1.
Alphabet
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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
2.
Writing system
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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
3.
Louis Braille
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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
4.
Night writing
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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
5.
1829 braille
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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
6.
English Braille
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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
7.
German Braille
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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
8.
Universal Character Set characters
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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
9.
Braille
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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
10.
International uniformity of braille alphabets
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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
11.
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
12.
B
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B or b is the second letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It represents the voiced stop in many languages, including English. In some other languages, it is used to represent other bilabial consonants, Old English was originally written in runes, whose equivalent letter was beorc ⟨ᛒ⟩, meaning birch. Beorc dates to at least the 2nd-century Elder Futhark, which is now thought to have derived from the Old Italic alphabets ⟨
13.
C
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C is the third letter in the English alphabet and a letter of the alphabets of many other writing systems which inherited it from the Latin alphabet. It is also the letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is named cee in English, C comes from the same letter as G. The sign is possibly adapted from an Egyptian hieroglyph for a staff sling, another possibility is that it depicted a camel, the Semitic name for which was gamal. Powell, a specialist in the history of writing, states It is hard to imagine how gimel = camel can be derived from the picture of a camel. In the Etruscan language, plosive consonants had no contrastive voicing, already in the Western Greek alphabet, Gamma first took a form in Early Etruscan, then in Classical Etruscan. In Latin it eventually took the c form in Classical Latin, in the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters c k q were used to represent the sounds /k/ and /ɡ/. Of these, q was used to represent /k/ or /ɡ/ before a vowel, k before a. During the 3rd century BC, a character was introduced for /ɡ/. The use of c replaced most usages of k and q, but during the course of the Old English period, /k/ before front vowels were palatalized, having changed by the tenth century to, though ⟨c⟩ was still used, as in circe, wrecca. On the continent, meanwhile, a similar phonetic change had also been going on, in Vulgar Latin, /k/ became palatalized to in Italy and Dalmatia, in France and the Iberian peninsula, it became. Yet for these new sounds ⟨c⟩ was still used before the letters ⟨e⟩, the letter thus represented two distinct values. Subsequently, the Latin phoneme /kʷ/ de-labialized to /k/ meaning that the various Romance languages had /k/ before front vowels, the convention of using both ⟨c⟩ and ⟨k⟩ was applied to the writing of English after the Norman Conquest, causing a considerable re-spelling of the Old English words. The Old English cw was also at length displaced by the French qu so that the Old English cwén and cwic became Middle English quen quik, the sound, to which Old English palatalized /k/ had advanced, also occurred in French, chiefly from Latin /k/ before a. In French it was represented by the digraph ⟨ch⟩, as in champ and this spelling was introduced into English, i-iii, child, chyld, riche, mychel, for the cild, rice, mycel, of the Old English version whence they were copied. Former generations also wrote sence for sense, hence, today the Romance languages and English have a common feature inherited from Vulgar Latin spelling conventions where ⟨c⟩ takes on either a hard or soft value depending on the following letter. In English orthography, ⟨c⟩ generally represents the value of /s/ before the letters ⟨e⟩, ⟨i⟩, and ⟨y⟩. However, there are a number of exceptions in English, soccer, the soft ⟨c⟩ may represent the /ʃ/ sound in the digraph ⟨ci⟩ when this precedes a vowel, as in the words delicious and appreciate
14.
D
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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
15.
E
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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
16.
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
17.
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
18.
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
19.
