(from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet), set of written symbols, each representing a given sound or sounds, which can be variously combined to form all the words of a language.

An alphabet attempts ideally to indicate each separate sound by a separate symbol, although this end is seldom attained, except in the Korean alphabet (the most perfect phonetic system known) and, to a lesser degree, in the Japanese syllabaries. Alphabets are distinguished from syllabaries and from pictographic and ideographic systems. A syllabary represents each separate syllable (usually a sequence of from one to four spoken sounds pronounced as an uninterrupted unit) by a single symbol. Japanese, for example, has two complete syllabaries—the hiragana and the katakana—devised to supplement the characters originally taken over from Chinese. A pictographic system represents picturable objects, for example, a drawing of the sun stands for the spoken word sun. An ideographic system combines various pictographs for the purpose of indicating nonpicturable ideas. Thus, the Chinese pictographs for sun and tree are combined to represent the Chinese spoken word for east.

Early systems of writing were of the pictographic-ideographic variety; among them are the CUNEIFORM (q.v.) of the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians, Egyptian HIEROGLYPHS, (q.v.), the written symbols still used by the Chinese and Japanese (see CHINESE LANGUAGE,; JAPANESE LANGUAGE,), and Mayan picture writing (see AMERICAN INDIAN LANGUAGES,; MAYA,). What converts such a system into an alphabet or syllabary is the use of a pictograph or ideograph to represent a sound rather than an object or an idea. The sound is usually the initial sound of the spoken word denoted by the original pictograph. Thus, in early Semitic, a pictograph representing a house, for which the Semitic spoken word was beth, eventually came to symbolize the initial b sound of beth. This Semitic symbol, standing originally for the entire word beth and later for the sound of b, ultimately became the b of the English alphabet.

North Semitic Alphabet.

The general supposition is that the first known alphabet developed along the eastern Mediterranean littoral between 1700 and 1500 bc. This alphabet, known as North Semitic, evolved from a combination of cuneiform and hieroglyphic symbols; some symbols might have been taken from kindred systems, such as the Cretan and Hittite. The North Semitic alphabet consisted exclusively of consonants. The vowel sounds of a word had to be supplied by the speaker or reader. The present-day Hebrew and Arabic alphabets still consist of consonantal letters only, the former having 22 and the latter 28. Some of these, however, may be used to represent long vowels, and vowels may also be indicated in writing by optional vowel points and dashes placed below, above, or to the side of the consonant. Writing is from the right to the left. See ARABIC LANGUAGE,; SEMITIC LANGUAGES,.

Many scholars believe that about 1000 bc four branches developed from the original Semitic alphabet: South Semitic, Canaanite, Aramaic, and Greek. (Other scholars, however, believe that South Semitic developed independently from North Semitic or that both developed from a common ancestor.) The South Semitic branch was the ancestor of the alphabets of extinct languages used in the Arabian Peninsula and in the modern languages of Ethiopia. Canaanite was subdivided into Early Hebrew and Phoenician, and the extremely important Aramaic branch became the basis of Semitic and non-Semitic scripts throughout western Asia. The non-Semitic group was the basis of the alphabets of nearly all Indian scripts; the Semitic subbranch includes Square Hebrew, which superseded Early Hebrew to become the prototype of modern Hebrew writing.

Greek and Roman Alphabets.

The Greeks adapted the Phoenician variant of the Semitic alphabet, expanding its 22 consonant symbols to 24 (even more in some dialects), and setting apart some of the original consonant symbols to serve exclusively as vowels (see GREEK LANGUAGE,). After about 500 bc, Greek was regularly written from left to right. The Greek alphabet spread throughout the Mediterranean world, giving rise to various modified forms, including the Etruscan, Oscan, Umbrian, and Roman alphabets. Because of Roman conquests and the spread of the LATIN LANGUAGE, (q.v.), that language's Roman alphabet became the basic alphabet of all the languages of western Europe.

