1.
Tea
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Tea is an aromatic beverage commonly prepared by pouring hot or boiling water over cured leaves of the Camellia sinensis, an evergreen shrub native to Asia. After water, it is the most widely consumed drink in the world, Tea originated in Southwest China, where it was used as a medicinal drink. It was popularized as a drink during the Chinese Tang dynasty. Portuguese priests and merchants introduced it to Europe during the 16th century, during the 17th century, drinking tea became fashionable among Britons, who started large-scale production and commercialization of the plant in India to bypass the Chinese monopoly. The term herbal tea usually refers to infusions of fruit or herbs made without the tea plant, such as steeps of rosehip, chamomile and these are sometimes called tisanes or herbal infusions to prevent confusion with tea made from the tea plant. The tea industry often uses the term fruit tea to refer to what are in fact fruit-flavored black teas. The Chinese character for tea is 茶, originally written with a stroke as 荼. The word is pronounced differently in the different varieties of Chinese, such as chá in Mandarin, zo and dzo in Wu Chinese, there were other ancient words for tea, though ming is the only other one still in common use. Most Chinese languages, such as Mandarin and Cantonese, pronounce it along the lines of cha and these two pronunciations have made their separate ways into other languages around the world. Starting in the seventeen century, the Dutch played a dominant role in the early European tea trade via the Dutch East India Company. The Dutch borrowed the word for tea from Min Chinese, either through trade directly from Fujian or Formosa where they had established a port, or from Malay traders in Bantam, Java. The Dutch then introduced to other European languages this Min pronunciation for tea, including English tea, French thé, Spanish té and this pronunciation is also the most common form worldwide. The Portuguese adopted the Cantonese pronunciation chá, and spread it to India, the Korean and Japanese pronunciations of cha were borrowed into Korean and Japanese during earlier periods of Chinese history. A third form, the increasingly widespread chai, came from Persian چای chay, both the châ and chây forms are found in Persian dictionaries. English has all three forms, cha or char, attested from the 16th century, tea, from the 17th, however, the form chai refers specifically to a black tea mixed with honey, spices and milk in contemporary English. Tea plants are native to East Asia, and probably originated around the points of the lands of north Burma. Tea drinking may have begun in the Yunnan region during the Shang Dynasty in China, Chinese legends attribute the invention of tea to Shennong in 2737 BC, although evidence suggests that tea drinking may have been introduced from the southwest of China. The earliest written records of tea come from China, in the Chronicles of Huayang, it was recorded that the Ba people in Sichuan presented tu to the Zhou king
2.
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
3.
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
4.
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
5.
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
6.
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
7.
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
8.
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
9.
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
10.
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
11.
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
12.
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
13.
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/
14.
W
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W is the 23rd letter in the modern English and ISO basic Latin alphabets. The sounds /w/ and /b/ of Classical Latin developed into a bilabial fricative /β/ between vowels in Early Medieval Latin, therefore, ⟨V⟩ no longer adequately represented the labial-velar approximant sound /w/ of Germanic phonology. The Germanic /w/ phoneme was therefore written as ⟨VV⟩ or ⟨uu⟩ by the 7th or 8th century by the earliest writers of Old English, Gothic, by contrast, simply used a letter based on the Greek Υ for the same sound. The digraph ⟨VV⟩/⟨uu⟩ was also used in Medieval Latin to represent Germanic names and it is from this ⟨uu⟩ digraph that the modern name double U derives. The digraph was commonly used in the spelling of Old High German, but only sporadically in Old English, in early Middle English, following the 11th-century Norman Conquest, ⟨uu⟩ gained popularity and by 1300 it had taken Wynns place in common use. Scribal realization of the digraph could look like a pair of Vs whose branches crossed in the middle, an obsolete, cursive form found in the nineteenth century in both English and German was in the form of an ⟨n⟩ whose rightmost branch curved around as in a cursive ⟨v⟩. The shift from the digraph ⟨VV⟩ to the distinct ligature ⟨W⟩ is thus gradual, there is no phonological distinction between and in contemporary German. English uses ⟨w⟩ to represent /w/, certain dialects of Scottish English still distinguish this digraph. In Europe, there are only a few languages that use ⟨w⟩ in native words, English, German, Low German, Dutch, Frisian, Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Walloon, Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Resian and Scandinavian dialects use ⟨w⟩ in native words. German, Polish and Kashubian use it for the labiodental fricative /v/. Unlike its use in languages, the letter is used in Welsh and Cornish to represent the vowel /u/ as well as the related approximant consonant /w/. Modern German dialects generally have only or for West Germanic /w/, but or is still heard allophonically for ⟨w⟩, especially in the clusters ⟨schw⟩, ⟨zw⟩, some Bavarian dialects preserve a light initial, such as in wuoz. The Classical Latin is heard in the Southern German greeting Servus, in Dutch, ⟨w⟩ became a labiodental approximant /ʋ/. In many Dutch speaking areas, such as Flanders and Suriname, in Finnish, ⟨w⟩ is seen as a variant of ⟨v⟩ and not a separate letter. It is, however, recognised and maintained in the spelling of some old names, reflecting an earlier German spelling standard, in all cases, it is pronounced /ʋ/. In Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, ⟨w⟩ is named double-v, in these languages, the letter only exists in old names, loanwords and foreign words. It is usually pronounced /v/, but in words of English origin it may be pronounced /w/. The letter was introduced in the Danish and Swedish alphabets as late as 1980 and 2006, respectively
15.
