1.
Alphabet
–
An alphabet is a standard set of letters that is used to write one or more languages based upon the general principle that the letters represent phonemes of the spoken language. This is in contrast to other types of writing systems, such as syllabaries and logographies, the Proto-Canaanite script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is the first fully phonemic script. Thus the Phoenician alphabet is considered to be the first alphabet, the Phoenician alphabet is the ancestor of most modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and possibly Brahmic. Under a terminological distinction promoted by Peter T. Daniels, an alphabet is a script that represents both vowels and consonants as letters equally. In this narrow sense of the word the first true alphabet was the Greek alphabet, in other alphabetic scripts such as the original Phoenician, Hebrew or Arabic, letters predominantly or exclusively represent consonants, such a script is also called an abjad. A third type, called abugida or alphasyllabary, is one where vowels are shown by diacritics or modifications of consonantal letters, as in Devanagari. The Khmer alphabet is the longest, with 74 letters, there are dozens of alphabets in use today, the most popular being the Latin alphabet. Many languages use modified forms of the Latin alphabet, with additional letters formed using diacritical marks, while most alphabets have letters composed of lines, there are also exceptions such as the alphabets used in Braille. Alphabets are usually associated with an ordering of letters. This makes them useful for purposes of collation, specifically by allowing words to be sorted in alphabetical order and it also means that their letters can be used as an alternative method of numbering ordered items, in such contexts as numbered lists and number placements. The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum, the Greek word was made from the first two letters, alpha and beta. The names for the Greek letters came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet, aleph, which also meant ox, and bet, in the alphabet song in English, the term ABCs is used instead of the word alphabet. Knowing ones ABCs, in general, can be used as a metaphor for knowing the basics about anything, the history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. These glyphs were used as guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections. Based on letter appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs and this script had no characters representing vowels, although originally it probably was a syllabary, but unneeded symbols were discarded. An alphabetic cuneiform script with 30 signs including three that indicate the vowel was invented in Ugarit before the 15th century BC. This script was not used after the destruction of Ugarit, the Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, which is conventionally called Proto-Canaanite before ca.1050 BC. The oldest text in Phoenician script is an inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram and this script is the parent script of all western alphabets
Alphabet
–
Edward Bernard 's "Orbis eruditi", comparing all known alphabets as of 1689.
Alphabet
–
Writing systems
Alphabet
–
A Specimen of
typeset fonts and
languages, by
William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728
Cyclopaedia.
Alphabet
–
Codex Zographensis in the
Glagolitic alphabet from Medieval
Bulgaria
2.
Non-linear writing
–
A writing system is any conventional method of visually representing verbal communication. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a form of information storage. The processes of encoding and decoding writing systems involve shared understanding between writers and readers of the meaning behind the sets of characters that make up a script, the general attributes of writing systems can be placed into broad categories such as alphabets, syllabaries, or logographies. Any particular system can have attributes of more than one category, in the alphabetic category, there is a standard set of letters of consonants and vowels that encode based on the general principle that the letters represent speech sounds. In a syllabary, each symbol correlates to a syllable or mora, in a logography, each character represents a word, morpheme, or other semantic units. Other categories include abjads, which differ from alphabets in that vowels are not indicated, alphabets typically use a set of 20-to-35 symbols to fully express a language, whereas syllabaries can have 80-to-100, and logographies can have several hundreds of symbols. Systems will also enable the stringing together of these groupings in order to enable a full expression of the language. The reading step can be accomplished purely in the mind as an internal process, writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, which used pictograms, ideograms and other mnemonic symbols. Proto-writing lacked the ability to capture and express a range of thoughts. Soon after, writing provided a form of long distance communication. With the advent of publishing, it provided the medium for a form of mass communication. Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that a system is always associated with at least one spoken language. In contrast, visual representations such as drawings, paintings, and non-verbal items on maps, such as contour lines, are not language-related. Some other symbols, such as numerals and the ampersand, are not directly linked to any specific language, every human community possesses language, which many regard as an innate and defining condition of humanity. However, the development of writing systems, and the process by which they have supplanted traditional oral systems of communication, have been sporadic, uneven, once established, writing systems generally change more slowly than their spoken counterparts. Thus they often preserve features and expressions which are no current in the spoken language. One of the benefits of writing systems is that they can preserve a permanent record of information expressed in a language. In the examination of individual scripts, the study of writing systems has developed along partially independent lines, thus, the terminology employed differs somewhat from field to field
Non-linear writing
–
Writing systems
Non-linear writing
–
Predominant national and selected regional or minority scripts
Non-linear writing
–
Chinese characters (漢字) are morpho-syllabic. Each one represents a syllable with a distinct meaning, but some characters may have multiple meanings or pronunciations
Non-linear writing
–
A Specimen of typefaces and styles, by
William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728
Cyclopaedia
3.