I
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I is the ninth letter and the third vowel in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. This letter could also be used to represent /i/, the close front unrounded vowel, the Greeks adopted a form of this Phoenician yodh as their letter iota to represent /i/, the same as in the Old Italic alphabet. In Latin, it was used to represent /j/ and this use persists in the languages that descended from Latin. The modern letter j originated as a variation of i, the dot over the lowercase i is sometimes called a tittle. In the Turkish alphabet, dotted and dotless I are considered separate letters, representing a front and back vowel, respectively, and both have uppercase and lowercase forms. In Modern English spelling, ⟨i⟩ represents several different sounds, either the diphthong /aɪ/ as in kite, the diphthong /aɪ/ developed from Middle English /iː/ through a series of vowel shifts. Because the diphthong /aɪ/ developed from a Middle English long vowel, the letter, ⟨i⟩, is the fifth most common letter in the English language. The English first-person singular nominative pronoun is I, pronounced /aɪ/, Chambers notes, however, that the capitalized form didn’t become established in the south of England “until the 1700s. Capitalizing the pronoun, Chambers explains, made it distinct, thus “avoiding misreading handwritten manuscripts. ”In many languages orthographies, ⟨i⟩ is used to represent the sound /i/ or, more rarely. The Roman numeral Ⅰ represents the number 1, in mathematics, the lowercase i represents the unit imaginary number. In some sans serif typefaces, the uppercase letter I, I may be difficult to distinguish from the lowercase letter L, l, the vertical bar character |, or the digit one 1. In serifed typefaces, the form of the letter has both a baseline and a cap-height serif, while the lowercase L has generally a hooked ascender. The uppercase I does not have a dot while the lowercase i has one in most Latin-derived alphabets, however, some schemes, such as the Turkish alphabet, have two kinds of I, dotted and dotless. The uppercase I has two kinds of shapes, with serifs and without serifs, usually these are considered equivalent, but they are distinguished in some extended Latin alphabet systems, such as the 1978 version of the African reference alphabet. In that system, the former is the counterpart of ɪ
20.
J
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J is the tenth letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its normal name in English is jay /ˈdʒeɪ/ or, now uncommonly, when used for the palatal approximant, it may be called yod or yot. A distinctive usage emerged in Middle High German, gian Giorgio Trissino was the first to explicitly distinguish I and J as representing separate sounds, in his Ɛpistola del Trissino de le lettere nuωvamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana of 1524. In English, ⟨j⟩ most commonly represents the affricate /dʒ/, in Old English, the phoneme /dʒ/ was represented orthographically with ⟨cg⟩ and ⟨cȝ⟩. Under the influence of Old French, which had a similar phoneme deriving from Latin /j/, English scribes began to use ⟨i⟩ to represent word-initial /dʒ/ in Old English, later, many other uses of ⟨i⟩ were added in loanwords from French and other languages. The first English language book to make a distinction between ⟨i⟩ and ⟨j⟩ was published in 1633. In loan words such as raj, ⟨j⟩ may represent /ʒ/, occasionally, ⟨j⟩ represents the original /j/ sound, as in Hallelujah and fjord. In words of Spanish origin, where ⟨j⟩ represents the velar fricative. In English, ⟨j⟩ is the fourth-least-frequently used letter in words, being more frequent only than ⟨z⟩, ⟨q⟩ and it is, however, quite common in proper nouns, especially personal names. Notable exceptions are English, Scots and Luxembourgish, some related languages, such as Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian, also adopted ⟨j⟩ into the Cyrillic alphabet for the same purpose. Because of this standard, the lower case letter was chosen to be used in the IPA as the symbol for the sound. In the Romance languages, ⟨j⟩ has generally developed from its original palatal approximant value in Latin to some kind of fricative, in French, Portuguese, Catalan, and Romanian it has been fronted to the postalveolar fricative /ʒ/. In Spanish, by contrast, it has been both devoiced and backed from an earlier /ʝ/ to a present-day /x ~ h/, with the phonetic realization depending on the speakers dialect/s. In modern standard Italian spelling, only Latin words, proper nouns or those borrowed from foreign languages have ⟨j⟩. Until the 19th century, ⟨j⟩ was used instead of ⟨i⟩ in diphthongs, as a replacement for final -ii, and in vowel groups, ⟨j⟩ is also used to render /j/ in dialect, e. g. Romanesque ajo for standard aglio. The Italian novelist Luigi Pirandello used ⟨j⟩ in vowel groups in his works written in Italian, he wrote in his native Sicilian language. In Basque, the represented by ⟨j⟩ has a variety of realizations according to the regional dialect. Among non-European languages that have adopted the Latin script, ⟨j⟩ stands for /ʒ/ in Turkish and Azerbaijani, ⟨j⟩ stands for /dʒ/ in Indonesian, Somali, Malay, Igbo, Shona, Oromo, Turkmen, and Zulu
21.