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
16.
Letter (alphabet)
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A letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters also appear in abjads and abugidas, letters broadly denote phonemes in the spoken form of the language, although there is rarely a consistent exact correspondence between letters and phonemes. Written signs in writing systems are best called syllabograms or logograms. Letter, borrowed from Old French lettre, entered Middle English around AD1200, letter derives from Latin littera, which may have derived, via Etruscan, from the Greek διφθέρα. The Middle English plural lettres could refer to an epistle or written document, use of the singular letter to refer to a written document emerged in the 14th century. As symbols that denote segmental speech, letters are associated with phonetics, in a purely phonemic alphabet, a single phoneme is denoted by a single letter, but in history and practice letters often denote more than one phoneme. A pair of letters designating a single phoneme is called a digraph, examples of digraphs in English include ch, sh and th. A phoneme can also be represented by three letters, called a trigraph, an example is the combination sch in German. A letter may also be associated more than one phoneme. As an example of positional effects, the Spanish letter c is pronounced before a, o, or u, letters also have specific names associated with them. These names may differ with language, dialect and history, Z, for example, is usually called zed in all English-speaking countries except the U. S. where it is named zee. Letters, as elements of alphabets, have prescribed orders and this may generally be known as alphabetical order though collation is the science devoted to the complex task of ordering and sorting of letters and words in different languages. In Spanish, for instance, ñ is a letter being sorted after n. In English, n and ñ are sorted alike, letters may also have numerical value. This is true of Roman numerals and the letters of other writing systems, in English, Arabic numerals are typically used instead of letters. Letters may be used as words, the words a and I are the most common English letter-words. Sometimes O is used for Oh in poetic situations, in extremely informal cases of writing individual letters may replace words, e. g. u may be used instead of you in English, when the letter name is pronounced as a homophone of the word. Nearly all alphabets in the world today either descend directly from development or were inspired by its design
17.
English language
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English /ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/ is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in early medieval England and is now the global lingua franca. Named after the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that migrated to England, English is either the official language or one of the official languages in almost 60 sovereign states. It is the third most common language in the world, after Mandarin. It is the most widely learned second language and a language of the United Nations, of the European Union. It is the most widely spoken Germanic language, accounting for at least 70% of speakers of this Indo-European branch, English has developed over the course of more than 1,400 years. The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the century, are called Old English. Middle English began in the late 11th century with the Norman conquest of England, Early Modern English began in the late 15th century with the introduction of the printing press to London and the King James Bible, and the start of the Great Vowel Shift. Through the worldwide influence of the British Empire, modern English spread around the world from the 17th to mid-20th centuries, English is an Indo-European language, and belongs to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages. Most closely related to English are the Frisian languages, and English, Old Saxon and its descendent Low German languages are also closely related, and sometimes Low German, English, and Frisian are grouped together as the Ingvaeonic or North Sea Germanic languages. Modern English descends from Middle English, which in turn descends from Old English, particular dialects of Old and Middle English also developed into a number of other English languages, including Scots and the extinct Fingallian and Forth and Bargy dialects of Ireland. English is classified as a Germanic language because it shares new language features with other Germanic languages such as Dutch, German and these shared innovations show that the languages have descended from a single common ancestor, which linguists call Proto-Germanic. Through Grimms law, the word for foot begins with /f/ in Germanic languages, English is classified as an Anglo-Frisian language because Frisian and English share other features, such as the palatalisation of consonants that were velar consonants in Proto-Germanic. The earliest form of English is called Old English or Anglo-Saxon, in the fifth century, the Anglo-Saxons settled Britain and the Romans withdrew from Britain. England and English are named after the Angles, Old English was divided into four dialects, the Anglian dialects, Mercian and Northumbrian, and the Saxon dialects, Kentish and West Saxon. Through the educational reforms of King Alfred in the century and the influence of the kingdom of Wessex. The epic poem Beowulf is written in West Saxon, and the earliest English poem, Modern English developed mainly from Mercian, but the Scots language developed from Northumbrian. A few short inscriptions from the period of Old English were written using a runic script. By the sixth century, a Latin alphabet was adopted, written with half-uncial letterforms and it included the runic letters wynn ⟨ƿ⟩ and thorn ⟨þ⟩, and the modified Latin letters eth ⟨ð⟩, and ash ⟨æ⟩
18.
