scripts, such as cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs and this made the script easy to learn, and seafaring Phoenician merchants took the script wherever they went. Phoenician gave rise to a number of new writing systems, including the Greek alphabet and Aramaic, the Greek alphabet evolved into the modern western alphabets, such as Latin and Cyrillic, while Aramaic became the ancestor of many modern abjads and abugidas of Asia. Impure abjads have characters for vowels, optional vowel diacritics. The term pure abjad refers to scripts entirely lacking in vowel indicators and this practice was at first rare and limited in scope, but it became increasingly common and more developed in later times. In the 9th century BC, the Greeks adapted the Phoenician script for use in their own language, the phonetic structure of the Greek language created too many ambiguities when the vowels went unrepresented, so the script was modified. They did not need letters for the sounds represented by aleph, he, heth or ayin. The letters waw and yod were also adapted into vowel signs, along with he, the major innovation of Greek was to dedicate these symbols exclusively and unambiguously to vowel sounds that could be combined arbitrarily with consonants. Abugidas developed along a different route. The basic consonantal symbol was considered to have an inherent a vowel sound, hooks or short lines attached to various parts of the basic letter modify the vowel. In this way, the South Arabian alphabet evolved into the Geez alphabet between the 5th century BC and the 5th century AD, similarly, around the 3rd century BC, the Brāhmī script developed. The other major family of abugidas, Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, was developed in the 1840s by missionary and linguist James Evans for the Cree. Evans used features of Devanagari script and Pitman shorthand to create his initial abugida, later in the 19th century, other missionaries adapted Evans system to other Canadian aboriginal languages
12.
Aramaic language
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Aramaic is a language or group of languages belonging to the Semitic subfamily of the Afroasiatic language family. More specifically, it is part of the Northwest Semitic group, the Aramaic alphabet was widely adopted for other languages and is ancestral to the Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic alphabets. During its approximately 3000 years of history, Aramaic has served variously as a language of administration of empires, therefore, there is not one singular, static Aramaic language, each time and place rather has had its own variation. The Aramaic languages are now considered endangered, Aram is used as a proper name of several people in the Torah including descendants of Shem, Nahor, and Jacob. Ancient Aram, bordering northern Israel and now called Syria, is considered the epicenter of Aramaic. The language is often considered to have originated within Assyria. Interestingly, the Christian New Testament, for which the constituent texts are written in Koine Greek. The Hellenized Jewish community of Alexandria instead translated Aramaic to the Syrian tongue, a related language, Mlahsô, has recently become extinct. Mandaeans living in the Khuzestan Province of Iran and scattered throughout Iraq and it is quite distinct from any other Aramaic variety. Central Neo-Aramaic consists of Turoyo and the recently extinct Mlahsô, very little remains of Western Aramaic. All these speakers of Modern Western Aramaic are fluent in Arabic, Jewish Palestinian Aramaic and Samaritan Aramaic are preserved in liturgical and literary usage. Each dialect of Aramaic has its own pronunciation, and it would not be feasible here to go into all these properties. Aramaic has a palette of 25 to 40 distinct phonemes. The open vowel is an open near-front unrounded vowel and it usually has a back counterpart, and a front counterpart. There is much correspondence between these vowels between dialects, there is some evidence that Middle Babylonian dialects did not distinguish between the short a and short e. In West Syriac dialects, and possibly Middle Galilean, the long a became the o sound, the open e and back a are often indicated in writing by the use of the letters א alaph or ה he. The close front vowel is the long i and it has a slightly more open counterpart, the long e, as in the final vowel of café. Both of these have shorter counterparts, which tend to be pronounced more open
13.
Persian alphabet
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The Persian alphabet or Perso-Arabic alphabet is a writing system based on the Arabic script and used for the Persian language. It has four more than the Arabic alphabet, پ, چ, ژ. The Persian script is an abjad and is exclusively written cursively and that is, the majority of the letters in a word connect to each other. This is also implemented on computers, whenever the Persian alphabet is typed, the computer automatically connects the letters to each other. Words are written right to left. Also, vowels are underrepresented in writing, see below for details, the replacement of the Pahlavi scripts with the Persian alphabet in order to write the Persian language was done by the Tahirid dynasty in ninth century Greater Khorasan. Below are the 32 letters of the modern Persian alphabet, since the script is cursive, the appearance of a letter changes depending on its position, isolated, initial, medial, and final of a word. The names of the letter are mostly the ones used in Arabic, the only ambiguous name is he, which is used for both ﺡ and ه. For clarification, these are often called ḥe-ye jimi and he-ye do-češm, respectively. Letters which do not link to a following letter Seven letters – و, ژ, ﺯ, ﺭ, ﺫ, ﺩ, ﺍ – do not connect to a letter as the rest of the letters of the alphabet do. These seven letters have the form in isolated and initial position. For example, when the letter ا alef is at the beginning of a such as اینجا injā. Persian script has adopted a subset of Arabic diacritics which consists of zabar /æ/, zir /e/, other Arabic diacritics may be seen in Arabic loan-words. The following are not actual letters but different orthographical shapes for letters, and in the case of the lām alef, as to ﺀ hamze, it has only a single graphic, since it is never tied to a preceding or following letter. However, it is seated on a vāv, ye or alef. Technically, hamze is not a letter but a diacritic, although at first glance they may seem similar, there are many differences in the way the different languages use the alphabets. For example, similar words are written differently in Persian and Arabic, vowel notation is simple but its history is complicated. Classical Arabic has a length distinction, in writing, long vowels are normally written ambiguously by letters known as matres lectionis while short ones are normally omitted entirely
14.
Ancient South Arabian script
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The ancient Yemeni alphabet branched from the Proto-Sinaitic script in about the 9th century BC. It was used for writing the Old South Arabian languages of the Sabaic, Qatabanic, Hadramautic, Minaean, Himyaritic, the earliest inscriptions in the alphabet date to the 9th century BC in the Akele Guzai region, Eritrea. There are no vowels, instead using the mater lectionis to mark them, in Ethiopia and Eritrea it evolved later into the Geez script, which, with added symbols throughout the centuries, has been used to write Amharic, Tigrinya and Tigre, as well as other languages. Zabūr is the name of the form of the South Arabian script that was used by the ancient Yemenis in addition to their monumental script. As yet only one thousand such texts have been discovered, of which perhaps some 26 have been published. It is usually written from right to left but can also be written left to right. When written from left to right the characters are flipped horizontally, the spacing or separation between words is done with a vertical bar mark. Letters in words are not connected together and it does not implement any diacritical marks, differing in this respect from the modern Arabic alphabet. The South Arabian alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in October,2009 with the release of version 5.2, the Unicode block, called Old South Arabian, is U+10A60–U+10A7F. Note that U+10A7D OLD SOUTH ARABIAN NUMBER ONE represents both the one and a word divider. Photos from National Museum of Yemen, Photos from Yemen Military Museum, Eduard Glaser Carl Rathjens Stein, the Ancient South Arabian Minuscule Inscriptions on Wood, A New Genre of Pre-Islamic Epigraphy. Jaarbericht van het Vooraziatisch-Egyptisch Genootschap Ex Oriente Lux, die altsüdarabischen Minuskelinschriften auf Holzstäbchen aus der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek in München. Il trono della regina di Saba, Artemide, Roma. pp. 149–155, Ancient scripts on South Arabian SI Omniglots entry on South Arabian
15.
