Word Finder - alphabets

definition

The set of letters used when writing in a language.

example

In the first year of school, pupils are taught to recite the alphabet.

definition

A writing system in which letters represent phonemes. (Contrast e.g. logography, a writing system in which each character represents a word, and syllabary, in which each character represents a syllable.)

definition

A typically finite set of distinguishable symbols.

example

Let L be a regular language over the alphabet \Sigma.

definition

An individual letter of an alphabet; an alphabetic character.

definition

The simplest rudiments; elements.

definition

To designate by the letters of the alphabet; to arrange alphabetically.

Indian alphabets have spread to Tibet, Cambodia, Java and Korea.

This letter corresponds to the second symbol in the Phoenician alphabet, and appears in the same position in all the European alphabets, except those derived, like the Russian, from medieval Greek, in which the pronunciation of this symbol had changed from b to v.

The form C which it takes in the alphabets of Naxos, Delos and other Ionic islands at the same period is difficult to explain.

In Phoenician itself and in the other Semitic alphabets the position of the middle legs of the W is altered so that the symbol takes such forms as or V or w, ultimately ending sometimes in a form like K laid sideways, he.

Some connexion between Babylonia and China is generally admitted, and all Indian alphabets seem traceable to a Semitic original borrowed in the course of commerce from the Persian Gulf.

Indian influence is predominant as far as Cambodia (though with a Chinese tinge), Indian alphabets being employed and the Buddhism being of the Sinhalese type, but in Annam and Tongking the Chinese script and many Chinese institutions are in use.

After affirming that the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes constitute a single nation and appealing to the right of self-determination, it declared in favour of complete national unity under the Karagjorgjevic dynasty, " a constitutional democratic and parliamentary monarchy, equality of the three national names and flags, of the Cyrilline and Latin alphabets, and of the Orthodox Catholic and Mussulman religions, equal rights for all citizens, universal suffrage in parliamentary and municipal life, and the freedom of the Adriatic to all nations."

They are inscribed in an alphabet which has many points of similarity with the western Greek alphabets, and some with the Punic alphabet; but which seems to retain a few characters from an older script akin to those of Minoan Crete and Roman Libya.

A collection of all the phonetic elements exhausts the .standard alphabets and calls for new letters.

In the Thamudaean and Sabaean alphabets the twenty-two original Phoenician characters are mostly similar, and so are the differentiated forms for, and?.

This seems to imply that the two alphabets had a common history up to a certain point, but parted company before they were fully developed.

He also published various treatises of archaeological interest, of which the most important are Die Erfindung des Alphabets (1840), Urgeschichte u.

As to the source from which it was derived opinions still differ, some thinking that it was borrowed from the Romans a century or two before this time, while others place its origin much farther back and trace it to one of the ancient Greek alphabets.

The alphabets used by the various Italian races from the 5th century were directly or indirectly learnt from the Greeks.

It is supposed that sea-going merchants, mostly Dravidians, and not Aryans, availing themselves of the monsoons, traded in the 7th century B.C. from the south-west ports of India to Babylon, and that there they became acquainted with a Semitic alphabet, which they brought back with them, and from which all the alphabets now used in India, Burma, Siam and Ceylon have been gradually evolved.

On the other hand, Professor Spiegelberg, 3 writing soon after Professor Breasted, says that investigation has not as yet furnished proof that the Phoenician alphabet is of Egyptian origin, though he admits that in some respects the development of the two alphabets, both without vowel signs, is curiously parallel.

Besides the excavations of Athens, Delos, Epidaurus and Delphi, the results of which are most important for the 5th century B.C. and later, the exploration of the sites of Olympia, of the Heraeum near Argos, of Naucratis in Egypt, and of various Cretan towns (above all the ancient Gortyn), has revolutionized our knowledge of the archaic alphabets of Greece.

That the alphabet was borrowed and adapted independently by different places not widely separated, and that the earliest Greek alphabets did not spread from one or a few centres in Greek lands, seem clear (a) from the different Greek sounds for which the Phoenician symbols were utilized; (b) from the different symbols which were employed to represent sounds which the Phoenicians did not possess, and for which, therefore, they had no symbols.

The Phoenician alphabet was an alphabet of consonants only, but all Greek alphabets as yet known agree in employing A, E, I, 0, Y as vowels.

On the other hand, a table of Greek alphabets 2 will show how widely different the symbols for the same sound were.

We have already seen that, in the earliest alphabets of Thera and Corinth, the ordinary symbol for E in the Ionic alphabet was used for.