Consonant
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In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. For example, the sound spelled th in this is a different consonant than the th sound in thin, the word consonant comes from Latin oblique stem cōnsonant-, from cōnsonāns sounding-together, a calque of Greek σύμφωνον sýmphōnon. Dionysius Thrax calls consonants sýmphōna pronounced with because they can only be pronounced with a vowel, the word consonant is also used to refer to a letter of an alphabet that denotes a consonant sound. The 21 consonant letters in the English alphabet are B, C, D, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, Z, and usually W and Y. The letter Y stands for the consonant /j/ in yoke, the vowel /ɪ/ in myth, the vowel /i/ in funny, and the diphthong /aɪ/ in my. W always represents a consonant except in combination with a letter, as in growth, raw, and how. In some other languages, such as Finnish, y represents a vowel sound. Such syllables may be abbreviated CV, V, and CVC and this can be argued to be the only pattern found in most of the worlds languages, and perhaps the primary pattern in all of them. However, the distinction between consonant and vowel is not always clear cut, there are consonants and non-syllabic vowels in many of the worlds languages. One blurry area is in segments variously called semivowels, semiconsonants, on one side, there are vowel-like segments that are not in themselves syllabic, but form diphthongs as part of the syllable nucleus, as the i in English boil. On the other, there are approximants that behave like consonants in forming onsets, some phonologists model these as both being the underlying vowel /i/, so that the English word bit would phonemically be /bit/, beet would be /bii̯t/, and yield would be phonemically /i̯ii̯ld/. Likewise, foot would be /fut/, food would be /fuu̯d/, wood would be /u̯ud/, the other problematic area is that of syllabic consonants, segments articulated as consonants but occupying the nucleus of a syllable. Other languages use fricative and often trilled segments as syllabic nuclei, as in Czech and several languages in Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Mandarin, they are historically allophones of /i/, and spelled that way in Pinyin. Ladefoged and Maddieson call these fricative vowels and say that they can usually be thought of as syllabic fricatives that are allophones of vowels and that is, phonetically they are consonants, but phonemically they behave as vowels. Many Slavic languages allow the trill and the lateral as syllabic nuclei, in languages like Nuxalk, it is difficult to know what the nucleus of a syllable is, or if all syllables even have nuclei. If the concept of syllable applies in Nuxalk, there are consonants in words like /sx̩s/ seal fat. Miyako in Japan is similar, with /f̩ks̩/ to build and /ps̩ks̩/ to pull, each spoken consonant can be distinguished by several phonetic features, The manner of articulation is how air escapes from the vocal tract when the consonant or approximant sound is made. Manners include stops, fricatives, and nasals, the place of articulation is where in the vocal tract the obstruction of the consonant occurs, and which speech organs are involved
19.
