Talk: Alphabet
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I would find it hard to support the statement that the letters of the alphabet represent (or approximate) phonemes. In English, due to its historical development, this is hardly the case. There are, supposedly, at least seven phonemes represented by "gh." In Italian, this statement has more validity.
The language ends up being very far from phonetic, but it's evidently organized on such principles. The letters generally have one or two primary sounds associated with them, so that when we see a new word we can usually guess about how it sounds, or transcribe foreign words into English. There are exceptions a lot of the time, but they are still the exceptions rather than the rule, I'd say. Maybe the best way to sum it up is: English is written with the Roman alphabet. ;)
PS - a quick search finds /g/ as in ghost, /gh/ as in doghouse, /f/ as in enough, /p/ as in hiccough, /w/ as in plough, /h/ as in Callaghan, and if you accept them, /k/ as in lough, /θ/ as in Keighley. Also it can show up as part of /ng/ or /ngh/ or as //, as in light. Tolkien used it to represent /γ/, but he was clearly being ridiculous.
- Not ridiculous at all. This is how Swahili and many
othertranscription systems for languages with that sound (like most Arabic transliterations for example) use the digraph "gh", so that k:g::kh:gh, i.e. "k" has the same relation to "g" (phonation) as "kh" (/x/) has to "gh". In fact, I don't believe there is any other frequently-used way to write that phoneme in the Latin alphabet (excluding IPA). Livajo 16:21, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Someone should add something here about George Bernhard Shaws alphabet proposals.----Are we referring to the "Fresh Fish" spelling item?
- See Shavian alphabet. Brion VIBBER, Friday, May 17, 2002
Question: Anybody know what this alphabet is called, and if it's already included:
A Alpha B Bravo C Charlie D Delta E Echo F Foxtrot
Answer: Nato phonetic alphabet. It is a so-called "phonetic" alphabet, not to be confused with the IPA. There are various "phonetic" alphabets of that kind. See http://www.bckelk.uklinux.net/able.html for a few. --Stephen Gilbert
I don't think Tolkien was being that ridiculous when choosing "gh" to represent the voiced "kh" or the fricative of "g". A couple other languages do that. Besides, it fits: k voices to g; kh voices to gh. I was kidding - I think it is completely reasonable, far more so than any of the actual options except g+h.
If syllabaries cannot have parallelism between sound and symbol (otherwise they would be called abugidas), can alphabets have parallelism between sound and symbol (such as a predictable mutation of the symbol from stop to fricative to nasal to semivowel or from voiced to voiceless)? --Damian Yerrick
Can hiragana and katakana be called an alphabet? There are some usages such as the kyo as in Tokyo which is used like an alphabet instead of syllable.
- No, the kana are definitely syllabaries. They just happen to have some digraphs. — Gwalla | Talk 20:16, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)
There are lots more alphabets remaining on the Unicode consortium list that could be added to the link farm at the end of this article -- The Anome
The examples in 'collating order' seem to be broken - shouldn't there be a few more characters in the examples than I can see?
-- The Anome
It appears the user 216.250.162.xxx's software has inserted a load of extra whitespace throughout the article -- I have edited it back out. The Anome
How about mentioning the Phoenicians? Their name was adopted for the word "phonetic" and other similar words, much like "alpha" and "beta" for "alphabet".
Also, why is the alphabet ordered "abcdefg..." and not "etoani..." or some other arrangement? From what I have read, the symbols were associated with objects. For instance, A is upsidedown from the original Phoenician symbol which was a line drawing of an ox's head, B ("beta" in Greek, "beth" in Phoenician) was for "house", C came from "gimel" which is "camel" and is a line drawing of a camel's head (Greek letter "Gamma"), and D is for "door", as in the triangular shaped door of a tent (Greek letter "Delta"), and so on. These symbols were grouped according to subject matter presumably to make memorization of the alphabet easier. The first group is for domestic objects. Other groups concerned travel, especially on the sea, or monetary ideas, for some 5(?) groups in all. (Don't recall how many groups and what categories they were.)
- As far as I can tell, the word "phonetic" is unrelated to "Phoenician". The element "phone" means sound or speach, as in "telephone", and has Indo-European roots. Josh Cherry
Is there a 'family tree' of alphabets available somewhere? I'd like to see a graph of which alphabet is derived from which. -- Kimiko 22:10, 11 May 2004 (UTC)
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It's not the "Latin Alphabet", it's the "English alphabet"
The following from this article seems to me erroneous, or at least incomplete:
- In modern linguistic usage, the term Latin alphabet is usually used to refer to the modern derivations from the alphabet used by the Romans (i.e. the Roman alphabet).
A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z
"Modern variations from the alphabet used by the Romans" include Norwegian (30 characters), Italian (22 characters), Spanish (29 characters), etc. And, for that matter, I'm pretty sure, the actual "Latin" alphabet had no J, no U, no Y, no Z. Every single article on a character uses this phrase Latin alphabet, but this is nothing but the English alphabet. Ortolan88 03:41, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Fair point, but easily corrected. - Mustafaa 04:55, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)
- You may have some logic on your side - but not all. The important thing is actual use in the field, and in this case, the term latin alphabet is widely used for these 26. The alphabets with more letters which blend into this sets, are called Latin-derived alphabets, see also Category:Alphabetic writing systems and List of writing systems. In a wider sense Latin Alphabet is used for the union of all these latin-derived alphabets, for example in the naming scheme of Unicode.