Ge'ez script
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Geez is a script used as an abugida for several languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea. It originated as an abjad and was first used to write Geez, now the language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. In Amharic and Tigrinya, the script is often called fidäl, the Geez script has been adapted to write other, mostly Semitic, languages, particularly Amharic in Ethiopia, and Tigrinya in both Eritrea and Ethiopia. It is also used for Sebatbeit, Meen, and most other languages of Ethiopia, in Eritrea it is used for Tigre, and it has traditionally been used for Blin, a Cushitic language. Tigre, spoken in western and northern Eritrea, is considered to resemble Geez more than do the other derivative languages, some other languages in the Horn of Africa, such as Oromo, used to be written using Geez, but have migrated to Latin-based orthographies. For the representation of sounds, this uses a system that is common among linguists who work on Ethiopian Semitic languages. This differs somewhat from the conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet, see the articles on the individual languages for information on the pronunciation. The earliest inscriptions of Semitic languages in Eritrea and Ethiopia date to the 9th century BC in Epigraphic South Arabian, after the 7th and 6th centuries BC, however, variants of the script arose, evolving in the direction of the Geez abugida. This evolution can be seen most clearly in evidence from inscriptions in Tigray region in northern Ethiopia, at least one of Wazebas coins from the late 3rd or early 4th century contains a vocalized letter, some 30 or so years before Ezana. It has been argued that the marking pattern of the script reflects a South Asian system. On the other hand, emphatic P̣ait ጰ, a Geez innovation, is a modification of Ṣädai ጸ, while Pesa ፐ is based on Tawe ተ. Thus, there are 24 correspondences of Geez and the South Arabian alphabet, Many of the names are cognate with those of Phoenician. Two alphabets were used to write the Geez language, an abjad and later an abugida. The abjad, used until c.330 AD, had 26 consonantal letters, h, l, ḥ, m, ś, r, s, ḳ, b, t, ḫ, n, ʾ, k, w, ʿ, z, y, d, g, ṭ, p̣, ṣ, ṣ́, f, p Vowels were not indicated. Modern Geez is written left to right. The Geez abugida developed under the influence of Christian scripture by adding obligatory vocalic diacritics to the consonantal letters. The diacritics for the vowels, u, i, a, e, ə, o, were fused with the consonants in a recognizable but slightly irregular way, the original form of the consonant was used when the vowel was ä, the so-called inherent vowel. The resulting forms are shown below in their traditional order, for some consonants, there is an eighth form for the diphthong -wa or -oa, and a ninth for -yä
16.
Egyptian hieroglyphs
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Egyptian hieroglyphs were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt. It combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with a total of some 1,000 distinct characters, cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts are derived from hieroglyphic writing, the writing system continued to be used throughout the Late Period, as well as the Persian and Ptolemaic periods. Late survivals of hieroglyphic use are found well into the Roman period, with the closing of pagan temples in the 5th century, knowledge of hieroglyphic writing was lost, and the script remained undeciphered throughout the medieval and early modern period. The decipherment of hieroglyphs would only be solved in the 1820s by Jean-François Champollion, the word hieroglyph comes from the Greek adjective ἱερογλυφικός, a compound of ἱερός and γλύφω, supposedly a calque of an Egyptian phrase mdw·w-nṯr gods words. The glyphs themselves were called τὰ ἱερογλυφικὰ γράμματα the sacred engraved letters, the word hieroglyph has become a noun in English, standing for an individual hieroglyphic character. As used in the sentence, the word hieroglyphic is an adjective. Hieroglyphs emerged from the artistic traditions of Egypt. For example, symbols on Gerzean pottery from c.4000 BC have been argued to resemble hieroglyphic writing, proto-hieroglyphic symbol systems develop in the second half of the 4th millennium BC, such as the clay labels of a Predynastic ruler called Scorpion I recovered at Abydos in 1998. The first full sentence written in hieroglyphs so far discovered was found on a seal found in the tomb of Seth-Peribsen at Umm el-Qaab. There are around 800 hieroglyphs dating back to the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, by the Greco-Roman period, there are more than 5,000. However, given the lack of evidence, no definitive determination has been made as to the origin of hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt. Since the 1990s, and discoveries such as the Abydos glyphs, as writing developed and became more widespread among the Egyptian people, simplified glyph forms developed, resulting in the hieratic and demotic scripts. These variants were more suited than hieroglyphs for use on papyrus. Hieroglyphic writing was not, however, eclipsed, but existed alongside the other forms, especially in monumental, the Rosetta Stone contains three parallel scripts – hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek. Hieroglyphs continued to be used under Persian rule, and after Alexander the Greats conquest of Egypt, during the ensuing Ptolemaic and Roman periods. It appears that the quality of comments from Greek and Roman writers about hieroglyphs came about, at least in part. Some believed that hieroglyphs may have functioned as a way to distinguish true Egyptians from some of the foreign conquerors, another reason may be the refusal to tackle a foreign culture on its own terms, which characterized Greco-Roman approaches to Egyptian culture generally
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Greek language
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Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any living language, spanning 34 centuries of written records and its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the major part of its history, other systems, such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary, were used previously. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic and many other writing systems. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world, during antiquity, Greek was a widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world and many places beyond. It would eventually become the official parlance of the Byzantine Empire, the language is spoken by at least 13.2 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey, and the Greek diaspora. Greek roots are used to coin new words for other languages, Greek. Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, the earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the worlds oldest recorded living language. Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now extinct Anatolian languages, the Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods, Proto-Greek, the unrecorded but assumed last ancestor of all known varieties of Greek. The unity of Proto-Greek would have ended as Hellenic migrants entered the Greek peninsula sometime in the Neolithic era or the Bronze Age, Mycenaean Greek, the language of the Mycenaean civilisation. It is recorded in the Linear B script on tablets dating from the 15th century BC onwards, Ancient Greek, in its various dialects, the language of the Archaic and Classical periods of the ancient Greek civilisation. It was widely known throughout the Roman Empire, after the Roman conquest of Greece, an unofficial bilingualism of Greek and Latin was established in the city of Rome and Koine Greek became a first or second language in the Roman Empire. The origin of Christianity can also be traced through Koine Greek, Medieval Greek, also known as Byzantine Greek, the continuation of Koine Greek in Byzantine Greece, up to the demise of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century. Much of the written Greek that was used as the language of the Byzantine Empire was an eclectic middle-ground variety based on the tradition of written Koine. Modern Greek, Stemming from Medieval Greek, Modern Greek usages can be traced in the Byzantine period and it is the language used by the modern Greeks, and, apart from Standard Modern Greek, there are several dialects of it. In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia, the historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of the Greek language is often emphasised. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than a foreign language and it is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, Homeric Greek is probably closer to demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English, Greek is spoken by about 13 million people, mainly in Greece, Albania and Cyprus, but also worldwide by the large Greek diaspora. Greek is the language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population
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Alpha
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Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 1 and it was derived from the Phoenician and Hebrew letter aleph - an ox or leader. Letters that arose from alpha include the Latin A and the Cyrillic letter А, in English, the noun alpha is used as a synonym for beginning, or first, reflecting its Greek roots. In Ancient Greek, alpha was pronounced and could be either long or short. Where there is ambiguity, long and short alpha are sometimes written with a macron and breve today, Ᾱᾱ, ὥρα = ὥρᾱ hōrā a time γλῶσσα = γλῶσσᾰ glôssa tongue In Modern Greek, vowel length has been lost, and all instances of alpha simply represent. It can also combine with the iota subscript, in the Attic-Ionic dialect of Ancient Greek, long alpha fronted to. In Ionic, the took place in all positions. In Attic, the shift did not take place after epsilon, iota, in Doric and Aeolic, long alpha is preserved in all positions. It originates from the Proto-Indo-European *n̥- and is cognate with English un-, copulative a is the Greek prefix ἁ- or ἀ- ha-, a-. The letter alpha represents various concepts in physics and chemistry, including radiation, angular acceleration, alpha particles, alpha carbon. Alpha also stands for thermal expansion coefficient of a compound in physical chemistry and it is also commonly used in mathematics in algebraic solutions representing quantities such as angles. Furthermore, in mathematics, the alpha is used to denote the area underneath a normal curve in statistics to denote significance level when proving null. In zoology, it is used to name the dominant individual in a wolf or dog pack, the proportionality operator ∝ is sometimes mistaken for alpha. The uppercase letter alpha is not generally used as a symbol because it tends to be rendered identically to the uppercase Latin A, in the International Phonetic Alphabet, a letter based on the lower case of alpha represents the open back unrounded vowel. Alpha was derived from aleph, which in Phoenician means ox, plutarch, in Moralia, presents a discussion on why the letter alpha stands first in the alphabet. He then added that he would rather be assisted by Lamprias, his own grandfather, than by Dionysus grandfather, according to Plutarchs natural order of attribution of the vowels to the planets, alpha was connected with the Moon. Alpha, both as a symbol and term, is used to refer to or describe a variety of things, the New Testament has God declaring himself to be the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. The term alpha has been used to position in social hierarchy
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Glottal consonant
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Glottal consonants are consonants using the glottis as their primary articulation. However, glottal consonants behave as consonants in many languages. For example, in Literary Arabic, most words are formed from a root C-C-C consisting of three consonants, which are inserted into templates such as /CaːCiC/ or /maCCuːC/. The glottal consonants /h/ and /ʔ/ can occupy any of the three root consonant slots, just like normal consonants such as /k/ or /n/, glottal consonants in the International Phonetic Alphabet, In many languages, the fricatives are not true fricatives. This is a usage of the word. They instead represent transitional states of the glottis without a place of articulation. Is a breathy-voiced transition, and could be transcribed as, the glottal stop occurs in many languages. Often all vocalic onsets are preceded by a stop, for example in German. The Hawaiian language writes the glottal stop as the ‘okina ‘, because the glottis is necessarily closed for the glottal stop, it cannot be voiced. So-called voiced glottal stops are not full stops, but rather creaky voiced glottal approximants that may be transcribed and they occur as the intervocalic allophone of glottal stop in many languages. Gimi contrasts /ʔ/ and /ʔ̞/, corresponding to /k/ and /ɡ/ in related languages, glottalic consonant Glottalization Place of articulation Index of phonetics articles Guttural Ladefoged, Peter, Maddieson, Ian. The Sounds of the Worlds Languages
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Vowel
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In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, with two competing definitions. There is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis and this contrasts with consonants, such as the English sh, which have a constriction or closure at some point along the vocal tract. In the other, phonological definition, a vowel is defined as syllabic, a phonetically equivalent but non-syllabic sound is a semivowel. In oral languages, phonetic vowels normally form the peak of many to all syllables, whereas consonants form the onset and coda. Some languages allow other sounds to form the nucleus of a syllable, the word vowel comes from the Latin word vocalis, meaning vocal. In English, the vowel is commonly used to mean both vowel sounds and the written symbols that represent them. The phonetic definition of vowel does not always match the phonological definition, the approximants and illustrate this, both are produced without much of a constriction in the vocal tract, but they occur at the onset of syllables. A similar debate arises over whether a word like bird in a dialect has an r-colored vowel /ɝ/ or a syllabic consonant /ɹ̩/. The American linguist Kenneth Pike suggested the terms vocoid for a vowel and vowel for a phonological vowel, so using this terminology. Nonetheless, the phonetic and phonemic definitions would still conflict for the syllabic el in table, or the syllabic nasals in button, daniel Jones developed the cardinal vowel system to describe vowels in terms of the features of tongue height, tongue backness and roundedness. These three parameters are indicated in the schematic quadrilateral IPA vowel diagram on the right, there are additional features of vowel quality, such as the velum position, type of vocal fold vibration, and tongue root position. This conception of vowel articulation has been known to be inaccurate since 1928, Peter Ladefoged has said that early phoneticians. Thought they were describing the highest point of the tongue, and they were actually describing formant frequencies. The IPA Handbook concedes that the quadrilateral must be regarded as an abstraction. Vowel height is named for the position of the tongue relative to either the roof of the mouth or the aperture of the jaw. However, it refers to the first formant, abbreviated F1. Height is defined by the inverse of the F1 value, The higher the frequency of the first formant, however, if more precision is required, true-mid vowels may be written with a lowering diacritic. Although English contrasts six heights in its vowels, they are interdependent with differences in backness and it appears that some varieties of German have five contrasting vowel heights independently of length or other parameters