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
22.
L
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L is the twelfth letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet, used in words such as lagoon, lantern, and less. Lamedh may have come from a pictogram of an ox goad or cattle prod, some have suggested a shepherds staff. In English orthography, ⟨l⟩ usually represents the phoneme /l/, which can have several sound values, the alveolar lateral approximant occurs before a vowel, as in lip or blend, while the velarized alveolar lateral approximant occurs in bell and milk. A medical condition or speech impediment restricting the pronunciation of ⟨l⟩ is known as lambdacism. In English orthography, ⟨l⟩ is often silent in such words as walk or could, ⟨l⟩ usually represents the sound or some other lateral consonant. Common digraphs include ⟨ll⟩, which has an identical to ⟨l⟩ in English, but has the separate value voiceless alveolar lateral fricative in Welsh. In Spanish, ⟨ll⟩ represents, or, depending on dialect, a palatal lateral approximant or palatal ⟨l⟩ occurs in many languages, and is represented by ⟨gli⟩ in Italian, ⟨ll⟩ in Spanish and Catalan, ⟨lh⟩ in Portuguese, and ⟨ļ⟩ in Latvian. In phonetic and phonemic transcription, the International Phonetic Alphabet uses ⟨l⟩ to represent the alveolar approximant. The capital letter L is used as the sign for the Albanian lek. It was often used, especially in handwriting, as the sign for the Italian lira. It is also used as a substitute for the pound sign. The Roman numeral Ⅼ represents the number 50, in some fonts, the lowercase letter ⟨l⟩ may be difficult to distinguish from the digit one, ⟨1⟩, or an uppercase letter ⟨I⟩. In recent times, many new fonts have curved the lowercase form to the right, a more modern version based on the handwritten letter-like ⟨ℓ⟩ is sometimes used in mathematics and elsewhere. In Japan, for example, this is the symbol for the liter and its LaTeX command is \ell, its codepoint is U+2113, and its numeric character reference is ℓ. The dictionary definition of L at Wiktionary The dictionary definition of l at Wiktionary The dictionary definition of ℓ at Wiktionary
23.
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
24.
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
25.
O
–
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
26.
P
–
P is the 16th letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. In English orthography and most other European languages, ⟨p⟩ represents the sound /p/, a common digraph in English is ⟨ph⟩, which represents the sound /f/, and can be used to transliterate ⟨φ⟩ phi in loanwords from Greek. In German, the digraph ⟨pf⟩ is common, representing a labial affricate /pf/, in the International Phonetic Alphabet, /p/ is used to represent the voiceless bilabial plosive. The Roman P had this form on coins and inscriptions until the reign of Claudius, ca.50 AD. Mind your Ps and Qs Pence or penny, the English slang for which is p Media related to P at Wikimedia Commons The dictionary definition of P at Wiktionary The dictionary definition of p at Wiktionary
27.
Q
–
Q is the 17th letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. In nearly all using the Latin alphabet it is a consonant. The Semitic sound value of Qôp was /q/, and the form of the letter could have based on the eye of a needle. /q/ is a common to Semitic languages, but not found in many European languages. Some have even suggested that the form of the letter Q is even more ancient, in Greek, qoppa probably came to represent several labialized velar stops, among them /kʷ/ and /kʷʰ/. As a result of sound shifts, these sounds in Greek changed to /p/. Therefore, qoppa was transformed into two letters, qoppa, which stood for the number 90, and phi, which stood for the aspirated sound /pʰ/ that came to be pronounced /f/ in Modern Greek. The Etruscans used Q in conjunction with V to represent /kʷ/, in the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all used to represent the two sounds /k/ and /ɡ/, which were not differentiated in writing. Of these, Q was used before a vowel, K before /a/. Later, the use of C replaced most usages of K and Q, Q survived only to represent /k/ when immediately followed by a /w/ sound, in writing block letters, bisecting tails are fastest to write as they require less precision. Typefaces with a disconnected Q tail, while uncommon, have existed since at least 1529, some early metal type fonts included up to 3 different Qs, a short-tailed Q, a long-tailed Q, and a long-tailed Q-u ligature. Not a fan of long-tailed Qs, American typographer D. B, updike celebrated their demise in his 1922 book Printing Types, claiming that Renaissance printers made their Q tails longer and longer simply to outdo each other. Latin language words, which are more likely than English words to contain Q as their first letter, have also been cited as the reason for their existence. Identifont, an automated typeface identification service that identifies typefaces via questions about their appearance, frutiger considered such Qs to make for more harmonious and gentle typefaces. Some typographers, such as Sophie Elinor Brown, have listed Q as being among their favorite letters. The lowercase q is usually seen as an o with a descender extending from the right side of the bowl, with or without a swash. The qs descender is usually typed without a swash due to the style difference typically seen between the descenders of the g and q. When handwritten, or as part of a font, the descender of the q sometimes finishes with a rightward swash to distinguish it from the letter g
28.
