Talk:Alphabet

Cyrillic in Wikipedia

Please see the new page at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Cyrillic), aimed at

1. Documenting the use of Cyrillic and its transliteration in Wikipedia
2. Discussing potential revision of current practices

—Michael Z. 2005-12-9 20:46 Z

Cultures without alphabet

Wouldn't this entry benefit from such a discussion? There's only mention of Mesoamerican writing (which isn't explained) but it seems that very few cultures in North America, southern Africa or Australia produced indigenous alphabets. Which were those that did? Sequoia invented the Cherokee syllabary after seeing the European advantage, but I cannot find any similar references.

Weren't most traditional cultures illiterate? I'd say cultures with a writing system actually were the exception for a long time in history, although it helped creating larger civilizations, and give important source material to historians. 惑乱 分からん 09:10, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Alphabet types image

Why is Ethiopia shown as not having an alphabet? Surely Amharic is written with an abugida? 惑乱 分からん 09:10, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Alphabets

I removed the section of the Georgian alphabet. It is impossible to have a section of each of the dozens of alphabet in this article. One can acess other alphabets through the Category:Alphabetic writing systems.   Andreas   ^(T) 14:58, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

what?

who made the idea of scantrons? they are based on the idea of the alphabet except we have to bubble on the letter. isnt that lame? u can mess up ...erasure errors and boom! say hello to a big fat F.

GA Collaboration

As this is now the GA collaboration I believe that our first task would be to add inline citations so this article meets criteria 2b. Are there any other ways we can improve the article? Tarret 13:20, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I for one want to know what "The counsonents of a complicated power of why between the three types of segmental scripts are not always clear-cut." means, it looks like there's some words missing in this sentence. Homestarmy 17:09, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Oh, and the last section, from "....those associated with the so-called "Toronto school of communications", is this theory of theirs primarily only in this one school, or is it more widespread? If it isn't, I think it might not be notable. Homestarmy 17:11, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

I asked the Writing Systems Wikiproject to give us a hand. They might be able to help us figure out the sentence. Tarret 01:00, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

The alphabet effect is quite off-topic and would need a separate article.   Andreas   ^(T) 01:53, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

So....what do we do with it? :/ Homestarmy 02:18, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

What needs to be sourced?

I thought everything in this sentence was fairly obvious, so I'd like to know why a {{fact}} tag was at the end of it.

However, many of these abstractions first occurred in societies which did not use an alphabet, such as the codified law of Hammurabi in Babylonia, which predated similar laws in societies with the alphabet.

Do you want a source that Babylonia didn't have an alphabet, or that they had codified laws? The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 02:03, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

The fact tag does not appear to be on that sentence, but rather the weasel worded "Since the alphabet quickly spread to become nearly ubiquitous, it is difficult to trace cause and effect in this matter[citation needed]." (Difficult according to whom? and in an article which obviously needs as high a vocabulary level as this one, is "ubiquitous" really necessary?) Homestarmy 02:08, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Never mind, I didn't realize you just removed the tag. Homestarmy 02:09, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

In spite of being fairly obvious, the criticism has to be sourced, else it would be your original research. Are there scholars (including yourself) who have contradicted or criticized the alphabet hypothesis in a peer-reviewed or otherwise notable and reliable publication? What were their arguments? .   Andreas   ^(T) 02:13, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

OK, you're adding {{fact}} tags to the wrong things. This sentence has nothing ambiguous or weasly about it. Can some editor {{fact}}ize the controversial things? The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 02:36, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

There are two sentences; neither of them is ambiguous or weasly, this is not my problem. My problem is that they are original research, and as such not allowed in Wikipedia. Wikipedia official policy is that

An edit counts as original research if [...] it introduces an argument, without citing a reputable source for that argument, that purports to refute or support another idea, theory, argument, or position;

(quoted from wikipedia:No original research)

A possible alternative would have been something in the lines of:

• However, the alphabet effect hypothesis has been challenged by XXX (citation) on the grounds that many of these abstractions..."  Andreas   ^(T) 03:55, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

I should point out that at the current state this article fails WP:WIAGA criteria 2b (lack of inline citations) you have till the end of the week or the article will be removed from the list. Tarret 01:44, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

State-centric view of the picture

The image "World alphabet distribution.png" is based on a state-centric view. It does not represent aboriginal, local or minority people. It should be replace with an ethnic-based one. 59.78.0.51 09:27, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Delisted GA

This article has been removed from the GA list due to lack of inline citations. Feel free to renominate it once these concerns have been adressed. Tarret 00:23, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Vandalism?