Taw
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Taw, tav, or taf is the twenty-second and last letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Tāw, Hebrew Tav ת, Aramaic Taw, Syriac Taw ܬ, and Arabic Tāʼ ت. Its original sound value is /t/, the Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek tau, Latin T, and Cyrillic Т. Taw is believed to be derived from the Egyptian hieroglyph meaning mark The letter is named tāʼ , the plural form of Arabic letter ت is tāʼāt, a palindrome. Recently the isolated ت has been used online as an emoticon, an alternative form called tāʼ marbūṭah is used at the end of words to mark feminine gender for nouns and adjectives. It denotes the final sound /-a/ and, when in construct state, regular tāʼ, to distinguish it from tāʼ marbūṭah, is referred to as tāʼ maftūḥah. In words such as risālah رسالة, tāʼ marbūṭah is denoted as h, historically, it was pronounced as the /t/ sound in all positions, but in coda positions it eventually developed into a weakly aspirated /h/ sound, this /h/ itself was eventually left unpronounced. When a word ending with a tāʼ marbūṭah is suffixed with a case ending or any other suffix. For example, the word رسالة is pronounced as risāla in pausa but is pronounced risālatu in the nominative case, the pronunciation is /t/, just like a regular tāʼ , but the identity of the character remains a tāʼ marbūṭah. Note that the isolated and final forms of this letter combine the shape of hāʼ , when words containing the symbol are borrowed into other languages written in the Arabic alphabet, tāʼ marbūṭah usually becomes either a regular ه or a regular ت. Hebrew spelling, תָו The letter tav in modern Hebrew usually represents a voiceless alveolar plosive, the letter tav is one of the six letters which can receive a dagesh kal diacritic, besides bet, gimel, dalet, kaph and pe. Three of them – bet, kaph and pe – have their sound changed in modern Hebrew from the fricative to the plosive by adding a dagesh. In modern Hebrew, the other three – including tav – do not change their pronunciation with or without a dagesh, but have had alternate pronunciations at other times and places. In traditional Ashkenazi pronunciation, tav represents an /s/ without the dagesh, in some Sephardi areas, some Chassidic groups, as well as Yemen, tav without a dagesh represented a voiceless dental fricative /θ/, and tav with the dagesh is the plosive /t/. In traditional Italian pronunciation, tav without a dagesh is sometimes /s/, in gematria, tav represents the number 400, the largest single number that can be represented without using the sophit forms. In representing names from languages, a geresh or chupchik can also be placed after the tav. Tav is the last letter of the Hebrew word emet, which means truth, the midrash explains that emet is made up of the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Sheqer, on the hand, is made up of the 19th, 20th. Thus, truth is all-encompassing, while falsehood is narrow and deceiving, in Jewish mythology it was the word emet that was carved into the head of the golem which ultimately gave it life
20.
Tau
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Tau is the 19th letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 300, the name in English is pronounced /taʊ/ or /tɔː/, but in modern Greek it is. This is because the pronunciation of the combination of Greek letters αυ has changed from ancient to modern times one of to either or. Tau was derived from the Phoenician letter taw, letters that arose from tau include Roman T and Cyrillic Te. The letter occupies the Unicode slots U+03C4 and U+03A4, in HTML, they can be produced with named entities, decimal references, or hexadecimal references. Kendall tau rank correlation coefficient in statistics Stopping time in stochastic processes Tau, in Biblical times, the taw was put on men to distinguish those who lamented sin, although newer versions of the Bible have replaced the ancient term taw with mark or signature. Tau in the Court of Seven Vowels, contains a reference to the cross attribution, stauros the vile engine is called, and it derives its vile name from him. Now, with all these crimes upon him, does he not deserve death, nay, francis love for it, symbol of the redemption and of the Cross. Stylized Greek text should be encoded using the normal Greek letters, with markup and formatting to indicate text style
21.
Semitic alphabets
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The history of alphabetic writing goes back to the consonantal writing system used for Semitic languages in the Levant in the 2nd millennium BCE. Most or nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic proto-alphabet and its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers in Egypt. This script was partly influenced by the older Egyptian hieratic, a script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs. In this sense, the first true alphabet was the Greek alphabet, Latin, the most widely used alphabet today, in turn derives from Greek. Two scripts are well attested from before the end of the fourth millennium BCE, Mesopotamian cuneiform, since vowels were mostly unwritten, the hieroglyphs which indicated a single consonant could have been used as a consonantal alphabet. This was not done writing the Egyptian language, but seems to have been significant influence on the creation of the first alphabet. The Rongorongo script of Easter Island may also be an invented alphabet. The Proto-Sinaitic script of Egypt has yet to be fully deciphered, however, it may be alphabetic and probably records the Canaanite language. The oldest examples are found as graffiti in the Wadi el Hol, the table below shows hypothetical prototypes of the Phoenician alphabet in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Several correspondences have been proposed with Proto-Sinaitic letters and this Semitic script adapted Egyptian hieroglyphs to write consonantal values based on the first sound of the Semitic name for the object depicted by the hieroglyph. So, for example, the hieroglyph per was used to write the sound in Semitic, because was the first sound in the Semitic word for house, bayt. The script was used sporadically, and retained its pictographic nature, for half a millennium. The first Canaanite states to make use of the alphabet were the Phoenician city-states. The Phoenician cities were maritime states at the center of a vast trade network, two variants of the Phoenician alphabet had major impacts on the history of writing, the Aramaic alphabet and the Greek alphabet. The Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets, like their Egyptian prototype, represented only consonants, the Arabic alphabet descended from Aramaic via the Nabataean alphabet of what is now southern Jordan. The Syriac alphabet used after the 3rd century CE evolved, through Pahlavi and Sogdian, into the alphabets of northern Asia, such as Orkhon, Uyghur, Mongolian, the Georgian alphabet is of uncertain provenance, but appears to be part of the Persian-Aramaic family. According to Greek legends transmitted by Herodotus, the alphabet was brought from Phoenicia to Greece by Cadmos, the letters of the Greek alphabet are the same as those of the Phoenician alphabet, and both alphabets are arranged in the same order. The Greeks used for some of the Phoenician letters representing consonants which werent used in Greek speech
22.