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Latin
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Latin is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. The Latin alphabet is derived from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets, Latin was originally spoken in Latium, in the Italian Peninsula. Through the power of the Roman Republic, it became the dominant language, Vulgar Latin developed into the Romance languages, such as Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Romanian. Latin, Italian and French have contributed many words to the English language, Latin and Ancient Greek roots are used in theology, biology, and medicine. By the late Roman Republic, Old Latin had been standardised into Classical Latin, Vulgar Latin was the colloquial form spoken during the same time and attested in inscriptions and the works of comic playwrights like Plautus and Terence. Late Latin is the language from the 3rd century. Later, Early Modern Latin and Modern Latin evolved, Latin was used as the language of international communication, scholarship, and science until well into the 18th century, when it began to be supplanted by vernaculars. Ecclesiastical Latin remains the language of the Holy See and the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church. Today, many students, scholars and members of the Catholic clergy speak Latin fluently and it is taught in primary, secondary and postsecondary educational institutions around the world. The language has been passed down through various forms, some inscriptions have been published in an internationally agreed, monumental, multivolume series, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Authors and publishers vary, but the format is about the same, volumes detailing inscriptions with a critical apparatus stating the provenance, the reading and interpretation of these inscriptions is the subject matter of the field of epigraphy. The works of several hundred ancient authors who wrote in Latin have survived in whole or in part and they are in part the subject matter of the field of classics. The Cat in the Hat, and a book of fairy tales, additional resources include phrasebooks and resources for rendering everyday phrases and concepts into Latin, such as Meissners Latin Phrasebook. The Latin influence in English has been significant at all stages of its insular development. From the 16th to the 18th centuries, English writers cobbled together huge numbers of new words from Latin and Greek words, dubbed inkhorn terms, as if they had spilled from a pot of ink. Many of these words were used once by the author and then forgotten, many of the most common polysyllabic English words are of Latin origin through the medium of Old French. Romance words make respectively 59%, 20% and 14% of English, German and those figures can rise dramatically when only non-compound and non-derived words are included. Accordingly, Romance words make roughly 35% of the vocabulary of Dutch, Roman engineering had the same effect on scientific terminology as a whole
22.
A
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A is the first letter and the first vowel in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter alpha, from which it derives, the upper-case version consists of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by a horizontal bar. The lower-case version can be written in two forms, the double-storey a and single-storey ɑ, the latter is commonly used in handwriting and fonts based on it, especially fonts intended to be read by children, and is also found in italic type. The earliest certain ancestor of A is aleph, the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet, in turn, the ancestor of aleph may have been a pictogram of an ox head in proto-Sinaitic script influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs, styled as a triangular head with two horns extended. The Phoenician alphabet letter had a form that served as the base for some later forms. Its name is thought to have corresponded closely to the Hebrew or Arabic aleph, the Etruscans brought the Greek alphabet to their civilization in the Italian Peninsula and left the letter unchanged. During Roman times, there were many variant forms of the letter A, first was the monumental or lapidary style, which was used when inscribing on stone or other permanent mediums. There was also a style used for everyday or utilitarian writing. Variants also existed that were intermediate between the monumental and cursive styles, the known variants include the early semi-uncial, the uncial, and the later semi-uncial. At the end of the Roman Empire, several variants of the cursive minuscule developed through Western Europe. By the 9th century, the Caroline script, which was similar to the present-day form, was the principal form used in book-making. This form was derived through a combining of prior forms, 15th-century Italy saw the formation of the two main variants that are known today. These variants, the Italic and Roman forms, were derived from the Caroline Script version, the Italic form, also called script a, is used in most current handwriting and consists of a circle and vertical stroke. This slowly developed from the fifth-century form resembling the Greek letter tau in the hands of medieval Irish and English writers, the Roman form is used in most printed material, it consists of a small loop with an arc over it. Both derive from the majuscule form, in Greek handwriting, it was common to join the left leg and horizontal stroke into a single loop, as demonstrated by the uncial version shown. Many fonts then made the right leg vertical, in some of these, the serif that began the right leg stroke developed into an arc, resulting in the printed form, while in others it was dropped, resulting in the modern handwritten form. Italic type is used to mark emphasis or more generally to distinguish one part of a text from the rest. There are some other cases aside from italic type where script a, the double ⟨aa⟩ sequence does not occur in native English words, but is found in some words derived from foreign languages such as Aaron and aardvark
23.
A (Cyrillic)
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A is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents a central unrounded vowel /a/, like the pronunciation of ⟨a⟩ in father. The Cyrillic letter А is romanized using the Latin letter A, the Cyrillic letter А was derived directly from the Greek letter Alpha. In the Early Cyrillic alphabet its name was азъ, meaning I, in the Cyrillic numeral system, the Cyrillic letter А had a value of 1. Through history the Cyrillic letter Aa has had various shapes, but today is standardised on one that looks exactly like the Latin letter Aa, including the italic forms. In most languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet – such as Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian, Serbian, Macedonian and Bulgarian – the Cyrillic letter А represents the open central unrounded vowel /a/. In Ingush and Chechen the Cyrillic letter А represents both the open back unrounded vowel /ɑ/ and the mid-central vowel /ə/, in Tuvan the letter can be written as a double vowel. A a, Latin letter A Ă ă, Latin letter A with breve, used in Romanian language, Ä ä, Latin letter A with diaeresis  â, Latin letter A with circumflex, after used in Vietnamese letter 3rd. Α α, Greek letter Alpha Cyrillic characters in Unicode The dictionary definition of А at Wiktionary The dictionary definition of а at Wiktionary
24.