Louis Braille
–
Louis Braille was a French educator and inventor of a system of reading and writing for use by the blind or visually impaired. His system remains known worldwide simply as braille, blinded in both eyes as a result of an early childhood accident, Braille mastered his disability while still a boy. He excelled in his education and received scholarship to Frances Royal Institute for Blind Youth, while still a student there, he began developing a system of tactile code that could allow blind people to read and write quickly and efficiently. Inspired by the cryptography of Charles Barbier, Braille constructed a new method built specifically for the needs of the blind. He presented his work to his peers for the first time in 1824, in adulthood, Braille served as a professor at the Institute and had an avocation as a musician, but he largely spent the remainder of his life refining and extending his system. It went unused by most educators for years after his death, but posterity has recognized braille as a revolutionary invention. Louis Braille was born in Coupvray, France, a town about twenty miles east of Paris. He and his three elder siblings – Monique Catherine, Louis-Simon, and Marie Céline – lived with their parents, Simon-René and Monique, Simon-René maintained a successful enterprise as a leatherer and maker of horse tack. As soon as he could walk, Braille spent time playing in his fathers workshop, at the age of three, the child was toying with some of the tools, trying to make holes in a piece of leather with an awl. Squinting closely at the surface, he pressed down hard to drive the point in, a local physician bound and patched the affected eye and even arranged for Braille to be met the next day in Paris by a surgeon, but no treatment could save the damaged organ. Due to his age, Braille did not realize at first that he had lost his sight. His parents made many efforts – quite uncommon for the era – to raise their youngest child in a normal fashion and he learned to navigate the village and country paths with canes his father hewed for him, and he grew up seemingly at peace with his disability. Brailles bright and creative mind impressed the teachers and priests. Braille studied in Coupvray until the age of ten, Braille, the last of the familys children to leave the household, departed for the school in February 1819. At that time the Royal Institute was an underfunded, ramshackle affair, the children were taught how to read by a system devised by the schools founder, Valentin Haüy. Not blind himself, Haüy was a philanthropist who devoted his life to helping the blind and he designed and manufactured a small library of books for the children using a technique of embossing heavy paper with the raised imprints of Latin letters. Readers would trace their fingers over the text, comprehending slowly, Braille was helped by the Haüy books, but he also despaired over their lack of depth, the amount of information kept in such books was necessarily small. Because the raised letters were made in a complex artisanal process using wet paper pressed against copper wire, so that the young Louis could send letters back home, Simon-René provided him with an alphabet made from bits of thick leather
Louis Braille
–
Bust of Louis Braille by Étienne Leroux, Bibliothèque nationale de France
Louis Braille
–
Birthplace of Louis Braille in Coupvray
Louis Braille
–
The first version of braille, composed for the
French alphabet
Louis Braille
–
Three forms of the letters "A" and "Z"
4.
Night writing
–
It was designed in 1808 by Charles Barbier in response to Napoleons demand for a code that soldiers could use to communicate silently and without light at night. Called sonography, each grid of dots stands for a character or phoneme, barbiers system was related to the Polybius square, in which a two-digit code represents a character. g. 4–2 for t represented by As many as twelve dots would be needed to represent one symbol, barbiers system was found to be too difficult for soldiers to learn and was rejected by the military. In 1821, Barbier visited the National Institute for the Blind in Paris, France, Braille identified the major failing of the code, which was that the human finger could not encompass the whole symbol without moving and so could not move rapidly from one symbol to another. His modification was to use a 6-dot cell, the Braille system that revolutionized written communication for the visually impaired
Night writing
–
Barbier's sonographie
5.
1829 braille
–
Louis Brailles original publication, Procedure for Writing Words, Music, and Plainsong in Dots, credits Barbiers night writing as being the basis for the braille script. It differed in a way from modern braille, It contained nine decades of characters rather than the modern five. Braille recognized, however, that the dashes were problematic, being difficult to distinguish from the dots in practice, and those characters were abandoned in the second edition of the book. The first four decades indicated the 40 letters of the alphabet, the fifth the digits, the sixth punctuation, the seventh decade was also used for musical notes. Most of the characters were unassigned. As in modern braille, most of the decades were derived from the first. Decade 5 was not derived from the first, like the first decade, only the top half of the cell was used. The digit 1 was a dash in the top row,2 was dashes in the top and mid rows. 3–5 were a top dash with a left, double, and right dot in the middle, 6–8 were a mid dash with a left, double, and right dot at top. 9 and 0 were a and b shifted to the right and that is, it resembled the 3rd decade with the two bottom dots connected into a line. Decade 7 was formed with a dash in the top row of the cell and that is, it was much like the modern fifth decade with an overstruck dash at the top. Decade 8 was formed by splitting the first decade with a dash and that is, a dash appeared in the middle row, displacing the dots of that row to the bottom of the cell. In the case of first and 3rd characters, which did not have dots in the middle row and that is, this decade was equivalent to adding an overstrike to ⠄⠅⠤⠩⠡⠍⠭⠥⠌⠬. Decade 9 was derived from the fifth by adding a dash in the bottom row and these were left unassigned apart from the first three, which were used when needed as markers of words, music, and plainsong, respectively. Thus the 1st and 5th decades occupied only the top half of the cell, the supplemental signs were ⠄⠤⠜⠼ and a top dash with ⠠⠰. Of the 125 possible patterns,97 were used, the modern 5th decade and other supplemental signs do not appear in the 1829 version of braille, apart from ⠐ and ⠒ in plainsong notation. Punctuation differed slightly from today, even accounting for the shift downward when the dash was dropped from the row of the cell. Anticipating that the dashes might prove problematic, Braille provided that the supplemental sign ⠼ would shift the decade by four and that is, adding it to the first four decades would produce substitutes for the fifth through eighth
1829 braille
–
The character tables of Braille's 1829 publication.