Hebrew alphabet
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Historically, there have been two separate abjad scripts to write Hebrew. In the remainder of this article, the term Hebrew alphabet refers to the Jewish square script unless otherwise indicated, the Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters. It does not have case, but five letters have different forms used at the end of a word. Hebrew is written right to left. Originally, the alphabet was an abjad consisting only of consonants, as with other abjads, such as the Arabic alphabet, scribes later devised means of indicating vowel sounds by separate vowel points, known in Hebrew as niqqud. In both biblical and rabbinic Hebrew, the letters א ה ו י are also used as matres lectionis to represent vowels. There is a trend in modern Modern Hebrew toward the use of matres lectionis to indicate vowels that have traditionally gone unwritten, the paleo-Hebrew alphabet was used in the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The Samaritans, who remained in the Land of Israel, continued to use the paleo-Hebrew alphabet, after the fall of the Persian Empire in 330 BCE, Jews used both scripts before settling on the Assyrian form. The square Hebrew alphabet was adapted and used for writing languages of the Jewish diaspora – such as Karaim, the Judeo-Arabic languages, Judaeo-Spanish. In the traditional form, the Hebrew alphabet is an abjad consisting only of consonants and it has 22 letters, five of which use different forms at the end of a word. Also, a system of points to indicate vowels, called niqqud, was developed. In modern forms of the alphabet, as in the case of Yiddish and to some extent Modern Hebrew, today, the trend is toward full spelling with the weak letters acting as true vowels. When used to write Yiddish, vowels are indicated, using letters, either with or without niqqud-diacritics, except for Hebrew words. To preserve the proper vowel sounds, scholars developed several different sets of vocalization, one of these, the Tiberian system, eventually prevailed. Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, and his family for generations, are credited for refining and maintaining the system. These points are used only for special purposes, such as Biblical books intended for study. The Tiberian system also includes a set of marks, called trope. These are shown below the normal form in the following table, although Hebrew is read and written from right to left, the following table shows the letters in order from left to right
23.
Greek alphabet
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It is the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. In its classical and modern forms, the alphabet has 24 letters, Modern and Ancient Greek use different diacritics. In standard Modern Greek spelling, orthography has been simplified to the monotonic system, examples In both Ancient and Modern Greek, the letters of the Greek alphabet have fairly stable and consistent symbol-to-sound mappings, making pronunciation of words largely predictable. Ancient Greek spelling was generally near-phonemic, among consonant letters, all letters that denoted voiced plosive consonants and aspirated plosives in Ancient Greek stand for corresponding fricative sounds in Modern Greek. This leads to groups of vowel letters denoting identical sounds today. Modern Greek orthography remains true to the spellings in most of these cases. The following vowel letters and digraphs are involved in the mergers, Modern Greek speakers typically use the same, modern, in other countries, students of Ancient Greek may use a variety of conventional approximations of the historical sound system in pronouncing Ancient Greek. Several letter combinations have special conventional sound values different from those of their single components, among them are several digraphs of vowel letters that formerly represented diphthongs but are now monophthongized. In addition to the three mentioned above, there is also ⟨ου⟩, pronounced /u/, the Ancient Greek diphthongs ⟨αυ⟩, ⟨ευ⟩ and ⟨ηυ⟩ are pronounced, and respectively in voicing environments in Modern Greek. The Modern Greek consonant combinations ⟨μπ⟩ and ⟨ντ⟩ stand for and respectively, ⟨τζ⟩ stands for, in addition, both in Ancient and Modern Greek, the letter ⟨γ⟩, before another velar consonant, stands for the velar nasal, thus ⟨γγ⟩ and ⟨γκ⟩ are pronounced like English ⟨ng⟩. There are also the combinations ⟨γχ⟩ and ⟨γξ⟩ and these signs were originally designed to mark different forms of the phonological pitch accent in Ancient Greek. The letter rho, although not a vowel, also carries a rough breathing in word-initial position, if a rho was geminated within a word, the first ρ always had the smooth breathing and the second the rough breathing leading to the transiliteration rrh. The vowel letters ⟨α, η, ω⟩ carry an additional diacritic in certain words, the iota subscript. This iota represents the former offglide of what were originally long diphthongs, ⟨ᾱι, ηι, ωι⟩, another diacritic used in Greek is the diaeresis, indicating a hiatus. In 1982, a new, simplified orthography, known as monotonic, was adopted for use in Modern Greek by the Greek state. Although it is not a diacritic, the comma has a function as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό. There are many different methods of rendering Greek text or Greek names in the Latin script, the form in which classical Greek names are conventionally rendered in English goes back to the way Greek loanwords were incorporated into Latin in antiquity. In this system, ⟨κ⟩ is replaced with ⟨c⟩, the diphthongs ⟨αι⟩ and ⟨οι⟩ are rendered as ⟨ae⟩ and ⟨oe⟩ respectively, and ⟨ει⟩ and ⟨ου⟩ are simplified to ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩ respectively
24.