Glottal stop
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The glottal stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʔ⟩, using IPA, this sound is known as a glottal plosive. In English, the glottal stop occurs as an open juncture, for most US English speakers, a glottal stop is used as an allophone of /t/ between a vowel and m or a syllabic n except in slow speech. In British English, the stop is most familiar in the Cockney pronunciation of butter as buer. The non-phonemic glottal stop always occurs before isolated or initial vowels, features of the glottal stop, Its manner of articulation is occlusive, which means it is produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract. Since the consonant is also oral, with no outlet, the airflow is blocked entirely. Its phonation is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibration of the cords, necessarily so, because the vocal cords are held tightly together. It is a consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth only. Because the sound is not produced with airflow over the tongue, the airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air solely with the lungs and diaphragm, as in most sounds. Although this segment is not a phoneme in English, it is present phonetically in nearly all dialects of English as an allophone of /t/ in the syllable coda. Speakers of Cockney, Scottish English and several other British dialects also pronounce an intervocalic /t/ between vowels as in city. In Received Pronunciation, a stop is inserted before a tautosyllabic voiceless stop, e. g. sto’p, tha’t, kno’ck, wa’tch, also lea’p, soa’k, hel’p. In many languages that do not allow a sequence of vowels, such as Persian, there are intricate interactions between falling tone and the glottal stop in the histories of such languages as Danish, Chinese and Thai. In many languages, the intervocalic allophone of the glottal stop is a creaky-voiced glottal approximant. These are only known to be contrastive in one language, Gimi, in the traditional Romanization of many languages, such as Arabic, the glottal stop is transcribed with an apostrophe, ⟨’⟩, and this is the source of the IPA character ⟨ʔ⟩. In Malay the glottal stop is represented by the letter ⟨k⟩, in Võro, other scripts also have letters used for representing the glottal stop, such as the Hebrew letter aleph ⟨א⟩, and the Cyrillic letter palochka ⟨Ӏ⟩ used in several Caucasian languages. In Tundra Nenets it is represented by the letters apostrophe ⟨ʼ⟩, in Japanese, glottal stops occur at the end of interjections of surprise or anger, and are represented by the character ⟨っ⟩. In the graphic representation of most Philippine languages, the stop has no consistent symbolization
25.
Mappiq
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The mappiq is a diacritic used in the Hebrew alphabet. It is part of the Masoretes system of niqqud, and was added to Hebrew orthography at the same time and it takes the form of a dot in the middle of a letter. An identical point with a different phonetic function is called a dagesh, the mappiq is used to mark the letter ה, indicating that it is to be pronounced as a consonant, although in a position where the letter usually indicates a vowel. Before the vowel points were invented, some consonants were used to indicate vowel sounds and these consonants are called matres lectionis. The letter he at the end of a word can indicate the sound a or e. When it does, it is not acting as a consonant, however, silent final h being also a feature of English, it is usually retained in Hebrew transliterations to distinguish final he from final aleph. The divine name Yah has a mappiq, so the last letter shall not be read as a vowel a, the most common occurrence of mappiq is in the suffix -ah, meaning her. A he with mappiq is meant to be pronounced as a full consonant h, in modern Hebrew, however, it is normally silent, although it is still pronounced in religious contexts by careful readers of the prayers and scriptures. In Masoretic manuscripts the opposite of a mappiq would be indicated by a rafe and this is no longer found in Hebrew. Hebrew alphabet Hebrew phonology Mater lectionis Rafe
26.
Proto-Sinaitic script
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It is also referred to as Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite, Old Canaanite, and Canaanite. The earliest Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are dated to between the mid-19th and the mid-16th century BC. The principal debate is between an early date, around 1850 BC, and a date, around 1550 BC. The choice of one or the other date decides whether it is proto-Sinaitic or proto-Canaanite, the so-called Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions were discovered in the winter of 1904–1905 in Sinai by Hilda and Flinders Petrie. The Wadi el-Hol inscriptions strongly suggest a date of development of Proto-Sinaitic writing from the mid-19th to 18th centuries BC, the Sinai inscriptions are best known from carved graffiti and votive texts from a mountain in the Sinai called Serabit el-Khadim and its temple to the Egyptian goddess Hathor. The mountain contained turquoise mines which were visited by repeated expeditions over 800 years, many of the workers and officials were from the Nile Delta, and included large numbers of Canaanites who had been allowed to settle the eastern Delta. The date of the inscriptions is placed in the 17th or 16th century BC. Four inscriptions have been found in the temple, on two small statues and on either side of a small stone sphinx. They are crudely done, suggesting that the workers who made them were illiterate apart from this script and they are all very short, most consisting of only a couple of letters, and may have been written by Canaanite caravaners or soldiers from Egypt. They sometimes go by the name Proto-Canaanite, although the term Proto-Canaanite is also applied to early Phoenician or Hebrew inscriptions, the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions were carved on the stone sides of an ancient high-desert military and trade road linking Thebes and Abydos, in the heart of literate Egypt. They are in a wadi in the Qena bend of the Nile, 25°57′N 32°25′E, among dozens of hieratic and hieroglyphic inscriptions. If the latter, h1 and h2 may be graphic variants rather than different consonants, some scholars think that the רב rb at the beginning of Inscription 1 is likely rebbe, and that the אל ʾl at the end of Inscription 2 is likely ʾel god. Brian Colless has published a translation of the text, in some of the signs are treated as logograms or rebuses Excellent banquet of the celebration of ʿAnat. ʾEl will provide plenty of wine and victuals for the celebration and we will sacrifice to her an ox and a prime fatling. This interpretation fits into the pattern in some of the surrounding Egyptian inscriptions, according to the alphabet hypothesis, the shapes of the letters would have evolved from Proto-Sinaitic forms into Phoenician forms, but most of the names of the letters would have remained the same. Below is a table showing selected Proto-Sinaitic signs and the correspondences with Phoenician letters. Also shown are the values, names, and descendants of the Phoenician letters. The Other section shows the corresponding Archaic Greek, Modern Greek, Etruscan, abjad Byblos syllabary Ugaritic script Albright, Wm. F
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Paleo-Hebrew alphabet
