Alphabet
From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- This article is about alphabets as a way to write things. The article about alphabets in computer science is at Alphabet (computer science)
An alphabet is a writing system, a list of symbols for writing. A symbol in an alphabet is usually called a "letter". In an alphabet, each letter is a symbol for a sound.
The name alphabet comes from Alpha and Beta, the first two letters in the Greek alphabet.
The alphabet in this article is the Latin alphabet (or "Roman alphabet"). It was first used in Ancient Rome to write Latin. Today many languages also use the Latin alphabet, and it is the most used alphabet.
[edit] Alphabets
A list of alphabets and examples of the languages they are used for:
- Latin alphabet (or "Roman alphabet")
- Greek alphabet, used for Greek
- Arabic alphabet, used for Arabic and Farsi
- Hebrew alphabet, used for Hebrew and Yiddish
- Cyrillic alphabet, which is based on the Greek alphabet, used for Russian and Bulgarian
- Hangul, used for Korean
[edit] Other writing systems
Other writing systems do not use symbols that mean a sound, but symbols that mean a word or a syllable. In the past such writing systems were used by many cultures, but today they are almost only used by languages people speak in Asia.
- The Chinese writing is called "pictographic" because their writing evolved from using pictures to represent words or ideas.
- Japanese uses a mix of the Chinese writing and two syllabaries called hiragana and katakana. Modern Japanese often also uses romaji, which is the Japanese syllabary written in the Roman alphabet.
- A syllabary is a system of writing that is similar to an alphabet. A syllabary uses one symbol to indicate each syllable of a word, instead of one symbol for each letter of the word. For example, a syllabary would use one symbol to mean the syllable "ga", instead of two letters of the alphabet "g" and "a".
- Korean used the Chinese writing in the past, but they use an alphabet now.