1829 braille
–
The final form of Braille's alphabet, according to Henri (1952). The decade diacritics are listed at left, and the supplementary letters are assigned to the appropriate decade at right. "(1)" indicates markers for musical and mathematical notation.
6.
English Braille
–
English Braille, also known as Grade-2 Braille, is the braille alphabet used for English. It consists of 250 or so letters, numerals, punctuation marks, formatting marks, contractions, some English Braille letters, such as ⠡ ⟨ch⟩, correspond to more than one letter in print. There are three levels of complexity in English Braille, Grade 1 is a one-to-one transcription of printed English, and is restricted to basic literacy. Grade 2, which is universal in print beyond basic literacy materials, abandons one-to-one transcription in many places. Grade 3 is not a system, but any of various personal shorthands. It is almost never found in publications, most of this article describes the 1994 American edition of Grade-2 Braille, which is largely equivalent to British Grade-2 Braille. Some of the differences with Unified English Braille, which was adopted by various countries between 2005 and 2012, are discussed at the end. Braille was originally intended, and is portrayed, as a re-encoding of the English orthography that is used by sighted people. However, for the blind, braille is an independent writing system, Braille was introduced to Britain in 1861. In 1876, a French-based system with a few hundred English contractions and abbreviations was adopted as the predominant script in Great Britain, however, the contractions and abbreviations proved unsatisfactory, and in 1902 the current grade-2 system, called Revised Braille, was adopted in the British Commonwealth. In 1878, the ideal of basing all braille alphabets of the world on the original French alphabetic order was accepted by Britain, Germany, and Egypt. A partially contracted English Braille, Grade 1½, was adopted in Britain in 1918, in 1991, an American proposal was made for Unified English Braille, intended to eliminate the confusion caused by competing standards for academic uses of English Braille. After several design revisions, it has since adopted by the Commonwealth countries starting in 2005. The chief differences with Revised Braille are in punctuation, symbols, and formatting, more accurately reflecting print conventions in matters such as brackets, mathematical notation, the 64 braille patterns are arranged into decades based on the numerical order of those patterns. In addition, for each there are two additional mirror-image patterns, and finally there are three patterns that utilize only the bottom row of the cell. The final pattern, the empty cell ⟨⠀⟩, is used as a space, cells 1 through 25 plus 40 are assigned to the 26 letters of the basic Latin alphabet. The other 37 cells, when they are used at all, are used for punctuation and are typically assigned different values in different languages. The English grade-two values are as follows, cells with dots on only the right side do not have equivalents in printed English, and are explained in the notes
English Braille
–
English Braille Grade-2 Braille British Revised Braille
7.
German Braille
–
German Braille is one of the older braille alphabets. The French-based order of the letter assignments was largely settled on with the 1878 convention that decided the standard for international braille, however, the assignments for German letters beyond the 26 of the basic Latin alphabet are mostly unrelated to French values. In numerical order by decade, the letters are, The generic accent sign, there are numerous contractions and abbreviations. These can be found in the link in the reference section. Punctuation is as follows, Only the first asterisk is marked with dot 6, so print *** is in braille ⠠⠔⠔⠔. ⠴ is the Artikel sign, for the brackets of phonetic transcription, German Braille uses a modified form, ⠰⠶⠀⠰⠶. Additional punctuation and symbols, especially mathematical, are explained in the reference below. Numbers are introduced with the sign ⠼ and they are dropped to decade 5 for ordinals and for the denominator of fractions. So, for example, ⠼⠙ is ⟨4⟩, while ⠼⠲ is ⟨4. ⟩, the percent sign requires the number sign even after a number, ⠼⠃⠼⠴ ⟨2%⟩, otherwise it would look like the fraction ²⁄₀. In a compound fraction, a repeat of the number sign separate the units from the fraction, the emphasis sign is marked with an extra point, ⠠⠸, when it occurs in the middle of a word. It is doubled, ⠸⠸, when more than one word is emphasized, the all-caps sign is used for initialisms and the like. Doubled, it is used for text, such as titles. Names with initials, such as J. S, bach, do not require the cap sign. Lower-case metric units are marked as lower-case, ⠠⠅⠘⠺ ⟨kW⟩ and this is useful, as it ends the scope of the number sign ⠼, ⠼⠁⠉⠚⠠⠓⠨⠏⠁ ⟨130 hPa⟩, ⠼⠁⠉⠚⠠⠅⠘⠧⠁ ⟨130 kVA⟩. Das System der deutschen Blindenschrift,2005
German Braille
–
German Braille
German Braille
–
A German Braille index at the
Nixdorfmuseum
8.