Is it only my computer or does the entire page just say "name=Kitty the Hedgehog"? i think thi needs to be fixed.

It's getting very wearing reverting vandalism on this page. Can a couple of admins start kicking butt? --Psicorps 13:40, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

If the vandalism gets really bad, a request for page protection can be made at WP:RFPP. Robotman¹⁹⁷⁴ 13:47, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

The Order

I was just wondering, why is the English alphabet in the order that its in? I can't really see any reason for why B follows A, D follows C, etc. -- Unsigned

You may get some insight in this by reading articles of the individual letters. Of particular interest are C, G and Z. -- Karl 29 November 2006 10:25 UT

The order of the letters in Western alphabets was inherited from the Phoenician alphabet. See History of the alphabet. The letters C, G, V, and Z are special cases. The letters U, V, and W follow each other because they are related (U is a late variant of V, and W is a double U, as the name says).  Andreas  ^(T) 14:58, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

This talk page

Can we do something about the organization of this page? All that freefloating stuff up top is confusing but it seems like it was left there on purpose. I don't want to archive anything myself for fear of making somebody mad, but can we talk about it?--Dmz5 19:53, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

I've added titles to all the freee floating stuff on top. Strawberry Island 05:42, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

Occidental/Oriental?

Hi! I would just like to point the fact that there are no mention of the oriental languages (chinese, japanese, corean,...) in the historic of the main page. Shouldn't we put "Historic of Occidental Alphabet"? Kastor 07:28, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

None of the languages you mention uses an alphabet. They are among the languages refered to by the following sentences from the article:
"There are other systems of writing such as logosyllabic writing, in which each symbol represents a morpheme, or word or a syllable or places the word within a category, and syllabaries, in which each symbol represents a syllable. "
"Some human languages are commonly written by using a combination of logograms (which represent morphemes or words) and syllabograms instead of an alphabet."
-Adjusting 07:50, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

Korean uses an alphabet. --Cbdorsett 14:57, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

The Alphabet Effect

I think the section entitled The Alphabet Effect should be moved to its own page, leaving a link in the See also section. There are all kinds of subjects peripherally connected to the concept of an alphabet, but they don't belong on the main page. We could write forever about substitution ciphers, Morse Code, the Braille alphabet and so on. This page should be reserved for material about the alphabet itself, not what it means according to somebody's theory of world history. I didn't add the {{controversial}} tag, but I agree with it. The material should be moved elsewhere. Cbdorsett 16:56, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

I think the section is too small to be its own article. Sections of articles that are quite large should have their own articles. It is fine where it is. A•N•N•Afoxlover hello! 18:06, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree with ANNAfoxlover. - Patricknoddy^{TALK (reply here)|HISTORY} 16:59, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Something seems seriously wrong with this section. First of all, it should be noted that the presence of laws and government occurs in any civilization, and that societies such as the Incas were able to pull off running an empire without having a writing system at all. The section mentions the laws of the Mesopotamian empire, although the cuneiform script was used for liturgical and legal matters. The first widely-used phonetic script, Phoenician, wasn't around until about 1050 BC, and meanwhile the civilization of Mesopotamia had gotten along fine without it since the 4th Millennium BC. As for monotheism, well, Judaism had been around since 2000 BC, and its books were compiled into the Torah much later. When you consider mathematics and Astronomy, the Egyptians and the Mayans created extremely accurate representations of the heavens and the movement of the sun without an alphabet. An alphabet is a way of recording language and ideas, but so is any writing system, and any idea that postulates enlightenment comes from a script is likely to be elementary. It reminds me of the 1800s mysticism that was created by western scholars misunderstanding the Chinese and Egyptian writing systems. I suggest that we remove the section, or at least add some counterexamples of societies which existed without alphabets. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 17:26, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

I think it sounds like pseudoscience. An alphabet is necessary for monotheism to develop? Give me a break. —Angr 17:53, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

I never stumbled on this section before, but it sounds indeed like pseudoscience (with a racist touch). It certainly does not belong in this article. Perhaps we can move it to an article on esoteric philosophies. −Woodstone 19:57, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