- The point that that not all 26 were used at the times of Caesar is addressed at Latin alphabet and the individual letter articles, see J.
- Pjacobi 06:25, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)
- Not to say, that there is no room for improvement. The information in the articles Alphabet, Latin alphabet, English alphabet, and Collation would profit from some alignment and more rational distribution between these four (Roman alphabet is also in the mix, but currently redirects to Latin alphabet; and there is also Alphabets derived from the Latin). So if you are interested in enhancing these articles, you are most welcome. Pjacobi 06:32, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)
- Quite correct. The Latin alphabet has evolved. One can refer to the Latin alphabet meaning characters used only in writing Latin words. But modern Church Latin and legal Latin writing normally distinguishes u from v and j from i and may use w and ø and other characters for spelling of personal names and place names. There are various extended Latin alphabets used for different languages. If I were comparing Norwegian to Russian, I might say that Norwegian is normally written using the Latin alphabet and Russian is normally written using the Cyrillic alphabet. That would usually be good enough. I might more pedantically say that the Norwegian alphabet is an extended form of the old Latin alphabet and the Russian alphabet is derived from the original Cyrillic alphabet.
- There is a tendency in modern discussion to be more precise by using the word script rather than alphabet when referring to styles of characters and to use alphabet to refer to particular sets of letters within that script, to say that the Norwegian alphabet uses the Latin script and the Russian alphabet uses the Cyrillic script. The Unicode standard uses script in this way.
- The 26-letter alphabet given in this article is indeed the standard English alphabet but it is not only the English alphabet.
- It is also the French alphabet as taught in French schools (even though k and w are not used in modern spelling of native French words) and it is the German alphabet (ß is not counted as a separate letter and is not used at all in Swiss German). It is also the alphabet used in international standards for codes intended for international use. It is obviously a Latin alphabet in the sense that it is not a Greek alphabet or a Cyrillic alphabet or a runic alphabet or an ogham alphabet or any other kind of alphabet.
- The International Phonetic Alphabet is similarly usually classed as a Latin alphabet, even though it includes some Greek characters, because it primarily uses Latin script letter forms or forms obviously derived from Latin script letter forms.
- Jallan 16:02, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)
- If I remember things right, I looked up when I was wondering about this, it was decided to use alphabet over script for articles about writing systems (Tamil alphabet, Hebrew alphabet), because it is the most common term and users would search for it more often. I'd prefer to have "script" there, but not strong enough, to fight for the change. -- Pjacobi 16:23, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)
- I think the edit I've just made should cover Ortolan88's quite reasonable comments. It is confusing that "Latin alphabet" can mean both the alphabet in which Latin is written and any variation of that alphabet. That should be explained. One would like a term like "Latinoid alphabet" or "Latinate alphabet" or "Latinish alphabet". I don't really like tagging on that discussion of ligatures and diacritics. But without it some readers are going to quite reasonably start asking about French œ and German ß and about diacritics, questioning the claim that the English, French, and German alphabets are identical.
- Script is indeed a bothersome term which I think is only beginning to work its way into general consciousness in phrases like "Latin script" and "Arabic script". But alphabets can also be written in scripts, for example the Latin alphabet can be written in the Lombardic script, Carolingian script, Uncial script (and various variety scripts within those scripts). We don't have good heirarchical teriminology in English in this area.
- Jallan 01:19, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 
Sorry, that was my mistake. It's a thin space. I was probably still holding the shift key down when I hit the space bar—my keyboard layout has that character for shift+space—and didn't notice the mistake in preview. — Gwalla | Talk 19:43, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC)
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Suggest 10 possible wiki links for Alphabet.
An automated Wikipedia link suggester has some possible wiki link suggestions for the Alphabet article:
- Can link for languages: ...eir writing systems, and writing systems have been borrowed for languages they were not designed for, so the degree to which letters ... (link to section)
- Can link one-to-one correspondence: ... within a single language. Languages may fail to achieve a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds in any of several ways:... (link to section)
- Can link Two-letter combinations: ... a combination of letters rather than just a single letter. Two-letter combinations are called [[digraph (orthography)|digraph]]s and three-let... (link to section)
- Can link phonetic alphabet: ...ges of the world can be written by a rather small universal phonetic alphabet. A standard for this is the [[International Phonetic Alphab... (link to section)
- Can link Egyptian hieroglyphs: ...emitic workers within Egyptian society. The inventors took Egyptian hieroglyphs and applied new names and phonetic sounds to the images, in... (link to section)
- Can link middle Persian: ...[Jordan]]. The [[Pahlavi alphabet]] was adapted for writing middle Persian, and is the ancestor of the [[Armenian alphabet]], which is... (link to section)
- Can link northern Asia: ...rd century]] AD, and was adapted to create the alphabets of northern Asia, including the [[Sogdian alphabet|Sogdian]], [[Manichean al... (link to section)
- Can link vowel sound: ...ch letter represents a consonant and vowel combination; the vowel sound is modified using [[diacritic]] marks above the letters.... (link to section)
- Can link classical Latin: ...e Latin alphabets generally drop some of the letters of the classical Latin alphabet or add additional letters.... (link to section)
- Can link Latin alphabet: ...Latin alphabet or add additional letters. The most popular Latin alphabet in use today is the 26-letter alphabet normally used for [[... (link to section)
Notes: The article text has not been changed in any way; Some of these suggestions may be wrong, some may be right.
Feedback: I like it, I hate it, Please don't link to — LinkBot 11:31, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