Cyrillic Alphabet.

About ad 860 Greek missionaries from Constantinople converted the Slavs to Christianity and devised for them a system of writing known as Cyrillic (see CYRILLIC ALPHABET,) from the name of one of its inventors, the apostle to the South Slavs, Saint Cyril. The Cyrillic alphabet, like the Roman, stems from the Greek; it is based on a 9th-century writing style. Additional characters, however, were devised to represent Slavic sounds that had no Greek equivalents. The Cyrillic alphabet, in various forms, is used currently in Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, and Bulgarian, but not in Polish, Czech, Slovak, or Slovenian, which are written in modified Roman alphabets. An interesting division exists in the Balkans where the Roman Catholic Croats use the Roman alphabet, but the Greek Orthodox Serbs employ Cyrillic for the same language.

Arabic Alphabet.

The Arabic alphabet, another offshoot of the early Semitic one, probably originated about the 4th century ad. It has spread to such languages as Persian and Urdu and is generally used by the Islamic world: throughout the Near and Middle East, in parts of Asia and Africa, and in southern Europe. Arabic is written in either of two forms: Kufic, a heavy, bold, formal script, was devised at the end of the 7th century; Naskhi, a cursive form, is the parent of modern Arabic writing. The question arises whether the various alphabets of India and Southeast Asia are indigenous developments or offshoots of early Semitic. One of the most important Indian alphabets, the Devanagari alphabet used in the SANSKRIT LANGUAGE (q.v.; see also INDIAN LANGUAGES,), is an ingenious combination of syllabic and true alphabetic principles. The progenitors, whether Semitic or Indian, of the Devanagari alphabet seem also to have given rise to the written alphabets of Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Sinhalese, Burmese, and Siamese, or Thai.

Artificial Alphabets.

Most of the alphabets considered in this article evolved gradually or were adapted from older prototypes. Some alphabets, however, have been created artificially for peoples previously illiterate, or for nations hitherto using alphabets of foreign origin. An outstanding example is the Armenian alphabet invented by Saint Mesrob (350–439) in 405 and still in use today. Also of great interest is the Mongolian hP'ags-Pa script (written from top to bottom), invented in China about 1269. In modern times, the Cherokee syllabary was invented soon after 1820 by the American Indian leader Sequoya. Later in the 19th century, missionaries and others created syllabaries and alphabets for American Indian languages, based on the Roman and, in the northwest, Russian Cyrillic scripts.

Alphabet Modifications.

Any alphabet used by peoples speaking different languages undergoes modifications. Such is the case with respect both to the number and form of letters used and to the subscripts and superscripts, or diacritical marks (accents, cedillas, tildes, dots, and others), used with the basic symbols to indicate modifications of sound. The letter c with a cedilla, for instance, appears regularly in French, Portuguese, and Turkish, but rarely, except in borrowed words, in English. The value of ç in French, Portuguese, and English is that of s, but in Turkish it represents the ch sound in church. It used to represent ts in Spanish, but that sound no longer exists in standard Spanish. So, too, letters have different sound values in different languages. The letter j, for example, as in English jam, has a y sound in German.

Although alphabets develop as attempts to establish a correspondence between sound and symbol, most alphabetically written languages are highly unphonetic, largely because the system of writing remains static while the spoken language evolves. Thus, the spelling of the English word knight reflects the pronunciation of an earlier period of the language, when the initial k was pronounced and the gh represented a sound, since lost, similar to the German ch in Wacht. The divergence between the written and spoken forms of certain languages, particularly English, has prompted movements for SPELLING, (q.v.) reform. See also LANGUAGE,; RUNES,; SHORTHAND,; WRITING,; and articles on the individual letters and languages.         M.P., MARIO PEI, Ph.D. & D.M.La., DAVID MARSHALL LANG, M.A., Ph.D., D.Lit.

For further information on this topic, see the Bibliography, sections 354. Paleography–355. Alphabet.