R
–
R is the 18th letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The original Semitic letter may have inspired by an Egyptian hieroglyph for tp. It was used for /r/ by Semites because in their language, the Lapis Satricanus inscription shows the form of the Latin alphabet around 500 BC. Here, the rounded, closing Π shape of the p, the descending stroke of the Latin letter R has fully developed by the 3rd century BC, as seen in the Tomb of the Scipios sarcophagus inscriptions of that era. From around 50 AD, the letter P would be written with its loop fully closed, the minuscule form developed through several variations on the capital form. Along with Latin minuscule writing in general, it developed ultimately from Roman cursive via the uncial script of Late Antiquity into the Carolingian minuscule of the 9th century. In handwriting, it was not to close the bottom of the loop but continue into the leg. The loop-leg stroke shortened into the simple arc used in the Carolingian minuscule, a calligraphic minuscule r, known as r rotunda, was used in the sequence or, bending the shape of the r to accommodate the bulge of the o. Later, the variant was also used where r followed other lower case letters with a rounded loop towards the right. Use of r rotunda was mostly tied to blackletter typefaces, insular script used a minuscule which retained two downward strokes, but which did not close the loop, this variant survives in the Gaelic type popular in Ireland until the mid 20th century. The name of the letter in Latin was er, following the pattern of letters representing continuants. This name is preserved in French and many other languages, in Middle English, the name of the letter changed from /ɛr/ to /ar/, following a pattern exhibited in many other words such as farm, and star. The letter R is sometimes referred to as the littera canina and this phrase has Latin origins, the Latin R was trilled to sound like a growling dog. A good example of a trilling R is the Spanish word for dog, in William Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet, such a reference is made by Juliets nurse in Act 2, scene 4, when she calls the letter R the dogs name. The reference is found in Ben Jonsons English Grammar. The letter ⟨r⟩ is the eighth most common letter in English, the letter ⟨r⟩ is used to form the ending -re, which is used in certain words such as centre in some varieties of English spelling, such as British English. Canadian English also uses the -re ending, unlike American English, ⟨r⟩ represents a rhotic consonant in many languages, as shown in the table below. Other languages may use the letter ⟨r⟩ in their alphabets to represent rhotic consonants different from the alveolar trill, in Haitian Creole, it represents a sound so weak that it is often written interchangeably with ⟨w⟩, e. g. Kweyol for Kreyol
29.
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
30.
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
31.