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The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, also spelt Palaeo-Hebrew alphabet, is a variant of the Phoenician alphabet. Like the Phoenician alphabet, the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet contains 22 letters, all of which are consonants, the term was coined by Solomon Birnbaum in 1954, he wrote, To apply the term Phoenician to the script of the Hebrews is hardly suitable. Still, the script is nearly identical to the Phoenician script, archeological evidence of the use of the script by the Israelites for writing the Hebrew language dates to around the 10th century BCE. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet began to fall out of use by the Jews in the 5th century BCE, the present Jewish square-script Hebrew alphabet evolved from the Aramaic alphabet. The Samaritans, now fewer than 1000 people, have continued to use a derivative of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, the chart below compares the letters of the Phoenician script with those of the Paleo-Hebrew and the present Hebrew alphabet, with names traditionally used in English. According to contemporary scholars, the Paleo-Hebrew script developed alongside others in the region during the course of the late second and it is closely related to the Phoenician script. The earliest known inscription in the Paleo-Hebrew script was the Zayit Stone discovered on a wall at Tel Zayit, the 22 letters were carved on one side of the 38 lb stone - which resembles a bowl on the other. The find is attributed to the mid-10th century BCE, the script of the Gezer calendar, dated to the late 10th century BCE, bears strong resemblance to contemporaneous Phoenician script from inscriptions at Byblos. Clear Hebrew features are visible in the scripts of the Moabite inscriptions of the Mesha Stele, in 1855 a Phoenician inscription in 22 lines was found among the ruins of Sidon. Each line contained about 40 or 50 characters, a facsimile copy of the writing was published in United States Magazine in July 1855. The inscription was on the lid of a stone sarcophagus carved in fine Egyptian style. The writing was primarily a history of a king of Sidon buried in the sarcophagus. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet was in use in the ancient Israelite kingdoms of Israel. Following the exile of the Kingdom of Judah in the 6th century BCE, in the Babylonian exile, Jews began using a form of the Assyrian script, the Samaritans, who remained in the Land of Israel, continued to use the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. After the fall of the Persian Empire, Jews used both scripts before settling on the Assyrian form, for a limited time thereafter, the use of the Paleo-Hebrew script among Jews was retained only to write the Tetragrammaton. The independent Hebrew script evolved by developing numerous cursive features, the features of the Phoenician alphabet being ever less pronounced with the passage of time. The aversion of the script may indicate that the custom of erecting stelae by the kings. Even the engraved inscriptions from the 8th century exhibit elements of the style, such as the shading
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Modern Standard Arabic
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Modern Standard Arabic, Standard Arabic, or Literary Arabic is the standardized and literary variety of Arabic used in writing and in most formal speech. It is considered a pluricentric language, MSA is based on classical Arabic, and differences between the two varieties of the language are directly related to modernizing and simplification, both in speaking and writing styles. Classical Arabic, also known as Quranic Arabic, is the used in the Quran as well as in numerous literary texts from Umayyad. Many Muslims study Classical Arabic in order to read the Quran in its original language, Modern Standard Arabic is the literary standard across the Middle East, North Africa, Horn of Africa and is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Most printed matter in the Arab League—including most books, newspapers, magazines, official documents and they are not normally written, although a certain amount of literature exists in many of them. Literary Arabic is the language of all Arab League countries and is the only form of Arabic taught in schools at all stages. Additionally, some Christian Arabic speakers recite prayers in it, as it is considered the literary language and this diglossic situation facilitates code-switching in which a speaker switches back and forth between the two dialects of the language, sometimes even within the same sentence. People speak MSA as a language if they speak other languages native to a country as their first language. Modern Standard Arabic is also spoken by people of Arab descent outside the Arab world when people of Arab descent speaking different dialects communicate each other, as there is a prestige or standard dialect of vernacular Arabic, speakers of standard colloquial dialects code-switch between these particular dialects and MSA. For these reasons, Modern Standard Arabic is generally treated separately in non-Arab sources, Arabic sources generally tend to regard MSA and Classical Arabic as different registers of one and the same language. Speakers of Modern Standard Arabic do not always observe the rules of Classical Arabic grammar. On the whole, Modern Standard Arabic is not homogeneous, there are authors who write in a very close to the classical models. As MSA is a revised and simplified form of Classical Arabic, as diglossia is involved, various Arabic dialects freely borrow words from MSA, this situation is similar to Romance languages, wherein scores of words were borrowed directly from formal Latin. It depends on the knowledge and attitude to the grammar of Classical Arabic, as well as the region. Pronunciation of foreign names in MSA is loose, names can be pronounced or even spelled differently in different regions, pronunciation also depends on the persons education, linguistic knowledge and abilities. Modern languages have also influenced pronunciation or word order. Examples are Turkish and English in Egypt, French in North Africa, Lebanon and Syria, English and Hebrew in Israel, notes, the marginal phoneme /ɫ/ only occurs in the word الله /aɫːaːh/ and words derived from it. /u/ can also have different realizations, i. e and they are distinct phonemes in loan words
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Israel Defense Forces
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The Israel Defense Forces, commonly known in Israel by the Hebrew acronym Tzahal, are the military forces of the State of Israel. They consist of the forces, air force, and navy. It is the military wing of the Israeli security forces. The IDF is headed by its Chief of General Staff, the Ramatkal, subordinate to the Defense Minister of Israel, Lieutenant general Gadi Eizenkot has served as Chief of Staff since 2015. The number of wars and border conflicts in which the IDF has been involved in its history makes it one of the most battle-trained armed forces in the world. The Israel Defense Forces differs from most armed forces in the world in many ways, differences include the mandatory conscription of women and its structure, which emphasizes close relations between the army, navy, and air force. Since its founding, the IDF has been designed to match Israels unique security situation. The IDF is one of Israeli societys most prominent institutions, influencing the economy, culture. In 1965, the Israel Defense Forces was awarded the Israel Prize for its contribution to education, the Uzi submachine gun was invented in Israel and used by the IDF until December 2003, ending a service that began in 1954. The Israeli cabinet ratified the name Israel Defense Forces, Tzva HaHagana LeYisrael, literally army for the defense of Israel, the other main contender was Tzva Yisrael. The name was chosen because it conveyed the idea that the role was defense, and because it incorporated the name Haganah. Among the primary opponents of the name were Minister Haim-Moshe Shapira, the IDF traces its roots to Jewish paramilitary organizations in the New Yishuv, starting with the Second Aliyah. The first such organization was Bar-Giora, founded in September 1907 and it was converted to Hashomer in April 1909, which operated until the British Mandate of Palestine came into being in 1920. Hashomer was an elitist organization with narrow scope, and was created to protect against criminal gangs seeking to steal property. During World War I, the forerunners of the Haganah/IDF were the Zion Mule Corps, after the Arab riots against Jews in April 1920, the Yishuvs leadership saw the need to create a nationwide underground defense organization, and the Haganah was founded in June of the same year. The Haganah became a defense force after the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine with an organized structure. During World War II the successor to the Jewish Legion of World War I was the Jewish Brigade, the IDF was founded following the establishment of the State of Israel, after Defense Minister and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion issued an order on 26 May 1948. The order called for the establishment of the Israel Defense Forces, although Ben-Gurion had no legal authority to issue such an order, the order was made legal by the cabinet on 31 May