Old Italic alphabet
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Old Italic is one of several now extinct alphabet systems used on the Italian Peninsula in ancient times for various Indo-European languages and non-Indo-European languages. The alphabets derive from the Euboean Greek Cumaean alphabet, used at Ischia, various Indo-European languages belonging to the Italic branch originally used the alphabet. Faliscan, Oscan, Umbrian, North Picene, and South Picene all derive from an Etruscan form of the alphabet, the Germanic runic alphabet was derived from one of these alphabets by the 2nd century AD. It is not clear whether the process of adaptation from the Greek alphabet took place in Italy from the first colony of Greeks and it was in any case a Western Greek alphabet. In the alphabets of the West, X had the value, Ψ stood for, in Etruscan. Until about 600 BC, the form of the Etruscan alphabet remained practically unchanged. From the 6th century, however, the alphabet evolved, adjusting to the phonology of the Etruscan language and its origin is disputed, it may have been an altered B or H or an ex novo creation. Its sound value was /f/ and it replaced the Etruscan FH, some letters were, on the other hand, falling out of use, B and D were apparently considered superfluous over P and T. K was dropped in favour of G. O disappeared and was replaced by U, in the course of its simplification, the redundant letters showed some tendency towards a syllabary, C, K and Q were predominantly used in the contexts CE, KA, QU. This classical alphabet remained in use until the 2nd century BC when it began to be influenced by the rise of the Latin alphabet, soon after, the Etruscan language itself became extinct. U came to be used to represent Oscan o, while Ú was used for actual Oscan u, the Nucerian alphabet is based on inscriptions found in southern Italy. It is attested only between the 6th and the 5th century BC, the most important sign is the /S/, shaped like a fir tree, and possibly a derivation from the Phoenician alphabet. U /u/ and V /w/ are distinguished, Θ is probably for /t/ and X for /g/. There are claims of a related script discovered in Glozel, the alphabet of Sanzeno, about 100 Raetic inscriptions. The alphabet of Magrè, east Raetian inscriptions, alphabet of Este, Similar but not identical to that of Magrè, Venetic inscriptions. Inscripted abecedarium on rock engraves in Valle Camonica, the South Picene alphabet, known from the 6th century BCE, is most like the southern Etruscan alphabet in that it uses Q for /k/ and K for /g/. It is, ⟨. ⟩ is a reduced ⟨o⟩ and ⟨, ⟩ is a reduced ⟨8⟩, the Old Italic alphabets were unified and added to the Unicode Standard in March,2001 with the release of version 3.1. The Unicode block for Old Italic is U+10300–U+1032F without specification of a particular alphabet, writing direction varies based on the language and even the time period
25.