U
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U is the 21st letter and the fifth vowel in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The letter u ultimately comes from the Phoenician letter Waw by way of the letter y, see the letter y for details. During the late Middle Ages, two forms of v developed, which were used for its ancestor u and modern v. The pointed form v was written at the beginning of a word, while a rounded form u was used in the middle or end, so whereas valour and excuse appeared as in modern printing, have and upon were printed haue and vpon. In English, the letter ⟨u⟩ has four main pronunciations, there are long and short pronunciations. Short ⟨u⟩, found originally in closed syllables, most commonly represents /ʌ/, though it retains its old pronunciation /ʊ/ after labial consonants in some words and occasionally elsewhere. Long ⟨u⟩, found originally in words of French origin, most commonly represents /juː/, reducing to /uː/ after ⟨r⟩ and sometimes after ⟨l⟩, in a few words, short ⟨u⟩ represents other sounds, such as /ɪ/ in business and /ɛ/ in bury. The letter ⟨u⟩ is used in the digraphs ⟨au⟩ /ɔː/, ⟨ou⟩, and with the value of u in ⟨eu⟩, ⟨ue⟩. It often has the sound /w/ before a vowel in the sequences ⟨qu⟩, ⟨gu⟩, additionally, the letter ⟨u⟩ is used in text messaging and internet and other written slang to denote you, by virtue of both being pronounced /juː/. In most languages that use the Latin alphabet, ⟨u⟩ represents the close back rounded vowel /u/ or a similar vowel, in French orthography the letter represents the close front rounded vowel, /u/ is represented by ⟨ou⟩. In Dutch and Afrikaans, it represents either /y/, or a near-close near-front rounded vowel, in Welsh orthography the letter can represent a long close front unrounded vowel or short near-close near-front unrounded vowel in Southern dialects. In Northern dialects, the long and short vowels are a long close central unrounded vowel. /u, / and /ʊ/ are represented by ⟨w⟩, the symbol U is the chemical symbol for uranium. In the context of Newtonian mechanics U is the symbol for the energy of a system. U is the symbol for the atomic mass unit and U is the symbol for one Enzyme unit, in IPA, the close back rounded vowel is represented by the lower case ⟨u⟩. U is also the source of the mathematical symbol ∪, representing a union. It is used mainly for Venn diagrams and geometry and it is used as for micro- in metric measurements as a replacement for the Greek letter μ, of which it is a graphic approximation, when that Greek letter is not available, as in um for μm. Some universities, such as the University of Miami and the University of Utah, are known as The U. Media related to U at Wikimedia Commons The dictionary definition of U at Wiktionary The dictionary definition of u at Wiktionary
32.
V
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V is the 22nd letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The letter V comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, in Greek, the letter upsilon Υ was adapted from waw to represent, at first, the vowel as in moon. This was later fronted to, the front rounded vowel spelled ü in German, thus, num — originally spelled NVM — was pronounced /num/ and via was pronounced. From the 1st century AD on, depending on Vulgar Latin dialect, consonantal /w/ developed into /β/, during the Late Middle Ages, two forms of v developed, which were both used for its ancestor /u/ and modern /v/. The pointed form v was written at the beginning of a word, while a rounded form u was used in the middle or end, so whereas valour and excuse appeared as in modern printing, have and upon were printed as haue and vpon. The first distinction between the u and v is recorded in a Gothic script from 1386, where v preceded u. By the mid-16th century, the v form was used to represent the consonant and u the vowel sound, capital U was not accepted as a distinct letter until many years later. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, /v/ represents the voiced labiodental fricative, in English, V is unusual in that it has not traditionally been doubled to indicate a short vowel, the way for example P is doubled to indicate the difference between super and supper. However, that is changing with newly coined words, such as divvy up, like J, K, Q, X, and Z, V is not used very frequently in English. It is the 6th least common letter in the English language, V is the only letter that cannot be used to form an English two-letter word in the Australian version of the game of Scrabble. C also cannot be used in the American version, the letter appears frequently in the Romance languages, where it is the first letter of the second person plural pronoun and the stem of the imperfect form of most verbs. Catalan, ve, pronounced, in dialects that lack contrast between /v/ and /b/, the letter is called ve baixa low B/V. Czech, vé French, vé German, Vau Italian, vi or vu Portuguese, vê Spanish, uve is recommended, but ve is traditional. If V is pronounced in the way, it would have the same pronunciation as the letter B in Spanish. In some countries it is called ve corta, ve baja, ve pequeña, some words are more often spelled with the b equivalent character instead of vu due to the long-time use of the word without it. In most languages which use the Latin alphabet, ⟨v⟩ has a voiced bilabial or labiodental sound, in English, it is a voiced labiodental fricative. In most dialects of Spanish, it is pronounced the same as ⟨b⟩, in Corsican, it is pronounced, or, depending on the position in the word and the sentence. In German and Dutch it can be either or, in Native American languages of North America, ⟨v⟩ represents a nasalized central vowel, /ə̃/
33.
