Alphabet
An alphabet is a complete standardized set of letters — basic written symbols — each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it may have been in the past. more...
There are other systems of writing such as logographies, in which each symbol represents a morpheme, or word, and syllabaries, in which each symbol represents a syllable.
The word "alphabet" itself is popularly believed to come from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, but some etymologists argue that instead the word derives from aleph and bet, the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The true origin of the word is unclear. There are dozens of alphabets in use today. Most of them are 'linear', which means that they are made up of lines. Notable exceptions are Braille, manual alphabets, Morse code, and the cuneiform alphabet of the ancient city of Ugarit.
History
The history of the alphabet starts in ancient Egypt. By 2700 BCE the Egyptians had developed a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent the individual consonants of their language, plus a 23rd that seems to have represented word-initial or word-final vowels. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names.
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