It is pseudo-science aimed at falsely establishing Judaism as (a) an antecedent, (b) a monotheistic religion and (c) the birthplace of monotheism. I mention this because increasingly I see the same conspiracy to falsify history all over the place. Given that the story of Genesis is an allegorical description of the birth of self-awareness in the human race and is thereby part of the common heritage of all mankind and that the Hebrew book is an 'Israelite' adoption or borrowing of older stories, Judaism is no particular antecedent to modern civilization. With regard to monotheism, Judaism has 72,000 lesser gods known as 'angels'. Lastly, of course, monotheism is actually the worship of Amon - the 'One God' - in Greek AMON O THEOS. Not forgetting, of course, that Ptah of Memphis is credited as the creator of *all* the other gods as well as the Universe. Moreover, without Judaism's bastard child, Christianity, mankind would have been in space in 500AD. If I were a religious person I might consider it behooves me to shut up, not to say bury my head in shame, in the face of such facts. Sault 00:19, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

I removed the section. If someone wants to argue for its inclusion, I'm all ears. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 20:12, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Exodus

After watching the Naked Archaeologist, where a theory is put forth that the invention of the alphabet coincided with the biblical exodus, would it be safe to say then that IF these two events both happened in the same place and time, that Genesis and Exodus were therefore the first thing ever written (in an alphabet)? I mean it seems like if you really believe in the traditional authorship and rough timeline of the scriptures being written down, this would put the earliest books either AT or even a smidge BEFORE the alphabet itself was even invented.

With regard to the above, unsigned comment, the Torah was allegedly written by a Babylonian called Ezra no earlier than about 500BC although linguistic analysis has found evidence of three principle redactors. There is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that either it or its worshippers existed any earlier than that, except that King Cyrus wanted them out of Babylon for reasons which probably we will never know. The earliest *extant* versions are from around 800AD, only decades older than the first of the extant Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. Sault 00:46, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

Spellings of English Letter Names

The article is missing the spellings of English letter names. Looking for them is what brought me to the article. Although I know the spellings of all the names of the letters of the Greek alphabet, of the English alphabet I know only how to spell 'eff', 'aitch', 'ell' and 'zed' ('zee' or some such to Americans). The fact that there *are* spellings for the names of some letters implies that there must be correct spellings for all the others too. Sault 23:49, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

There are not consistent spellings for the names of all the letters. For example, I've seen "haitch" and "el", I've seen "be" and "bee", etc. User:Argyriou (talk) 18:50, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

As far as I understand it, there is no 'correct spelling' of the 'names' of the letters of the English alphabet. The letters themselves are the names. If you look them up in the dictionary, that is what you will find. Everything else (e.g., 'be', 'bee', etc.) is an attempt to approximate the pronunciation of the letters. Varoon Arya 00:28, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

The letter is the letter, not its name. Although the names are not commonly seen in print, they exist, as a good dictionary (such as the OED) will show, and occasional words like tee-shirt, deejay, emcee, etc. Vowels are themselves (though they may take -es in the plural), while consonants are of the forms &ee and e& (where & is the letter in question). That is, it's el, not ell. Exceptions are aitch, jay, kay, cue (archaic cu), ar, ess, double-u, wy or wye. Also, ef doubles the consonant in derivations like effing, and ex does not double where other letters would, as in exed. Those who pronounce H with an /h/ may spell it haitch. kwami 04:24, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

Well, I'm using Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language - the 1700-page behemoth considered by many to be the best dictionary available to mere mortals - and it doesn't have any of these supposed 'names'. Maybe you guys need to enlighten the folks at Webster's... Varoon Arya 08:30, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

Since people generally do just use the letter to refer to itself, as you said, maybe they don't think it's important enough. I've actually written in to Webster's with words they were missing, and they said that unless the word comes into common use, it's beyond the scope of their dictionary. So, for example, Usonian (U.S. American) isn't in there, despite the fact you can hear it on Usonian TV. Even in the OED, the less common letter names don't have their own entries, but are simply listed under the letters themselves. Nonetheless, they do list historical spelling changes, just for any other words. For example, Q was spelled cu in the 15th century, qu, que, kue, and kewe in the 16th, and cue from the 16th century on. H was spelled ache in Middle English; it comes from something like *ahha in the Romance languages, parallel to elle, effe, emme, etc. C, on the other hand, hasn't changed; it's been cee since the 16th century. kwami 16:53, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