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Edom
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Edom is the name of a country and a people located initially in Transjordan, between Ammon to the north, the Dead Sea and the Arabah to the west, and the Arabian desert to the south and east. Edom is a used in written sources relating to the late Bronze Age and to the entire Iron Age in the Levant, such as the Hebrew Bible. In classical antiquity the cognate name Idumea was used to refer to an area in the same general region. Edom is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, but also in a list of the Egyptian pharaoh Seti I from c.1215 BC, the Edomites, who have been identified archaeologically, were a Semitic people who probably arrived in the region around the 14th century BC. Archaeological investigation showed that the country flourished between the 13th and 8th centuries BC, and was destroyed after a period of decline in the 6th century BC by the Babylonians. Once pushed out of their territory, the Edomites settled during the Persian period in an area comprising the hills of Judea down to the area north of Beer Sheva. Here the people appear under the form of their old name, as Idumeans or Idumaeans, and their new territory is called Idumea or Idumaea. The Hebrew word Edom means red, and is derived from the name of its founder, whose name was Esau. Later, as an adult, he sold his birthright to his brother Jacob for red pottage. The Tanakh describes the Edomites as descendants of Esau, the Edomites may have been connected with the Shasu and Shutu, nomadic raiders mentioned in Egyptian sources. The earliest Iron Age settlements—possibly copper mining camps—date to the 9th century BC, settlement intensified by the late 8th century BC and the main sites so far excavated have been dated between the 8th and 6th centuries BC. This occurred after the Hebrew prophet Isaiah had earlier quoted Yahweh as pronouncing that Edom was marked for destruction, another scriptural reference from Ezekiel chapter 35 foretells that Edom will be completely destroyed. According to the Egyptian inscriptions, the Aduma at times extended their possessions to the borders of Egypt, after the conquest of Judah by the Babylonians, Edomites settled in the region of Hebron. They prospered in this new country, called by the Greeks and Romans Idumaea or Idumea, the Edomites original country, according to the Hebrew Bible, stretched from the Sinai peninsula as far as Kadesh Barnea. Southward it reached as far as Eilat, which was the seaport of Edom, on the north of Edom was the territory of Moab. The boundary between Moab and Edom was the Wadi Zered, the ancient capital of Edom was Bozrah. According to Genesis, Esaus descendants settled in land after displacing the Horites. It was also called the land of Seir, Mount Seir appears to have been identified with them
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Arabic definite article
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Al- is the definite article in the Arabic language, a particle whose function is to render the noun on which it is prefixed definite. For example, the word كتاب kitāb book can be made definite by prefixing it with al-, consequently, al- is typically translated as the in English. Unlike most other particles in Arabic, al- is always prefixed to another word, consequently, most dictionaries will not list it as a separate word, and it is almost invariably ignored in collation. Similarly, al- is not a permanent component of the word to which it is prefixed and it is added and removed to toggle between the definiteness and indefiniteness of the word. As a particle, al- does not inflect for gender, plurality, for example, for the Nile, one does not say al-Nīl, but an-Nīl. When followed by a letter, like m-, no replacement occurs. This affects only the pronunciation and not the spelling of the article, to put al- into perspective, there are many ways in which Arabic words can be made definite. These include the use of pronouns like me, the use of proper nouns like Saudi Arabia, demonstrative pronouns like this man. Vocation like O man, possession like my man, and of course the definite article like the man, apart from possession, prefixing a noun with al- is the weakest form of definiteness. That is, saying the man does not define the man being referred to as clearly as saying this man, Arabic has an indefinite article indicated by nunation which is declined for three cases. The etymology of al- is the study of how it developed, there are several major opinions in regards to the origins of the Arabic definite article. While Proto-Semitic language did not have any articles, the most likely theory is that article al- comes from the same source as the Hebrew definite article ה־ ha-. That theory is based primarily on the fact that the two share many similarities, both particles are prefixed to nouns, and both geminate with certain following letters. Moreover, neither particle is prefixed to nouns in a genitival construction. Finally, both are prefixed to relative clauses, according to David Testen, many northern and southwestern Semitic languages have particles that bear similarities to al-. With this fact, he posits that al- has a proto-Semitic antecedent, often cited is the Arabic word for this, هذا hādhā, which, when combined with a definite phrase, has been known to become shortened from هذا البيت hādhā al-bayt to هلبيت hal-bayt. However, hal-bayt may merely be a shortening of the demonstrative pronoun, weingreen also states that the original form of the Hebrew ha- was in fact hal. Hebrew, then, dropped the final l to achieve ha- while Arabic softened the h- to a hamza, however, there is no evidence supporting the existence of hal from ancient Hebrew texts
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Arabic diacritics
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The Arabic script has numerous diacritics, including ijam ⟨إِعْجَام⟩, and tashkil ⟨تَشْكِيل⟩. The latter include the ḥarakāt ⟨حَرَكَات⟩, the Arabic script is an impure abjad, where short consonants and long vowels are represented by letters but short vowels and consonant length are not generally indicated in writing. Tashkīl is optional to represent missing vowels and consonant length, modern Arabic is also written without consonant pointing, but some books are written with consonant pointing such as books for Arabic learners and childrens books. The literal meaning of tashkīl is forming and it serves the same purpose as furigana in Japanese or pinyin or zhuyin in Mandarin Chinese for children who are learning to read or foreign learners. The bulk of Arabic script is written without ḥarakāt, however, they are commonly used in texts that demand strict adherence to exact wording. This is true, primarily, of the Quran ⟨الْقُرْآن⟩ and poetry and it is also quite common to add ḥarakāt to hadiths ⟨الْحَدِيث⟩ and the Bible. Another use is in childrens literature, moreover, ḥarakāt are used in ordinary texts in individual words when an ambiguity of pronunciation cannot easily be resolved from context alone. Arabic dictionaries with vowel marks provide information about the pronunciation to both native and foreign Arabic speakers. In art and calligraphy, ḥarakāt might be used simply because