Unicode range
–
The Unicode Consortium and the International Organisation for Standardisation collaborate on the Universal Character Set. The UCS is a standard to map characters used in natural language, mathematics, music. By creating this mapping, the UCS enables computer software vendors to interoperate, because it is a universal map, it can be used to represent multiple languages at the same time. UCS has a capacity to encode over 1 million characters. Each UCS character is represented by a code point, which is an integer between 0 and 1,114,111, used to represent each character within the internal logic of text processing software. The number of encoded characters is made up as follows,128,019 graphical characters 218 special purpose characters for control, ISO maintains the basic mapping of characters from character name to code point. Often the terms character and code point will get used interchangeably, however, when a distinction is made, a code point refers to the integer of the character, what one might think of as its address. Input methods can be through keyboard or a character palette. The UCS can be divided in various ways, such as by plane, block, character category, the x must be lowercase in XML documents. The nnnn or hhhh may be any number of digits and may include leading zeros, the hhhh may mix uppercase and lowercase, though uppercase is the usual style. In contrast, an entity reference refers to a character by the name of an entity which has the desired character as its replacement text. The entity must either be predefined or explicitly declared in a Document Type Definition, the format is the same as for any entity reference, &name, where name is the case-sensitive name of the entity. Unicode and ISO divide the set of points into 17 planes. As of 2016 ISO and the Unicode Consortium has only allocated characters, the others remain empty and reserved for future use. Most characters are assigned to the first plane, the Basic Multilingual Plane. This is to ease the transition for legacy software since the Basic Multilingual Plane is addressable with just two octets. The characters outside the first plane usually have very specialized or rare use. Each plane corresponds with the value of the one or two hexadecimal digits preceding the four ones, hence U+24321 is in Plane 2, U+4321 is in Plane 0
Unicode range
–
Example of fraction slash use. This
typeface (
Apple Chancery) shows the synthesized common fraction on the left and the precomposed fraction glyph on the right as a rendering the plain text string “1 1⁄4 1¼”. Depending on the text environment, the single string “1 1⁄4” might yield either result, the one on the right through substitution of the fraction sequence with the single precomposed fraction glyph.
9.
Braille
–
Braille /ˈbreɪl/ is a tactile writing system used by people who are blind or visually impaired. It is traditionally written with embossed paper, braille-users can read computer screens and other electronic supports thanks to refreshable braille displays. They can write braille with the slate and stylus or type it on a braille writer, such as a portable braille note-taker. Braille is named after its creator, Frenchman Louis Braille, who lost his eyesight due to a childhood accident, in 1824, at the age of 15, Braille developed his code for the French alphabet as an improvement on night writing. He published his system, which included musical notation, in 1829. The second revision, published in 1837, was the first binary form of writing developed in the modern era, Braille characters are small rectangular blocks called cells that contain tiny palpable bumps called raised dots. The number and arrangement of these dots distinguish one character from another, since the various braille alphabets originated as transcription codes of printed writing systems, the mappings vary from language to language. Braille cells are not the thing to appear in braille text. There may be embossed illustrations and graphs, with the lines either solid or made of series of dots, arrows, bullets that are larger than braille dots, a full Braille cell includes six raised dots arranged in two lateral rows each having three dots. The dot positions are identified by numbers from one through six,64 solutions are possible from using one or more dots. A single cell can be used to represent a letter, number, punctuation mark. In the face of screen-reader software, braille usage has declined, in Barbiers system, sets of 12 embossed dots encoded 36 different sounds. It proved to be too difficult for soldiers to recognize by touch, in 1821 Barbier visited the Royal Institute for the Blind in Paris, where he met Louis Braille. Brailles solution was to use 6-dot cells and to assign a specific pattern to each letter of the alphabet. At first, braille was a transliteration of French orthography, but soon various abbreviations, contractions. The expanded English system, called Grade-2 Braille, was complete by 1905, for blind readers, Braille is an independent writing system, rather than a code of printed orthography. Braille is derived from the Latin alphabet, albeit indirectly, in Brailles original system, the dot patterns were assigned to letters according to their position within the alphabetic order of the French alphabet, with accented letters and w sorted at the end. The first ten letters of the alphabet, a–j, use the upper four dot positions and these stand for the ten digits 1–9 and 0 in a system parallel to Hebrew gematria and Greek isopsephy
Braille
–
Braille
Braille
–
Braille code where the word ⠏ ⠗ ⠑ ⠍ ⠊ ⠑ ⠗ (premier,
French for "first") can be read.
Braille
–
Silver wedding bands with names Henri(que) and Tita written in braille
Braille
–
Braille typewriter
10.