X
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X is the 24th and antepenultimate letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. In Ancient Greek, Χ and Ψ were among several variants of the letter, used originally for /kʰ/ and later, in western areas such as Arcadia. In the end, more conservative eastern forms became the standard of Classical Greek, however, the Etruscans had taken over Χ from western Greek, and it therefore stands for /ks/ in Etruscan and Latin. The letter Χ ~ Ψ for /kʰ/ was a Greek addition to the alphabet, in English orthography, ⟨x⟩ is typically pronounced as the voiceless consonant cluster /ks/ when it follows the stressed vowel, and the voiced consonant /ɡz/ when it precedes the stressed vowel. It is also pronounced /ɡz/ when it precedes a silent ⟨h⟩, before ⟨i⟩ or ⟨u⟩, it can be pronounced /kʃ/ or /ɡʒ/, these result from earlier /ksj/ and /ɡzj/. It also makes the sound /kʃ/ in words ending in -xion, when ⟨x⟩ ends a word, it is always /ks/, except in loan words such as faux. There are very few English words that start with ⟨x⟩, when ⟨x⟩ does start a word, it is usually pronounced /z/, in rare recent loanwords or foreign proper names, it can also be pronounced /s/ or /ʃ/. Many of the words that start with ⟨x⟩ are of Greek origin, in abbreviations, it can represent trans-, cross-, Christ- as shorthand for the labarum, the crys- in crystal, or various words starting with ex-. It is the third least common letter in English, with a frequency of about 0. 15% in words, in some languages, as a result of assorted phonetic changes, handwriting adaptations or simply spelling convention, ⟨x⟩ has other pronunciations, Basque, as a spelling for. Additionally there is the digraph ⟨tx⟩, Dutch, ⟨x⟩ usually represents, except in the name of the island of Texel, which is pronounced Tessel. This is because of historical sound-changes in Dutch, where all /ks/ sounds have been replaced by /s/ sounds, words with an ⟨x⟩ in the Dutch language are nowadays usually loanwords. In the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, family names with ⟨x⟩ are not uncommon, usage in Danish, German and Finnish is similar. French, at the ends of words, silent, three exceptions are pronounced, six, dix and in some city names such as Bruxelles or Auxerre. It is pronounced in sixième and dixième, in Italian, ⟨x⟩ is either pronounced, as in extra, uxorio, xilofono, or, as exogamia, when it is preceded by ⟨e⟩ and followed by a vowel. In several related languages, notably Venetian, it represents the voiced sibilant and it is also used, mainly amongst the young people, as a short written form for per, meaning for, for example, x sempre. This because in Italian the multiplication sign is called per. However, ⟨x⟩ is found only in loanwords, as it is not part of the standard Italian alphabet, in most words with ⟨x⟩, in Old Spanish, ⟨x⟩ was pronounced, as it is still currently in other Iberian Romance languages. Later, the sound evolved to a hard sound, in modern Spanish, the sound is generally spelled as the letters ⟨j⟩ or ⟨g⟩, though ⟨x⟩ is still retained for some names
34.
