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alphabet

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
Set of conventional symbols used for writing, based on a correlation between individual symbols and spoken sounds, so called from alpha (α) and beta (β), the names of the first two letters of the classical Greek alphabet. The earliest known alphabet is from Palestine, about 1700 BC . Alphabetic writing now takes many forms – for example, the Hebrew aleph-beth and the Arabic script, both written from right to left; the Devanagari script of the Hindus, in which the symbols ‘hang’ from a line common to all the symbols; and the Greek alphabet, with the first clearly delineated vowel symbols. Each letter of the alphabets descended from Greek represents a particular sound or sounds, usually grouped into vowels ( a , e , i , o , u , in the English version of the Roman alphabet), consonants ( b , p , d , t , and so on), and semivowels ( w , y ). Letters may be combined to produce distinct sounds (for example, a and e in words like tale and take , or o and i together to produce a ‘wa’ sound in…
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Full text Article alphabet

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
[Gr. alpha-beta , like Eng. ABC], system of writing , theoretically having a one-for-one relation between character (or letter) and phoneme (see phonetics ). Few alphabets have achieved the ideal exactness. A system of writing is called a syllabary when one character represents a syllable rather…
| 354 words
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Full text Article alphabet

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
Set of conventional symbols used for writing, based on a correlation between individual symbols and spoken sounds, so called from alpha (α) and beta (β), the names of the first two letters of the classical Greek alphabet. The earliest known alphabet is from Palestine, about 1700 BC . Alphabetic…
| 941 words
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Full text Article Alphabet

From Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
The word goes back to Greek alphabētos , combining alpha and beta , the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. A sentence that contains all the letters of the alphabet is known as a pangram. A near example is Ezra 7:21, although it misses the letter ‘j’. An old popular typing test is the 33-letter…
| 238 words
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Full text Article alphabet

From Encyclopedia of Ancient Literature
Originally developed to represent the consonant sounds of ancient Hebrew and related tongues like Phoenician, Moabite, and Aramaic, the alphabet, which first appeared around 1000 BCE , achieved a distinct advantage over other systems of writing such as cuneiform and hieroglyphs. Using a finite…
| 493 words
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Full text Article alphabet, Greek

From Encyclopedia of the Ancient Greek World
The Greek alphabet, containing 24 to 26 letters (depending on locale and era), was adapted from the 22-letter alphabet of the ancient Phoenicians, sometime between 800 and 750 BCE . Prior to this time, Greek societies had used syllabic, pictographic scripts, where one character corresponded to a…
| 576 words
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Full text Article Alphabet, Greek

From Encyclopedia of World Trade: From Ancient Times to the Present Full text Article A-Z Entries
An alphabet used by the Ancient Greeks for trade, culture, and administration beginning in the eighth century b.c.e., and most extensively from ca. 350 b.c.e. to ca. 1450 c.e. The Greeks acquired their alphabet from the Phoenicians, probably at trading centers on Rhodes, Thera, or Crete. Since…
| 291 words
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Full text Article Alphabet, Latin

From Encyclopedia of World Trade: From Ancient Times to the Present Full text Article A-Z Entries
The world's most widely used alphabet today, derived from the script used in the Roman empire. Greeks living in southern Italy imported a western Greek alphabet that was borrowed by the Etruscans, who became the source of the Romans’ alphabet. Although second-century B.C.E. Latin upper-case letters…
| 343 words
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Full text Article Alphabet, Phoenician

From Encyclopedia of World Trade: From Ancient Times to the Present Full text Article A-Z Entries
The ancestor to which all Western alphabets (but not all languages) can be traced. Most of the world's writing systems before the invention of the alphabet were pictograms, such as the Egyptian hieroglyphics. An alphabet is an important cultural innovation that allows easy and therefore potential…
| 1,003 words
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Full text Article Alphabet, Cyrillic

From Encyclopedia of World Trade: From Ancient Times to the Present Full text Article A-Z Entries
An alphabet named after Saint Cyril and now employed from the Balkans to the Bering Strait. Around 863, the Byzantine polyhistors Cyril (ca. 827–869) and Methodius (ca. 815–885) began the Christianization of Great Moravia. To translate religious literature into the Slavic language of the Moravians, …
| 339 words
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Full text Article Arabic alphabet

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Script used to write Arabic and a number of other languages whose speakers have been influenced by Arab and Islamic culture. The 28-character Arabic alphabet developed from a script used to write Nabataean Aramaic . Because Arabic had different consonants than Aramaic, diacritical dots came to be…
| 213 words
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