International braille
–
The goal of braille uniformity is to unify the braille alphabets of the world as much as possible, so that literacy in one braille alphabet readily transfers to another. A second round of unification was undertaken under the auspices of UNESCO in 1951, Braille arranged his characters in decades, and assigned the 25 letters of the French alphabet to them in order. The characters beyond the first 25 are the source of variation today. In the first decade, only the top four dots are used, Braille is in its origin a numeric code. Louis Braille applied the characters in order to the French alphabet in alphabetical order. As braille spread to other languages, the order was retained and applied to the local script. Therefore, where the alphabetical order differed from that of French, for example, French was based on a 25-letter alphabet without a w. In the United Kingdom, however, French Braille was adopted without such reordering, therefore, any English book published in braille needed to be typeset separately for the United States and the United Kingdom. Similarly, the letters Egyptian Arabic Braille were assigned their forms based on their nearest French equivalents, so that for example Arabic d had the same braille letters as French d. For Algerian Arabic Braille, however, the characters were assigned to the Arabic alphabet according to the Arabic alphabetical order. Thus an Arabic book published in Algeria was utterly unintelligible to blind Egyptians, with the values of its symbols unaltered from those of the original French. Gradually the various reordered and frequency-based alphabets fell out of use elsewhere as well. For example, Greek γ gamma is written ⠛ g, as it is romanized, not ⠉ c, as it is ordered in the alphabet or as it is related historically to the Latin letter c. Occasional assignments are made on grounds, such as Greek ω omega. Correspondences among the basic letters of representative modern braille alphabets include, the additional letters of the extended French braille alphabet, such as ⠯, are not included in the international standard. The French ⠯, for example, corresponds to print ⟨ç⟩, whereas the ⠯ in English and German braille transcribes ⟨&⟩, and the ⠯ in Hungarian and Albanian braille is ⟨q⟩. Such languages include, Bemba, Chewa, Dobuan, Greenlandic, Huli, Indonesian, Luvale, Malagasy, Malaysian, Ndebele, Shona, Swahili, Swazi, Tok Pisin, Tolai, Xhosa, Zulu. In these languages, print digraphs such as ch are written as digraphs in braille too, languages of the Philippines are augmented with the use of the accent point with n, ⠈⠝, for ñ
International braille
–
An early braille chart, displaying the numeric order of the characters
11.
A
–
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
A
–
ISO basic
Latin alphabet
A
–
Writing cursive forms of A
12.
D
–
D is the fourth letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The Semitic letter Dāleth may have developed from the logogram for a fish or a door, there are many different Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this. In Semitic, Ancient Greek and Latin, the letter represented /d/, in the Etruscan alphabet the letter was superfluous, the equivalent Greek letter is Delta, Δ. The minuscule form of d consists of a loop and a vertical stroke. It developed by gradual variations on the majuscule form, in handwriting, it was common to start the arc to the left of the vertical stroke, resulting in a serif at the top of the arc. This serif was extended while the rest of the letter was reduced, resulting in an angled stroke, the angled stroke slowly developed into a vertical stroke. In most languages that use the Latin alphabet, and in the International Phonetic Alphabet, however, in the Vietnamese alphabet, it represents the sound /z/ in northern dialects or /j/ in southern dialects. In Fijian it represents a prenasalized stop /nd/, in some languages where voiceless unaspirated stops contrast with voiceless aspirated stops, ⟨d⟩ represents an unaspirated /t/, while ⟨t⟩ represents an aspirated /tʰ/. Examples of such languages include Icelandic, Scottish Gaelic, Navajo, the Roman numeral Ⅾ represents the number 500. D is the grade below C but above E in the grading system. The dictionary definition of D at Wiktionary The dictionary definition of d at Wiktionary
D
–
The letter D, standing for "Deutschland", i.e. Germany in German, on a
boundary stone at the border between Austria and Germany.
D
–
Writing cursive forms of D
13.
E
–
E is the fifth letter and the second vowel in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used letter in many languages, including Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin, Latvian, Norwegian, Spanish, the Latin letter E differs little from its source, the Greek letter epsilon, Ε. In Semitic, the letter represented /h/, in Greek, hê became the letter epsilon, the various forms of the Old Italic script and the Latin alphabet followed this usage. Although Middle English spelling used ⟨e⟩ to represent long and short /e/, in other cases, the letter is silent, generally at the end of words. In the orthography of languages it represents either these or /ɛ/, or some variation of these sounds. Less commonly, as in French, German, or Saanich, ⟨e⟩ represents a mid-central vowel /ə/. Digraphs with ⟨e⟩ are common to indicate either diphthongs or monophthongs, such as ⟨ea⟩ or ⟨ee⟩ for /iː/ or /eɪ/ in English, ⟨ei⟩ for /aɪ/ in German, the International Phonetic Alphabet uses ⟨e⟩ for the close-mid front unrounded vowel or the mid front unrounded vowel. E is the most common letter in the English alphabet and several other European languages, in the story The Gold Bug by Edgar Allan Poe, a character figures out a random character code by remembering that the most used letter in English is E. This makes it a hard and popular letter to use when writing lipograms, ernest Vincent Wrights Gadsby is considered a dreadful novel, and supposedly at least part of Wrights narrative issues were caused by language limitations imposed by the lack of E. Both Georges Perecs novel A Void and its English translation by Gilbert Adair omit e and are considered better works, ∃, existential quantifier in predicate logic. ∈, the symbol for set membership in set theory, ℯ, the base of the natural logarithm. 1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings. In British Sign Language, the e is signed by extending the index finger of the right hand touching the tip of index on the left hand. Media related to E at Wikimedia Commons The dictionary definition of E at Wiktionary The dictionary definition of e at Wiktionary
E
–
ISO basic
Latin alphabet
14.