Actually, the OED does not list the spelling haitch. Also, F is ef as a noun, eff as a verb, so I was mistaken above. Eff is defined as "Variant of ef, name of the letter F, euphemistically representing fuck v. 2, 3." kwami 16:59, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

Origin

Despite the fervid talk the article is not of high quality. For example it gives a Greek origin but Alif (ox) and Beit (house) are Phoenician (as mentioned above in The Order) and carry on too at the start of the Arabic alphabet. Letter A upside down represents an ox and a chunky B is a house. "syllabary" was misspelt (? as syballary?). Wikipedia needs a purge.--SilasW 18:01, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

What specifically do you suggest be changed or added? Please be as specific as you can. (Patricia Op 23:29, 31 August 2007 (UTC))

Largest Alphabet?

I thought Khmer script had the largest alphabet? It's rather hard to work out which language has this honour from the article. However, with 33 consonants (+2 no longer in use), 16 dependent vowels (24 with diacritics) and around 16 independent vowels it would seem to trump Devanāgarī. Guinness apparently had Khmer as the largest alphabet in the 1995 edition (though I don't have a copy to check). Cheers, Paxse 06:33, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

The Thai alphabet has 44 consonants and 15 independent symbols for vowels, used in combinations to spell at least 28 vowel sounds, and numerous diphthongs. Counting in abugida's is difficult (see talk:Thai alphabet). Take your pick for the winner. −Woodstone 20:25, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Section: Spelling

The article currently reads:

"Languages may fail to achieve a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds in any of several ways: (...) Pronunciation of individual words may change according to the presence of surrounding words in a sentence (sandhi)."

Shouldn't this statement be corrected to reflect the fact that it is orthographic fossilization in conjunction with euphonic combination that can lead to incongruency between the spoken and the written word? Because in Sanskrit - the very language from which the term 'sandhi' comes - the process of euphonic combination does not lead to such incongruency. Varoon Arya 00:19, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

An alphabet is not necessarily a representation of a spoken language

The majority of definitions of alphabet indicate that an alphabet is the list of characters that are used to express a language. For sign languages SignWriting provides the script while a subset of the characters make up the alphabet for the expression of that sign language in SignWriting. GerardM 06:56, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Reverse alphabet

How exactly is giving the reverse order of the english alphabet relevant at all? Especially in the summary at the the top, I don't see how it would be helpful, given that the forward order is provided and the reverse order can be trivially derived from that. Seems silly to me, unless i'm missing something profound. Jordyhoyt (talk) 04:15, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Good catch. How did that joke remain undetected so long? −Woodstone (talk) 07:49, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Alphabet - The Original Definition of

The Information given below was deleted without comments. Could I have some one discuss the suitability or non suitability of the following please.

Alphabet - The Original Definition of ... The ancient Tamil Grammar Tolkappiyam, believed to be the earliest surviving Grammar of any language defined alphabet as the name of "The Places of Articulation" Prappiyal 3.பிறப்பியல் and phonemes as “The Manner and Style of Articulation" [Thrampada Isaiththal]. It is probable that the two (alphabet and phoneme) got mixed up in its passage around the world. Tamil Grammar Tolkappiyam defines 18 places of articulation for consonants (which includes nasal manipulations as places of articulation too!). It is believed that Tamil uses the largest number of phonemes due to the scalable nature of alphabet and its manner of manipulations. Tamil Phonemes குரலொலிகள் The alternative definition used around the world which largely accepting phoneme as alphabet is not probably scientific, but random. It is probable that English uses a mixture of two opposing definitions in its use, probably caused by accommodating the Latin script.

Not knowing the Tolkappiyam, I can't comment directly, and there may be something valuable there that we should cover. However, the deleted passage is nearly nonsensical. If I had to guess, I'd say that the 'alphabet' mentioned in 'defined alphabet as the name of "The Places of Articulation"' is a misinterpretation or mistranslation of one axis of the phonemic inventory. I don't know if the confusion is on the part of the Wikipedia editor, or if the author of the Tolkappiyam didn't understand the difference between speech and writing.

'It is believed that Tamil uses the largest number of phonemes': It's not clear to me what this is supposed to mean, but it appears that the editor is referring to a Tamil-based international phonetic alphabet - that is, the Tamil alphabet modified with diacritics to stand in for the IPA, in which case it appears to distinguish fewer sounds than the regular IPA. The Tamil language itself doesn't have many phonemes, and the Tamil alphabet doesn't indicate as many sounds as, say, Devanagari.