X-SAMPA
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The Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at the University of London and it is designed to unify the individual language SAMPA alphabets, and extend SAMPA to cover the entire range of characters in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The result is a SAMPA-inspired remapping of the IPA into 7-bit ASCII, SAMPA was devised as a hack to work around the inability of text encodings to represent IPA symbols. Later, as Unicode support for IPA symbols became more widespread, however, X-SAMPA is still useful as the basis for an input method for true IPA. The IPA symbols that are ordinary lower-case letters have the value in X-SAMPA as they do in the IPA. X-SAMPA uses backslashes as modifying suffixes to create new symbols, for example, O is a distinct sound from O\, to which it bears no relation. Such use of the character can be a problem, since many programs interpret it as an escape character for the character following it. For example, you use such X-SAMPA symbols in EMU. X-SAMPA diacritics follow the symbols they modify, except for ~ for nasalization, = for syllabicity, and for retroflexion and rhotacization, diacritics are joined to the character with the underscore character _. The underscore character is used to encode the IPA tiebar. The numbers _1 to _6 are reserved diacritics as shorthand for language-specific tone numbers, asterisks mark sounds that do not have X-SAMPA symbols. Daggers mark IPA symbols that have recently added to Unicode. Since April 2008, the latter is the case of the labiodental flap, a dedicated symbol for the labiodental flap does not yet exist in X-SAMPA. International Phonetic Alphabet International Phonetic Alphabet for English Kirshenbaum and WorldBet, list of phonetics topics SAMPA, a language-specific predecessor of X-SAMPA. SAMPA chart for English Computer-coding the IPA, A proposed extension of SAMPA Translate English texts into IPA phonetics with PhoTransEdit and this free software tool allows to export transcriptions to X-SAMPA. Online converter between IPA and X-Sampa Web-based translator for X-SAMPA documents, produces Unicode text, XML text, PostScript, PDF, or LaTeX TIPA. Z-SAMPA, an extension of X-SAMPA sometimes used for conlangs Web-based X-SAMPA to IPA Converter
26.
Voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant
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The voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant fricative or voiceless domed postalveolar sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in many languages, including English. In English, it is usually spelled ⟨sh⟩, as in ship, the symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʃ⟩, the letter esh introduced by Isaac Pitman. The equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is S and it originated with the Czech orthography of Jan Hus and was adopted in Gajs Latin alphabet and other Latin alphabets of Slavic languages. It also features in the orthographies of many Baltic, Finno-Lappic and its phonation is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords. In some languages the vocal cords are separated, so it is always voiceless, in others the cords are lax. It is a consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth only. It is a consonant, which means it is produced by directing the airstream along the center of the tongue. The airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air solely with the lungs and diaphragm, in various languages, including English and French, it may have simultaneous labialization, i. e. although this is usually not transcribed. Classical Latin did not have, though it does occur in most Romance languages, for example, ⟨ch⟩ in French chanteur singer is pronounced /ʃ/. Chanteur is descended from Latin cantare, where ⟨c⟩ was pronounced /k/, the ⟨sc⟩ in Latin scientia science was pronounced /sk/, but has shifted to /ʃ/ in Italian scienza. Similarly, Proto-Germanic had neither nor, yet many of its descendants do, in most cases, this or descends from a Proto-Germanic /sk/. For instance, Proto-Germanic *skipą was pronounced /ˈski. pɑ̃/ and this change took longer to catch on in West Germanic languages other than Old English, though it eventually did. The second West Germanic language to undergo this sound shift was Old High German, in fact, it has been argued that Old High Germans /sk/ was actually already, because a single had already shifted to. Furthermore, by Middle High German, that /s̠k/ had shifted to, after High German, the shift most likely then occurred in Low Saxon. After Low Saxon, Middle Dutch began the shift, but it stopped shifting once it reached /sx/, then, most likely through influence from German and Low Saxon, North Frisian experienced the shift. However, the realization of Swedish /ɧ/ varies considerably among dialects, for instance. Finally, the last to undergo the shift was Norwegian, in which the result of the shift was, the sound in Russian denoted by ⟨ш⟩ is commonly transcribed as a palato-alveolar fricative but is actually a laminal retroflex fricative. The voiceless postalveolar non-sibilant fricative is a consonantal sound, as the International Phonetic Alphabet does not have separate symbols for the post-alveolar consonants, this sound is usually transcribed ⟨ɹ̠̊˔⟩
27.