F
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F is the sixth letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The origin of F is the Semitic letter vâv that represented a sound like /v/ or /w/, graphically it originally probably depicted either a hook or a club. Latin F, despite being pronounced differently, is descended from digamma. After sound changes eliminated /w/ from spoken Greek, digamma was used only as a numeral, however, the Greek alphabet also gave rise to other alphabets, and some of these retained letters descended from digamma. In the Etruscan alphabet, F probably represented /w/, as in Greek, when the Romans adopted the alphabet, they used V not only for the vowel /u/, but also for the corresponding semivowel /w/, leaving F available for /f/. And so out of the various vav variants in the Mediterranean world, the Roman alphabet forms the basis of the alphabet used today for English and many other languages. The lowercase f is not related to the visually similar long s, ſ, the use of the long s largely died out by the beginning of the 19th century, mostly to prevent confusion with f when using a short mid-bar. In the English writing system ⟨f⟩ is used to represent the sound /f/ and it is commonly doubled at the end of words. Exceptionally, it represents the voiced labiodental fricative /v/ in the word of. In the writing systems of languages, ⟨f⟩ commonly represents /f/. In French orthography, ⟨f⟩ is used to represent /f/ and it may also be silent at the end of words. In Spanish orthography, ⟨f⟩ is used to represent /f/, in the Hepburn romanization of Japanese, ⟨f⟩ is used to represent. This sound is considered to be an allophone of /h/. In Welsh orthography, ⟨f⟩ represents /v/ while ⟨ff⟩ represents /f/, in Slavic languages, ⟨f⟩ is used primarily in words of foreign origin. The International Phonetic Alphabet uses ⟨f⟩ to represent the labiodental fricative. Media related to F at Wikimedia Commons The dictionary definition of F at Wiktionary The dictionary definition of f at Wiktionary
F
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ISO basic
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F
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Writing cursive forms of F
15.
G
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G is the 7th letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The letter G was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of C to distinguish voiced /ɡ/ from voiceless /k/, the recorded originator of G is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school, who taught around 230 BC. At this time, K had fallen out of favor, and C, rugas positioning of G shows that alphabetic order related to the letters values as Greek numerals was a concern even in the 3rd century BC. Hempl proposes that there never was such a space in the alphabet, zeta took shapes like ⊏ in some of the Old Italic scripts, the development of the monumental form G from this shape would be exactly parallel to the development of C from gamma. He suggests that the pronunciation /k/ > /ɡ/ was due to contamination from the also similar-looking K, because of French influence, English orthography shares this feature. The modern lowercase g has two variants, the single-story and the double-story. The double-story form had developed similarly, except that some ornate forms then extended the tail back to the right, the initial extension to the left was absorbed into the upper closed bowl. The double-story version became popular when printing switched to Roman type because the tail was effectively shorter, in the double-story version, a small top stroke in the upper-right, often terminating in an orb shape, is called an ear. Generally, the two forms are complementary, but occasionally the difference has been exploited to provide contrast. Most, if not all, in English, the letter appears either alone or in some digraphs. In words of Romance origin, ⟨g⟩ is mainly soft before ⟨e⟩, ⟨i⟩, or ⟨y⟩, and hard otherwise. There are many English words of non-Romance origin where ⟨g⟩ is hard though followed by ⟨e⟩ or ⟨i⟩, the double consonant ⟨gg⟩ has the value /ɡ/ as in nugget, with very few exceptions, /gd͡ʒ/ in suggest and /d͡ʒ/ in exaggerate and veggies. The digraph ⟨dg⟩ has the value /d͡ʒ/, as in badger, non-digraph ⟨dg⟩ can also occur, in compounds like floodgate and headgear. Non-trigraph ⟨ngh⟩ also occurs, in compounds like stronghold and dunghill, Most Romance languages and some Nordic languages also have two main pronunciations for ⟨g⟩, hard and soft. While the soft value of ⟨g⟩ varies in different Romance languages, in all except Romanian and Italian, in Italian and Romanian, ⟨gh⟩ is used to represent /ɡ/ before front vowels where ⟨g⟩ would otherwise represent a soft value. In Italian and French, ⟨gn⟩ is used to represent the palatal nasal /ɲ/, in Italian, the trigraph ⟨gli⟩, when appearing before a vowel or as the article and pronoun gli, represents the palatal lateral approximant /ʎ/. Other languages typically use ⟨g⟩ to represent /ɡ/ regardless of position, amongst European languages Czech, Dutch and Finnish are an exception as they do not have /ɡ/ in their native words. Nevertheless, word-finally it is always voiceless in all dialects, including the standard Dutch of Belgium, on the other hand, some dialects, may have a phonemic /ɡ/. Faroese uses ⟨g⟩ to represent /dʒ/, in addition to /ɡ/, in Maori, ⟨g⟩ is used in the digraph ⟨ng⟩ which represents the velar nasal /ŋ/ and is pronounced like the ⟨ng⟩ in singer
G
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ISO basic
Latin alphabet
G
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Writing cursive forms of G
16.
