TYPES OF SCRIPTS, ALPHABETS AND ABC

IN THE WORLD

The term "alphabet" is used by linguists and paleographers in general. In the broadest sense, the alphabet, alphabet or ABC, is a script that is segmented by phonemes and thus produce independent glyphs paragraph with individual sounds.

In the strictest sense, some scholars distinguish what they regard as a true alphabet abc abecedaro or, in other two types of scripts and abugidas abjads segmented. These three differ in the way they treat vowels as well: peer abjads have letters, consonants and vowels leave the highest court of the unspoken. Abugidas also consistent occurs against, but vowels are indicated with diacritics or a systematic change graphics and consonants.

In some scripts, or abc alphabet, consonants and vowels are written as single letters. The first known alphabet, here is the alphabet, alphabet, abc or Wadi el-Hol script. The Abjad, is through its successor Phoenician ancestor of modern alphabets, including Arabic alphabet, the Greek alphabet, the alphabet American (via the Old Italic alphabet), Cyrillic (via the Greek alphabet) and Hebrew (A via Aramaic).

Examples abjads Day present yet, are Arabic and Hebrew are nothing more than script, considered true alphabets include: Latin, Cyrillic, and Korean are hanguly abugidas used to write Tigrinya Amharic, Hindi, and Thai. Aboriginal Canadians are also a abugida syllabic rather than a syllabary as their name implies, as each glyph represents a consonant which is modified by rotation to represent the following vowel. (In a true syllabary, each consonant-vowel combination would be represented by a separate glyph.)

The three types can be augmented with syllabic glyphs. Ugaritic, for example, is basically a abjad, but has syllabic letters for / ʔa, ʔi, ʔu /. (These are the members listed only once.) Cyrillic alphabet is basically true, but it is syllabic letters / ja, je, ju / (я, е, ю) is a Coptic letter / ti /. abugida Devanagari is typically increased, with lyrics dedicated to the vowels, though some traditions use consonant अ as zero based graphics such vowels.

The boundaries between the three types of segmental scripts are not always clear. For example, Sorani Kurdish is written in the Arabic alphabet, which is usually a abjad. However, in Kurdish, the vocal writing is mandatory, and the complete lyrics are used, so that writing is a veritable alphabet. Other languages ​​may use a Semitic abjad with mandatory vowel diacritics, effectively abugidas. On the other hand, the script of the Mongol Empire Phagspa is based closely on the Tibetan abugida, but all brands of vowels were written after the consonant that precedes it and not as diacritics. Although short, one was not written, as in the Indian abugida, one could argue that the linear arrangement has made this a true alphabet. On the contrary, the marks of a member of the abugida abugida Tigrinya and Amharic (ironically, the original source of the term "abugida") have been so thoroughly assimilated into their consonants that the modifications are not systematic and must be learned as a primer in rather than as a segmental script. Even more extreme, the Pahlavi abjad eventually became logographic.

Thus, the main classification of alphabets reflects how they treat vowels. For tonal languages, the classification can be based on his treatment of tone, although the names do not yet exist to distinguish different types. Some alphabets disregard completely tone, especially when carrying a heavy load is not functional, as in Somalia and many other languages ​​of Africa and the Americas. These scripts are in tune with what abjads are vowels. Generally, tones are indicated with diacritics, vowels are treated abugidas. This is the case of Viet Nam (a true alphabet) and Thailand (a abugida). In Thailand, the tone is mainly determined by the choice of consonant, with diacritics for disambiguation. In the Pollard script, an abugida, vowels are indicated with diacritics, but the placement of the diacritic relative to the consonant is modified to indicate the tone. More rarely, a script may have separate letters for tones, as in the case of the Hmong and Zhuang. For most of these scripts, regardless of whether letters or diacritics are used, the most common tone is not marked, as the most common vowel is not marked in Indian abugidas in Zhuyin not only one dial-tone, but there is a diacritic to indicate the lack of tone, as the Indian virama.

The number of letters in an alphabet can be very small. The Book Pahlavi script, a abjad, had only twelve letters at a given time, and may have had even less later. Today, only twelve Rotokas alphabet letters. (The Hawaiian alphabet is sometimes claimed to be so small, but actually consists of 18 cards, including okina and five long vowels.) Rotokas While having a small alphabet because it has few phonemes to represent (only once), book Pahlavi was small because many letters had been merged - ie, the visual that was lost over time, and diacritics were not developed to compensate for this as they were in Arabic, another script that lost many of their ways the different letters. For example, a comma-shaped letter represented G, D, Y, K, or j. However, this seemingly perverse simplification can make a more complicated script. In later Pahlavi papyri, half of the graph remaining differences of these twelve letters were lost, and the script could not be read as a sequence of letters at all, but every word had to learn a whole - that is, that had become logograms as in Egyptian Demotic.

The largest segmental script is probably a abugida, Devanagari. When written in Devanagari, Vedic Sanskrit has an alphabet of 53 letters, including visarga mark for the ultimate aspiration and special cards and JN ks, although one of the letters is theoretical and not actually used. The Hindi alphabet must represent both Sanskrit and modern vocabulary, and this has been extended to 58 with khutma letters (letters with a dot added) to represent sounds from Persian and English.

Most abjad known is Sindhi, with 51 letters. The largest alphabets in the narrow sense are Kabardian and Abkhaz (for Cyrillic), with 58 and 56 letters, respectively, and Slovakia (from Latin), with 46. However, these scripts either count di-and tri-graphs as separate letters, as Spanish did with ch and ll until recently, or uses diacritics like Slovak č. The largest true alphabet where each card is a freelance graphic is probably Georgia, with 41 letters.

Primers typically contain 50 to 400 glyphs (though the Mura-Pirahã language of Brazil require only 24 if not denote tone and Rotokas it takes only 30), and the glyphs of logographic systems typically the result of hundreds of thousands. Thus, a simple count of the number of different symbols is an important clue to the nature of an unknown script.

Alphabetically

It is not always clear what constitutes a different alphabet.