After reading the last two sentences several times, I can only guess that the editor was trying to say that many alphabets are not perfectly phonemic. This is presumably as true of Tamil as many other scripts. kwami (talk) 01:16, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments Kwamikagami.

There is a need to understand what an alphabet is. Some define it as alphabet soup because there is no siceintific oriented definition in that approach. Infact Tholkappiyam exactly defines alphabet as the nemes of places of articulation and there are 18 consonants and 12 vowels (% base) in Tamil. However the phonemes which are subsets of alphabet are many. Phonemes in Devanagari are limited (though the written form are many), while phonemes in Tamil are numerous while written forms only refer to tru alphabet (places of articulation). IPA is a by product of Tamil Grammar, Tolkappiyam. Please read the definitions of both to clarify this distinction. The phonemes shown for Tamil(in IPA terms) are not alphabet, but scalled alphabets and the usage samples at http://www.araichchi.net/chiirmai/phonemes/Tamil_Phonemes2.pdf is not complete list. (Devanagari because of phonemic definitions can not have phonemes more than defined, I imagine.)

The point to establish here is that the alphabet is the place of articulation, and the phoneme is the scalled alphabet. The alphabet defined in Tolkappiyam is structured and scientific. (I'll try and explain later, if not understood with above explanation.) The current (international) definition for alphabet is "A soup of phonemes", an unstructured collection of letters, "Alphabet soup", etc... Clearly the original definition needs investigating, it seems. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.176.166 (talk) 02:29, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm having a hard time following what you're saying. Some is demonstrably false: Tamil has a small number of phonemes, relatively speaking, and the IPA is not a byproduct of Tamil anything. What I'm guessing you're trying to say is that the Tamil alphabet is organized according to phonetic principals, rather than the ABC orders inherited from the first alphabets. This is a characteristic of all Brahmic alphabets, not just Tamil, and in any case only concerns the alphabetical order. It's not a 'definition' of the alphabet. It is worth noting that Indians (whether Panini or Tolkappiyam or both I don't know) were the first to organize the alphabet along linguistic principles, as this shows the state of Indian science at the time, but it didn't affect the functioning of the alphabet. kwami (talk) 01:27, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

I added a section on alphabetic order. I thought there used to be such a section; maybe it was deleted. kwami (talk) 02:03, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

from: SiSrivas I think we better concentrate on the issue, (as Tamil has the most number of phonemes in use, while have least number of alphabet. Let us discuss Tamil related matters later). Now concentrate on the definition of alphabet only.

Alphabet = name for physical+soul parts used in speech. An alphabet is defined as the name for placess of articulation. The number is near definitive. It is 18 consonants and 5++ vowels. These are not phonemes, so alphabet does not represent phoneme, but the body parts in the human organ and the soul. (Just for info, not for discussion immediately: Only Tamil in Indian language defines the above, but the following may be implicit in all languages. Consonant means physical (human) entity = mey. Vowel means soul entity = uyr

each alphabet ie, each place of articulation can produce a range of phonemes. ie, definitive alphabet creating a range of (scalable in use) phonemes.

phonemes For example, Th - place of articulation dental: can produce the following and more

• th as in thick
• th as in this
• th as in "athan/அதன்" ---- not found in any langugae except Tamil, but some think th as in "father" is one. IPA do not represent this
• th (nth) as in inththi/இந்தி (Hindi) --- IPA do not represent this nasal nth

Hence, alphabet has nothing to do with phonemes or sounds Alphabet = places of articulation. Sisrivas (talk) 20:47, 4 January 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sisrivas (talk • contribs) 20:43, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

I think we might be having a language problem with the word you're translating as "alphabet". What you're discussing seems to have nothing to do with the alphabet. kwami (talk) 00:55, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Alphabet, the original definition... Let's move back a bit. Phonemes is not alphabet. Shall we agree on this for a start Sisrivas (talk) 09:00, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Phonemes are cognitive units of speech. The alphabet is a writing system. The original definition of the word "alphabet", as someone says below, is the Greek writing system. It had nothing to do with Tamil. kwami (talk) 07:02, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Alphabeta

the name came from the first 2 letters. alpha, A, and beta, B. (Greek alphabet). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.141.122.240 (talk) 02:58, 13 January 2008 (UTC)