Y
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Y is the 25th and penultimate letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. In the English writing system, it represents a vowel. The names igrek in Polish and i gờ-rét in Vietnamese are both phonetic borrowings of the French name, in Dutch, both Griekse ij and i-grec are used. The original Greek name υ ψιλον has also adapted into several modern languages, in German, for example, it is called Ypsilon. In Portuguese, both names are used, Old English borrowed Latin Y to write the native Old English sound /y/. The name of the letter may be related to ui in various languages, in Middle English it was wi /wiː/. The oldest direct ancestor of English letter Y was the Semitic letter waw, from which also come F, U, V, the Greek and Latin alphabets developed from the Phoenician form of this early alphabet. In Modern English, there is some historical influence from the old English letter yogh. The form of the modern letter Y is derived from the Greek letter upsilon, the Romans first borrowed a form of upsilon as the single letter V, which represented both the vowel sound /u/ and the semivowel consonant sound /w/. This first loaning of upsilon into Latin is not the source of the Modern English Y and it was used to transcribe loanwords from the prestigious Attic dialect of Greek, which had the non-Latin vowel sound /y/, as found in modern French cru, or German grün. Because it was not a sound of Latin, it was usually pronounced /u/ or /i/. Some Latin words of Italic origin also came to be spelled with y, Latin silva was commonly spelled sylva, in analogy with the Greek cognate and synonym ὕλη. The Roman Emperor Claudius proposed introducing a new letter into the Latin alphabet to transcribe the so-called sonus medius, the letter Y was used to represent the sound /y/ in the writing systems of some other languages that adopted the Latin alphabet. In Old English, there was a native /y/ sound, but, by the time of Middle English, /y/ had lost its roundedness and became identical to I. Therefore, many words that originally had I were spelled with Y, in Modern English, Y can represent the same vowel sounds as the letter I. The use of the letter Y to represent a vowel is restricted in Modern English than it was in Middle. It occurs mainly in the three environments, for upsilon in Greek loan-words, at the end of a word. As a consonant in English, Y normally represents a palatal approximant and this use was possibly influenced by the Middle English letter yogh, which could represent /j/
35.
Z
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Z is the 26th and final letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. and deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal form. Another English dialectal form is izzard /ˈɪzərd/ and this dates from the mid-18th century and probably derives from Occitan izèda or the French ézed, whose reconstructed Latin form would be *idzēta, perhaps a popular form with a prosthetic vowel. Several languages render it as /ts/ or /dz/, e. g. zeta /tsetɑ/ or /tset/ in Finnish, in Standard Chinese pinyin, the name of the letter Z is pronounced, although the English zed and zee have become very common. The Semitic symbol was the letter, named zayin, which meant weapon or sword. It represented either the sound /z/ as in English and French, the Greek form of Z was a close copy of the Phoenician Zayin, and the Greek inscriptional form remained in this shape throughout ancient times. The Greeks called it zeta, a new name made in imitation of eta and theta, in other dialects, such as Elean and Cretan, the symbol seems to have been used for sounds resembling the English voiced and voiceless th. In the common dialect that succeeded the older dialects, ζ became /z/, the Etruscan letter Z was derived from the Phoenician alphabet, most probably through the Greek alphabet used on the island of Ischia. In Etruscan, this letter may have represented /ts/, the letter z was part of the earliest form of the Latin alphabet, adopted from Etruscan. Because the sound /z/ in Latin changed to /r/ by rhotacism in the fifth century BC, z was dropped and its place given to the new letter g. Before the reintroduction of z, the sound of zeta was written s at the beginning of words and ss in the middle of words, as in sōna for ζώνη belt, likewise, /di/ sometimes replaced /z/ in words like baptidiare for baptizare to baptize. In modern Italian, z represents /ts/ or /dz/, whereas the reflexes of ianuarius and hodie are written with the g, gennaio. In other languages, such as Spanish, further evolution of the sound occurred, Early English used S alone for both the unvoiced and the voiced sibilant. The Latin sound imported through French was new and was not written with Z, the successive changes can be well seen in the double forms from the same original, jealous and zealous. Both of these come from a late Latin zelosus, derived from the imported Greek ζῆλος zêlos, the earlier form is jealous, its initial sound is the, which developed to Modern French. John Wycliffe wrote the word as gelows or ielous, Z at the end of a word was pronounced ts, as in English assets, from Old French asez enough, from Vulgar Latin ad satis. In earlier times, the English alphabets used by children terminated not with Z, some Latin based alphabets have extra letters on the end of the alphabet. The last letter for the Icelandic, Finnish and Swedish alphabets is Ö, while it is Å for Danish, the German alphabet ends with z. A glyph variant of Z originating in the medieval Gothic minuscules, in some Antiqua typefaces, this letter is present as a standalone letter or in ligatures