their writing is considered aesthetically pleasing, an example of a fully vocalised Arabic from the Basmala, بِسْمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحْمٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِBismi Llāhi r-Raḥmāni r-Raḥīm In the Name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. Some Arabic textbooks for foreigners now use ḥarakāt as a guide to make learning reading Arabic easier. The other method used in textbooks is phonetic romanisation of unvocalised texts, fully vocalised Arabic texts are sought after by learners of Arabic. Some online bilingual dictionaries also provide ḥarakāt as a phonetic guide similarly to English dictionaries providing transcription, the ḥarakāt, which literally means motions, are the short vowel marks. There is some ambiguity as to which tashkīl are also ḥarakāt, the fatḥah ⟨فَتْحَة⟩ is a small diagonal line placed above a letter, and represents a short /a/. The word fatḥah itself means opening and refers to the opening of the mouth when producing an /a/, for example, with dāl, ⟨دَ⟩ /da/. When a fatḥah is placed before the letter ⟨ا⟩, it represents a long /aː/, the fatḥah is not usually written in such cases. When a kasrah is placed before the letter ⟨ﻱ⟩, it represents a long /iː/, the kasrah is usually not written in such cases, but if yā’ is pronounced as a diphthong /eɪ/, fatḥah should be written on the preceding consonant to avoid mispronunciation. The ḍammah ⟨ضَمَّة⟩ is a small curl-like diacritic placed above a letter to represent a short /u/, when a ḍammah is placed before the letter ⟨و⟩, it represents a long /uː/. The ḍammah is usually not written in such cases, but if wāw is pronounced as a diphthong /aw/, the maddah ⟨مَدَّة⟩ is a tilde-like diacritic, which can appear mostly on top of an alif and indicates a glottal stop /ʔ/ followed by a long /aː/
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Yodh
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Yodh is the tenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Yōd, Hebrew Yōd י, Aramaic Yodh, Syriac Yōḏ ܚ, and Arabic Yāʾ ي. Its sound value is /j/ in all languages for which it is used, in languages, it also serves as a long vowel. The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Iota, Latin I, J, Cyrillic І, Й, Coptic iauda, Yodh is thought to have originated with a pictograph of a hand that ultimately derives from Proto-Semitic *yad-. It may be related to the Egyptian hieroglyphic of an arm, a long /iː/ usually in the middle or end of words. In this case it has no diacritic, but could be marked with a kasra in the letter in some traditions. A long /eː/ In many dialects, as a result of the monophthongization that underwent the diphthong /aj/ in most of the words, a part of a diphthong, /aj/. Then, it has no diacritic but could be marked with a sukun in some traditions, the preceding consonant could have no diacritic or have fatḥa sign, hinting to the first vowel in the diphthong, i. e. /a/. As a vowel, yāʾ can serve as the seat of the hamza, Yāʾ as a prefix is the marker for a singular imperfective verb, as in يَكْتُب yaktub he writes from the root ك-ت-ب K-T-B. Yāʾ with a shadda is particularly used to turn a noun into an adjective, for instance, مِصْر Miṣr → مِصْرِيّ Miṣriyy. The transformation can be abstract, for instance, مَوْضَوع mawḍūʿ → مَوْضُوعِيّ mawḍūʿiyy. Still other uses of this function can be a bit further from the root, the common pronunciation of the final /-ijj/ is most often pronounced as or. A form similar to but distinguished from yāʾ is the ʾalif maqṣūrah broken alif and it indicates a final long /aː/. In Egypt, Sudan and sometimes the Maghreb, the form is always ى. ى representing final /-aː/ is less likely to occur in Modern Standard Arabic, in this case, it is commonly known as, especially in Egypt, أَلِف لَيِّنَة ʾalif layyinah. In Egypt, it is short if used in Egyptian Arabic and most commonly short in Modern Standard Arabic. In the Persian alphabet, the letter is generally called ye following Persian-language custom, in its final form, the letter does not have dots, much like the Arabic ʾalif maqṣūrah or, more to the point, much like the custom in Egypt, Sudan and sometimes Maghreb. On account of this difference, Perso-Arabic ye is located at a different Unicode code point than both of the standard Arabic letters, in computers, the Persian version of the letter automatically appears with two dots initially and medially. The Arabic version without dots ى is not used initially or medially, however, it is used in the Uyghur Arabic alphabet and the Arabic-based Kyrgyz alphabet
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Cursive
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Cursive, is any style of penmanship in which some characters are written joined together in a flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing faster. Formal cursive is generally joined, but casual cursive is a combination of joins, the writing style can be further divided as looped, italic, or connected. The cursive method is used with a number of alphabets due to its improved writing speed, in some alphabets, many or all letters in a word are connected sometimes making a word two single complex strokes. Cursive is any style of penmanship in which the symbols of the language are written in a conjoined and/or flowing manner and this writing style is distinct from printscript using block letters, in which the letters of a word are unconnected and in Roman/Gothic letterform rather than joined-up script. Not all cursive copybooks join all letters, formal cursive is generally joined, in the Arabic, Syriac, Latin, and Cyrillic alphabets, many or all letters in a word are connected, sometimes making a word one single complex stroke. In Hebrew cursive and Roman cursive, the letters are not connected, in Maharashtra there is a version of Cursive called Modi In looped cursive penmanship, some ascenders and descenders have loops which provide for joins. Cursive italic penmanship—derived from chancery cursive—uses non-looped joins or no joins, in italic cursive, there are no joins from g, j, q or y, and a few other joins are discouraged. Italic penmanship became popular in the 15th-century Italian Renaissance, the term italic as it relates to handwriting is not to be confused with italic typed letters that slant forward. Many, but not all, letters in the handwriting of the Renaissance were joined, the origins of the cursive method is associated with practical advantages of writing speed and infrequent pen lifting to accommodate the limitations of the quill. Quills are fragile, easily broken, and will spatter unless used properly, steel dip pens followed quills, they were sturdier, but still had some limitations. The individuality of the provenance of a document was a factor also, the term cursive derives from the 18th century Italian corsivo from Medieval Latin cursivus, which literally means running. This term in turn derives from Latin currere, Modi is a script used to write the Marathi language, which is the primary language spoken in the state of Maharashtra, India. There are at least two different theories concerning its origin, modI was an official script used to write Marathi until the 20th century when the Balbodh style of the Devanagari script was promoted as the standard writing system for Marathi. Although Modi was primarily used to write Marathi, other such as Urdu, Kannada, Gujarati, Rajasthani, Hindi. In Bengali cursive script the letters are more likely to be more curvy in appearance than in standard Bengali handwriting, also, the horizontal supporting bar on each letter runs continuously through the entire word, unlike in standard handwriting. Roman cursive is a form of handwriting used in ancient Rome and it is customarily divided into old cursive, and new cursive. New Roman cursive, also called minuscule cursive or later Roman cursive, the Greek alphabet has had several cursive forms in the course of its development. In antiquity, a form of handwriting was used in writing on papyrus
Madnḫaya Alap
Serṭo Olaph
Esṭrangela Alap