H
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H is the eighth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The original Semitic letter Heth most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative, the form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts. The Greek eta Η in Archaic Greek alphabets still represented /h/, in this context, the letter eta is also known as heta to underline this fact. Thus, in the Old Italic alphabets, the letter heta of the Euboean alphabet was adopted with its sound value /h/. For most English speakers, the name for the letter is pronounced as /ˈeɪtʃ/, the pronunciation /ˈheɪtʃ/ and the associated spelling haitch is often considered to be h-adding and is considered nonstandard in England. It is, however, a feature of Hiberno-English and other varieties of English, such as those of Malaysia, India, Newfoundland, in Northern Ireland, it is a shibboleth as Protestant schools teach aitch and Catholics haitch. In the Republic of Ireland, the h is generally pronounced as haitch. The perceived name of the letter affects the choice of indefinite article before initialisms beginning with H, the pronunciation /ˈheɪtʃ/ may be a hypercorrection formed by analogy with the names of the other letters of the alphabet, most of which include the sound they represent. Despite this increasing number, pronunciation without the /h/ sound is considered to be standard in England. Authorities disagree about the history of the letters name, the Oxford English Dictionary says the original name of the letter was in Latin, this became in Vulgar Latin, passed into English via Old French, and by Middle English was pronounced. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language derives it from French hache from Latin haca or hic, anatoly Liberman suggests a conflation of two obsolete orderings of the alphabet, one with H immediately followed by K and the other without any K, reciting the formers. H, K, L. as when reinterpreted for the latter, H, L. would imply a pronunciation for H. In English, ⟨h⟩ occurs as a single-letter grapheme and in digraphs, such as ⟨ch⟩ /tʃ/, /ʃ/, /k/, or /x/). The letter is silent in a syllable rime, as in ah, ohm, dahlia, cheetah, pooh-poohed, as well as in other words such as hour, honest, herb. Initial /h/ is often not pronounced in the form of some function words including had, has, have, he, her, him, his. It was formerly common for an rather than a to be used as the article before a word beginning with /h/ in an unstressed syllable, as in an historian. In the German language, the name of the letter is pronounced /haː/, following a vowel, it often silently indicates that the vowel is long, In the word erhöhen, only the first ⟨h⟩ represents /h/. In 1901, a spelling reform eliminated the silent ⟨h⟩ in nearly all instances of ⟨th⟩ in native German words such as thun or Thür
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ISO basic
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H
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Writing cursive forms of H
17.
K
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K is the eleventh letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. In English, the letter K usually represents the voiceless velar plosive, the letter K comes from the Greek letter Κ, which was taken from the Semitic kap, the symbol for an open hand. This, in turn, was adapted by Semites who had lived in Egypt from the hieroglyph for hand representing D in the Egyptian word for hand. The Semites evidently assigned it the sound value /k/ instead, because their word for hand started with that sound, in the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all used to represent the sounds /k/ and /g/. Of these, Q was used to represent /k/ or /g/ before a vowel, K before /a/. Later, the use of C and its variant G replaced most usages of K and Q, K survived only in a few fossilized forms such as Kalendae, the calends. After Greek words were taken into Latin, the Kappa was transliterated as a C, loanwords from other alphabets with the sound /k/ were also transliterated with C. Hence, the Romance languages generally use C and have K only in loanwords from other language groups. The Celtic languages also tended to use C instead of K, today, English is the only Germanic language to productively use hard ⟨c⟩ rather than ⟨k⟩. The letter ⟨k⟩ is usually silent at the start of an English word when it comes before the letter ⟨n⟩, as in the knight, knife, knot, know. The SI prefix for a thousand is kilo-, officially abbreviated as k—for instance, prefixed to metre or its abbreviation m, kilometre or km signifies a thousand metres. As such, people occasionally represent the number in a notation by replacing the last three zeros of the general numeral with K, for instance, 30K for 30,000. In most languages where it is employed, this represents the sound /k/ or some similar sound. The International Phonetic Alphabet uses ⟨k⟩ for the voiceless velar plosive, K replacing C in Satiric misspelling K is the unit symbol for the Kelvin temperature scale. K is the symbol for the element potassium. Triangle K Unit prefix K is the name of the character in Kafkas novel The Trial In chess notation. In baseball scoring, the letter K is used to represent a strikeout, a forwards oriented K represents a strikeout swinging, a backwards oriented K represents a strikeout looking. As abbreviation for OK, often used in emails and short text messages, K is used as a slang term for Ketamine among recreational drug users
K
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ISO basic
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K
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Writing cursive forms of K
18.
M
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M is the thirteenth letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The letter M is derived from the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu, semitic Mem is most likely derived from a Proto-Sinaitic adoption of the water ideogram in Egyptian writing. The letter ⟨m⟩ represents the bilabial nasal consonant sound in the orthography of Latin as well as in that of modern languages. In English, the Oxford English Dictionary says that ⟨m⟩ is sometimes a vowel in words like spasm, in modern terminology, this is described as a syllabic consonant. The Roman numeral Ⅿ represents the number 1000, though it was not used in Roman times, media related to M at Wikimedia Commons The dictionary definition of M at Wiktionary The dictionary definition of m at Wiktionary
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ISO basic
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Writing cursive forms of M
19.
N
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N is the 14th letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. One of the most common hieroglyphs, snake, was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like the English ⟨J⟩, because the Egyptian word for snake was djet. However, the name for the letter in the Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic alphabets is nun, the sound value of the letter was /n/—as in Greek, Etruscan, Latin and modern languages. ⟨n⟩ represents a dental or alveolar nasal in all languages that use the Latin alphabet. A common digraph with ⟨n⟩ is ⟨ng⟩, which represents a nasal in a variety of languages. Often, before a plosive, ⟨n⟩ alone represents a velar nasal. In Italian and French, ⟨gn⟩ represents a palatal nasal /ɲ/, the Portuguese and Vietnamese spelling for this sound is ⟨nh⟩, while Spanish and a few other languages use the letter ⟨ñ⟩. In English, ⟨n⟩ is generally silent when it is preceded by an ⟨m⟩ at the end of words, as in hymn, however, it is pronounced in this combination when occurring word medially, as in hymnal. ⟨n⟩ is the sixth most common letter and the second-most commonly used consonant in the English language, in mathematics, the italic form n is a particularly common symbol for a variable quantity which represents an integer. The dictionary definition of n at Wiktionary
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ISO basic
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Writing cursive forms of N
20.
