- Ugaritic The Ugaritic alphabet is a cuneiform abjad (alphabet without vowels), used from around 1500 BCE for the Ugaritic language, an extinct Northwest Semitic language discovered in Ugarit, Syria, in 1928. It has 31 letters. Other languages (particularly Hurrian) were occasionally written in it in the Ugarit area, although not elsewhere 15 c. BCE
- Proto-Canaanite The Proto-Sinaitic script, also known as Proto-Canaanite, is the alphabetic script of a number of Middle Bronze Age inscriptions in the Sinai, Middle Egypt, and Canaan. It is ancestral to the Semitic abjads as they developed by the Early Iron Age, and via Phoenician and Aramaic also to nearly all modern alphabets 14 c. BCE
- Phoenician The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, was a non-pictographic consonantal alphabet, or abjad. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia. It has been classified as an abjad because it records only 12 c. BCE
- Paleo-Hebrew The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet is an abjad offshoot of the ancient Semitic alphabet, identical to the Phoenician alphabet. At the very least it dates to the 10th century BCE. It was used as the main vehicle for writing the Hebrew language by the Israelites, both Jews and Samaritans 10 c. BCE
- Aramaic The Aramaic alphabet is adapted from the Phoenician alphabet, and became distinctive from it by the 8th century BCE. The letters all represent consonants, some of which are matres lectionis, which also indicate long vowels 8 c. BCE
- Kharoṣṭhī 6 c. BCE
- Brāhmī Brāhmī is the modern name given to the oldest members of the Brahmic family of scripts. The best known inscriptions in Brāhmī are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka in north-central India, dated to the 3rd century BCE. These are traditionally considered the earliest known examples of Brāhmī writing, though recent discoveries suggest that it may & Indic The Brahmic or Indic scripts are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout South Asia, Southeast Asia, and parts of Central and East Asia, and are descended from the Brāhmī script of the ancient Indian subcontinent. They are used by languages of several linguistic families: Indo-European, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Mongolic, 6 c. BCE
- Hebrew The Hebrew alphabet , known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script, block script, and because of its place of origin, the Assyrian script (not to be confused with the Syriac alphabet). The alphabet is used in the writing of the Hebrew language, as well as other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic 3 c. BCE
- Thaana Thaana, Taana or Tāna is the modern writing system of the Divehi language spoken in the Maldives. Taana has characteristics of both an abugida (diacritic, vowel-killer strokes) and a true alphabet (all vowels are written), with consonants derived from indigenous and Arabic numerals, and vowels derived from the vowel diacritics of the Arabic abjad 4 c. BCE
- Pahlavi Pahlavi or Pahlevi denotes a particular and exclusively written form of various Middle Iranian languages. The essential characteristics of Pahlavi are 3 c. BCE
- Palmyrene Palmyrene or Palmyrenean was a West Aramaic dialect spoken in the city of Palmyra, Syria, in the early centuries AD. The development of cursive versions of Aramaic led to the creation of the Palmyrene alphabets 2 c. BCE
- Syriac The Syriac alphabet is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language from around the 2nd century BC. It is one of the Semitic abjads directly descending from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet and shares similarities with the Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabets 2 c. BCE
- Sogdian The Sogdian alphabet was originally used for the Sogdian language, a language in the Iranian family used by the people of Sogdiana. The alphabet is derived from Syriac, the descendant script of the Aramaic alphabet. The Sogdian alphabet is one of three scripts used to write the Sogdian language, the others being the Manichaean alphabet and the 2 c. BCE
- Orkhon The Old Turkic script is the alphabet used by the Göktürk and other early Turkic Khanates from at least the 8th century to record the Old Turkic language. It was later used by the Uyghur Empire. Additionally, a Yenisei variant is known from 9th-century Kyrgyz inscriptions, and it has likely cousins in the Talas Valley of Turkestan and the Old (Old Turkic) 6 c. CE
- Old Uyghur The Old Uyghur alphabet was used for writing the Uyghur language. It was descendant of the Sogdian alphabet, used for texts with Buddhist, Manichaean and Christian content for 700–800 years in Uyghurstan. The last known manuscripts are dated to the 18th century. This was the prototype for the Mongolian and Manchu alphabets
- Nabataean The Nabataean alphabet is a consonantal alphabet that was used by the Nabataeans in the 2nd century BC. Important inscriptions are found in Petra. The alphabet is descended from the Aramaic alphabet via the Syriac alphabet. It in turn developed into the Arabic alphabet from the 4th century, which is why its letterforms are intermediate between the 2 c. BCE
- Sogdian The Sogdian alphabet was originally used for the Sogdian language, a language in the Iranian family used by the people of Sogdiana. The alphabet is derived from Syriac, the descendant script of the Aramaic alphabet. The Sogdian alphabet is one of three scripts used to write the Sogdian language, the others being the Manichaean alphabet and the 2 c. BCE
- Mandaic The Mandaic alphabet is based on the Aramaic alphabet, and is used for writing the Mandaic language 2 c. CE
- Greek The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It is the first and oldest alphabet in the narrow sense that it notes each vowel and consonant with a separate symbol. It is as such in continuous use to this day. The letters were also used to represent 8 c. BCE
- Etruscan Old Italic refers to several now extinct alphabet systems used on the Italian Peninsula in ancient times for various Indo-European languages and non-Indo-European (e.g. Etruscan) languages. The alphabets derive from the Euboean Greek Cumaean alphabet, used at Ischia and Cumae in the Bay of Naples in the eighth century BC 8 c. BCE
- Coptic The Coptic alphabet is the script used for writing the Coptic language. The repertoire of glyphs is based on the Greek alphabet augmented by letters borrowed from the Demotic and is the first Alphabetic Script used for the Egyptian Language. There are in fact several Coptic alphabets as the Coptic writing system may vary greatly among the various 3 c. CE
- Gothic The Gothic alphabet is an alphabetic writing system attributed to Ulfilas which was used exclusively for writing the ancient Gothic language. Before its creation in the fourth century, the Goths had used runes to write their language. The new alphabet was created by Ulfilas for the purpose of translating the Christian Bible into Gothic, and it is 3 c. CE