The sign x was kept in the western group for the guttural spirant in E, which was written X*; but, as this spirant occurred nowhere else, the combination was often abbreviated, and X was used for X precisely as in the Italic alphabets we shall find that F =f develops out of a combination FH.

The inscription runs from right to left, and is in letters which show more clearly than ever that the Roman alphabet is borrowed from the alphabets of the Chalcidian Greek colonies in Italy.

In the Chalcidian alphabet the symbol for x was placed after the symbols common to all Greek alphabets, a position which X retains in the Latin (and also in the Faliscan) alphabet.

That it took over the whole Chalcidian alphabet is rendered probable by the survival in Umbrian and Oscan, its daughter alphabets, of forms which are not found in Etruscan itself.

If it ever existed in Etruscan, it had been lost before the Oscans and Umbrians borrowed their alphabets.

The runes are found in all Teutonic countries, and the Romans were in close contact with the Germans on the Rhine before the beginning I For further details of these alphabets, see Conway, The Italic Dialects, ii.

While the Phoenician alphabet was thus fertile in developing daughter alphabets in the West, the progress of writing was no less great in the East, first among the Semitic peoples, and through them among other peoples still more remote.

The Aramaic became in time by far the most important of the northern Semitic alphabets.

Another form of the Aramaic alphabet, namely, the so-called Estrangela writing which was in use amongst the Christians of northern Syria, was carried by Nestorian missionaries into Central Asia and became the ancestor of a multitude of alphabets spreading through the Turkomans as far east as Manchuria.

There still remain for discussion the alphabets of the Indo-European peoples of Persia and India from which the other alphabets of the Farther East are descended.

The people of India already possessed their Brahmi alphabet, of these alphabets is drawn from this work and from the same author's Indische Palciographie in the Grundriss der indo-arischen Philologie, to which is attached an atlas of plates (Strassburg, 1896), and in which a full bibliography is given.

As Stein's explorations show, both alphabets may be found on opposite sides of the same piece of wood.

In its later forms it is so unlike other alphabets that many scholars have regarded it as an invention within India itself.

The Semitic alphabet is excellently treated by Lidzbarski in the Jewish Encyclopaedia (1901); his Nordsemitische Epigraphik (1898) has excellent facsimiles and tables of the alphabets, and there are many contributions to the history of the alphabet in the same writer's Ephemeris fur semitische Epigraphik (Giessen, since 1900).

Considering that the divergence of two alphabets (like the difference of two dialects) requires both time and familiar use, we may gather from these facts that writing was well known in Greece early in the 7th century B.e.2 The rise of prose composition in the 6th century B.C. has been thought to mark the time when memory was practically superseded by writing as a means of preserving literature - the earlier use of letters being confined to short documents, such as lists of names, treaties, laws, &c. This conclusion, however, is by no means necessary.

The fact that the Phoenician Vau was retained in the Greek alphabets, and the vowel v added, shows that when the alphabet was introduced the sound denoted by was still in full vigour.

It represents the Koppa of the earliest Greek alphabets surviving in that form of the Ionic alphabet, which ultimately superseded all others, merely as the numerical symbol for 90.

Thumi Sambhota accordingly invented an alphabet for the Tibetan language on the model of the Indian alphabets then in use.

Other letters, however, have been taken over from the Runic and Latin alphabets.

The Aramaic. and Hebrew v, which seem so different, arise from a circle left open at the top, 0, a form which can be traced in Aramaic from the 5th or 6th century B.C. In the Greek alphabets the circle appears sometimes with a dot in the centre, but in many cases it is doubtful whether this mark is, intentional, or is only the result of fixing a sharp point there while describing the circle.

The three best known runic alphabets are the elder futhark, the younger futhark, and the Anglo-Saxon futhorc.

The fact that linguistically Serb and Croat had thus become interchangeable terms, only to be distinguished by the respective use of the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, inevitably reacted upon the political situation, and served as an incentive to the movement for unity.

Except for a single Attic inscription (see Plate), the alphabets of Thera and of Corinth are the oldest Greek Alphabets which we possess.

There are forty-seven letters in their alphabets.

Some runes symbols are likely to have been acquired from other alphabets, such as the Greek, Etruscan, and the Early Roman.

The opposite page was always the title-page, and its verso generally displayed alphabets.

Activity Village has printable alphabets in all sorts of themes, from Easter to Quidditch.

You can buy chipboard alphabets, as well as assorted frames and simple shapes.

Scrapbook Scrapbook has printable alphabets, tags, and borders suitable for everyday layouts, as well as a number of themed scrapbook items.