O
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O is the 15th letter and the second-to-last vowel in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its graphic form has remained constant from Phoenician times until today. The name of the Phoenician letter was ʿeyn, meaning eye and its original sound value was that of a consonant, probably, the sound represented by the cognate Arabic letter ع ʿayn. The use of this Phoenician letter for a sound is due to the early Greek alphabets. The letter was adopted with this value in the Old Italic alphabets, in Greek, a variation of the form later came to distinguish this long sound from the short o. Greek omicron gave rise to the corresponding Cyrillic letter O and the early Italic letter to runic ᛟ, the letter ⟨o⟩ is the fourth most common letter in the English alphabet. Like the other English vowel letters, it has associated long, the long ⟨o⟩ as in boat is actually most often a diphthong /oʊ/. In English there is also a short ⟨o⟩ as in fox, /ɒ/, which sounds slightly different in different dialects. In most dialects of British English, it is either an open-mid back rounded vowel or a back rounded vowel, in American English. In other contexts, especially before a letter with a minim, ⟨o⟩ may represent the sound /ʌ/, in English, the letter ⟨o⟩ in isolation before a noun, usually capitalized, marks the vocative case, as in the titles to O Canada or O Captain. Or certain verses of the Bible, ⟨o⟩ is commonly associated with the open-mid back rounded vowel, mid back rounded vowel or close-mid back rounded vowel in many languages. Other languages use ⟨o⟩ for various values, usually back vowels which are at least partly open, derived letters such as ⟨ö⟩ and ⟨ø⟩ have been created for the alphabets of some languages to distinguish values that were not present in Latin and Greek, particularly rounded front vowels. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, ⟨o⟩ represents the close-mid back rounded vowel, oxygen = O O mark Media related to O at Wikimedia Commons The dictionary definition of O at Wiktionary The dictionary definition of o at Wiktionary
O
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ISO basic
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21.
S
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S is the 19th letter in the Modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Northwest Semitic šîn represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ and it originated most likely as a pictogram of a tooth and represented the phoneme /ʃ/ via the acrophonic principle. Greek did not have a /ʃ/ phoneme, so the derived Greek letter Sigma came to represent the alveolar sibilant /s/. Within Greek, the name of sigma was influenced by its association with the Greek word σίζω to hiss. The original name of the letter sigma may have been san, herodotus reports that San was the name given by the Dorians to the same letter called Sigma by the Ionians. In Etruscan, the value /s/ of Greek sigma was maintained, while san represented a separate phoneme, the early Latin alphabet adopted sigma, but not san, as Old Latin did not have a /ʃ/ phoneme. The shape of Latin S arises from Greek Σ by dropping one out of the four strokes of that letter, in other Italic alphabets, the letter could be represented as a zig-zagging line of any number between three and six strokes. The familiar S-shape with three strokes is present in the earliest Latin inscriptions of the 6th century BC, the familiar rounded S-shape is present regularly in the Old Latin inscriptions of the 2nd century BC. It remained standard in writing throughout the medieval period and was adopted in early printing with movable types. It existed alongside minuscule round or short s, which was at the only used at the end of words. In most western orthographies, the ſ gradually fell out of use during the half of the 18th century. In Spain, the change was accomplished between the years 1760 and 1766. In France, the change occurred between 1782 and 1793, printers in the United States stopped using the long s between 1795 and 1810. In English orthography, the London printer John Bell pioneered the change. His edition of Shakespeare, in 1785, was advertised with the claim that he ventured to depart from the mode by rejecting the long ſ in favor of the round one. The Times of London made the switch from the long to the s with its issue of 10 September 1803. Encyclopaedia Britannicas 5th edition, completed in 1817, was the last edition to use the long s, in German orthography, long s was retained in Fraktur type as well as in standard cursive well into the 20th century, and was officially abolished in 1941. The ligature of ſs was retained, however, giving rise to the Eszett, the letter ⟨s⟩ is the seventh most common letter in English and the third-most common consonant
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ISO basic
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22.
T
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T is the 20th letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second most common letter in English language texts, taw was the last letter of the Western Semitic and Hebrew alphabets. In English, ⟨t⟩ usually denotes the voiceless alveolar plosive, as in tart, tee, or ties, the digraph ⟨ti⟩ often corresponds to the sound /ʃ/ word-medially when followed by a vowel, as in nation, ratio, negotiation, and Croatia. The letter ⟨t⟩ corresponds to the affricate /t͡ʃ/ in some words as a result of yod-coalescence, in the International Phonetic Alphabet, ⟨t⟩ denotes the voiceless alveolar plosive. Media related to T at Wikimedia Commons The dictionary definition of T at Wiktionary The dictionary definition of t at Wiktionary
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ISO basic
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