Phonological history of English consonant clusters
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The phonological history of the English language includes various changes in the phonology of consonant clusters. The H-cluster reductions are various consonant reductions that have occurred in the history of English, the cluster /hw/ has been subject to two kinds of reduction, Reduction to /h/ before rounded vowels. This occurred with the word how in the Old English period, and with who, Reduction to /w/, a development that has affected the speech of the great majority of English speakers, causing them to pronounce ⟨wh-⟩ the same as ⟨w-⟩. The distinction is maintained, however, in Scotland, most of Ireland, the Old English consonant clusters /hl/, /hr/ and /hn/ were reduced to /l/, /r/, and /n/ in Middle English. For example, Old English hlāf, hring and hnutu become loaf, ring, in some dialects of English the cluster /hj/ is reduced to /j/, leading to pronunciations like /juːdʒ/ for huge and /ˈjuːmən/ for human, and making hew a homophone of ewe or you. This is sometimes considered a type of glide cluster reduction, but it is less widespread than wh-reduction. Aside from accents with general H-dropping, in the United States this reduction is found in accents of Philadelphia and New York City. In other dialects of English hew and yew remain distinct, however and this change from to, which had occurred in London by the end of the 17th century, did not take place in all dialects. Yod-dropping is the elision of the /j/ from certain syllable-initial clusters of the described above. Particular cases of yod-dropping may affect all or some of the dialects which have the relevant clusters, however, in a survey conducted in the Golden Horseshoe area of Southern Ontario in 1994, over 80% of respondents under the age of 40 pronounced student and news without yod. General American thus undergoes yod-dropping after all alveolar consonants, however, in words like annual, menu, volume, Matthew, continue, etc. where there is a syllable break before the /j/, there is no yod-dropping. The same applies accordingly to British and other accents – while the yod is often dropped after initial /l/, for example, it is not dropped in words like volume or value. Yod-dropping after /t/, /d/ and /n/ was also a feature of Cockney speech. A well-known series of UK television advertisements beginning in the 1980s featured Bernard Matthews describing his turkeys as bootiful, such accents only pronounce a /j/ in words like use, unit etc. where there is no consonant before the /j/. Yod-coalescence is a process that palatalizes the clusters, and into, the first two of these are examples of affrication. Unlike yod-dropping, yod-coalescence frequently occurs with clusters which would be considered to span a syllable boundary and it thus commonly occurs before unstressed syllables. For example, in educate, the cluster would not usually be subject to yod-dropping, as the /d/ is assigned to the previous syllable. In some accents, yod-coalescence also occurs in stressed syllables, as in tune and dune, yod-coalescence has traditionally been resisted in RP
28.
Digraph (orthography)
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Digraphs are often used for phonemes that cannot be represented using a single character, like the English sh in ship and fish. In other cases they may be relics from a period of the language when they had a different pronunciation, or represent a distinction which is made only in certain dialects. They may also be used for purely etymological reasons, like rh in English, digraphs are used in some Romanization schemes, like the zh often used to represent the Russian letter ж. As an alternative to digraphs, orthographies and Romanization schemes sometimes use letters with diacritics, like the Czech š, examples are found in Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Albanian and Gajs Latin Alphabet. In Dutch, when the digraph ij is capitalized, both letters are capitalized, digraphs may develop into ligatures, but these are distinct concepts – a ligature involves a graphical combination of two characters, as when a and e are fused into æ. Digraphs may consist of two different characters or two instances of the same character, in the latter case, they are generally called double letters. Doubled vowel letters are used to indicate a long vowel sound. This is the case in Finnish and Estonian, for instance, where represents a longer version of the vowel denoted by ⟨u⟩, ⟨ää⟩ represents a longer version of the vowel denoted by ⟨ä⟩. Doubled consonant letters can also be used to indicate a long or geminated consonant sound, in Italian, for example, consonants written double are pronounced longer than single ones. In modern English, for example, the ⟨pp⟩ of tapping differentiates the first vowel sound from that of taping, in Spanish and Catalan, ⟨rr⟩ is used between vowels for the alveolar trill /r/, since an ⟨r⟩ alone between vowels represents an alveolar flap /ɾ/. In Spanish the digraph ⟨nn⟩ formerly indicated /ɲ/, it developed into the letter ñ, in Basque, double consonant letters generally mark palatalized versions of the single consonant letter, as in ⟨dd⟩, ⟨ll⟩, ⟨tt⟩. However, ⟨rr⟩ is a trill, contrasting with the flap, as in Spanish. In several European writing systems, including the English one, the doubling of the letter ⟨c⟩ or ⟨k⟩ is represented as the heterogeneous digraph ⟨ck⟩ instead of ⟨cc⟩ or ⟨kk⟩ respectively. In native German words, the doubling of ⟨z⟩, which corresponds to /ts/, is replaced by the digraph ⟨tz⟩, some languages have a unified orthography with digraphs that represent distinct pronunciations in different dialects. For example, in Breton there is a digraph ⟨zh⟩ that is pronounced in most dialects, similarly, the Saintongeais dialect of French has a digraph ⟨jh⟩ that is pronounced in words that correspond to in standard French. Similarly, Catalan has a digraph ⟨ix⟩ that is pronounced in Eastern Catalan, the pair of letters making up a phoneme are not always adjacent. This is the case with English silent e, for example, the sequence a. e has the sound /eɪ/ in English cake. Later still, the vowel /aː/ became /eɪ/, however, alphabets may also be designed with discontinuous digraphs