- Armenian The Armenian alphabet is an alphabet that has been used to write the Armenian language since the year 405 or 406. It was devised by Saint Mesrop Mashtots, an Armenian monk, and contained 36 letters. Two more letters, օ and ֆ, were added in the Middle Ages. Until the 19th century, Classical Armenian was the literary language; since then, the 405
- Georgian The Georgian alphabet is the writing system currently used to write the Georgian language and other South Caucasian (Kartvelian) languages (Mingrelian, Svan and sometimes Laz), and occasionally other languages of the Caucasus (such as Ossetic and Abkhaz in the 1940s). The Georgian language has phonemic orthography and the modern alphabet has (disputed) ca. 430 CE
- Glagolitic The Glagolitic alphabet , also known as Glagolitsa, is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. The name was not coined until many centuries after its creation, and comes from the Old Slavic glagolъ "utterance" (also the origin of the Slavic name for the letter G). The verb glagoliti means "to speak". It has been conjectured that the 862
- Cyrillic Cyrillic script is an alphabet developed in the 9th century in Bulgaria, and used in the Slavic national languages of Belarusian, Bulgarian, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian, Macedonian, Montenegrin and Ukrainian, and in the non-Slavic languages of Moldovan, Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Tuvan, and Mongolian. It also was used in past languages of Eastern ca. 940
- Paleohispanic The Paleohispanic scripts are the writing systems created in the Iberian peninsula before the Latin alphabet became the dominant script. Most of them are typologically very unusual in that they are semi-syllabic rather than purely alphabetic, despite having developed from the Phoenician alphabet 7 c. BCE
- Epigraphic South Arabian The ancient South Arabian alphabet branched from the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet in about the 9th century BC. It was used for writing the Yemeni Old South Arabic languages of the Sabaean, Qatabanian, Hadrami (Ḥaḍramī), Minaean, Himyarite, and proto-Ge'ez (or proto-Ethiosemitic) in Dʿmt. The earliest inscriptions in the alphabet date to the 9th 9 c. BCE
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic An alphabet is a standardized set of letters — basic written symbols or graphemes — each of which roughly represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic unit, and syllabaries, in which writing system Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to comprehend the text. In contrast, other possible symbolic systems such as information signs, painting, maps and mathematics often do not require prior knowledge of a spoken in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It is the first and oldest alphabet in the narrow sense that it notes each vowel and consonant with a separate symbol. It is as such in continuous use to this day. The letters were also used to represent called the Cumaean alphabet, which was borrowed and modified by the Etruscans Old Italic refers to several now extinct alphabet systems used on the Italian Peninsula in ancient times for various Indo-European languages and non-Indo-European (e.g. Etruscan) languages. The alphabets derive from the Euboean Greek Cumaean alphabet, used at Ischia and Cumae in the Bay of Naples in the eighth century BC who ruled early Rome, whose alphabet was then adapted and further modified by the ancient Romans Ancient Rome was a civilization that grew out of a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 10th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea, it became one of the largest empires in the ancient world to write the Latin language Latin or sometimes Roman is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Although often considered a dead language, in view of the fact that it has no native speakers, a small number of scholars can fluently speak it and it continues to be taught in schools and universities and has been, and currently is, used in the process of.
During the Middle Ages The Middle Ages is a period of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The period followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, and preceded the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period in a three-period division of history: Classical, Medieval, and Modern. The term "Middle Ages" (medium aevum) was coined in, it was adapted to the Romance languages, the direct descendants of Latin, as well as to the Celtic The Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic", a branch of the greater Indo-European language family. The term "Celtic" was used to describe this language group by Edward Lhuyd in 1707, having much earlier been used by Greek and Roman writers to describe tribes in central Gaul. During the 1st, Germanic, Baltic, and some Slavic languages, and finally to most of the languages of Europe.
With the age of colonialism and Christian evangelism, the Latin alphabet was spread overseas, and applied to Indigenous American, Indigenous Australian, Austronesian, East Asian, and African languages. More recently, western linguists have also tended to prefer the Latin alphabet or the International Phonetic Alphabet (itself largely based on the Latin alphabet) when transcribing or creating written standards for non-European languages, such as the African reference alphabet.
In modern usage, the term Latin alphabet is used for any direct derivation of the alphabet first used to write Latin. These variants may discard letters from the classical Roman script (like the Rotokas alphabet) or add new characters to it, as from the Danish and Norwegian alphabet. Letter shapes have changed over the centuries, including the creation of entirely new lower case characters.
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History
Main article: History of the Latin alphabet
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Mon, 05 Jul 2010 08:19:04 GMT+00:00
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner Words are understood differently in places like China, where the Latin alphabet isn't used. The Chinese language is made up of 2000 single-syllable ...
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Auerbach s work recently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art where she exhibited works as a 2008 recipient of the SECA Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art Awards The SECA Awards program summarises Auerbach s work by stating that Auerbach investigates the logic of representational systems in series of drawings prints painting and mixed media works
luffyluffy
Sun, 22 Aug 2010 03:16:21 GM
I personally value practicallity over aesthetic value. As beautiful an alphabet Kanji is, it's so ridiculously complicated compared to the . Latin alphabet. I'm surprised they've stuck with it for so long ...
