Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The word etymology is derived from the Ancient Greek word ἐτυμολογία (etumologíā), itself from ἔτυμον (étumon), meaning ' true sense or sense of a truth ', and the suffix -logia, denoting ' the study or logic of '. [3] [4] The etymon refers to the predicate (i.e. stem [5] or root [6]) from which a later word or morpheme ...
The order of the letters of the alphabet is attested from the 14th century BC in the town of Ugarit on Syria's northern coast. [23] Tablets found there bear over one thousand cuneiform signs, but these signs are not Babylonian and there are only thirty distinct characters. About twelve of the tablets have the signs set out in alphabetic order.
An alphabet is a standard set of letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from another in a given language. [ 1 ]
Some words contain silent letters, which do not represent any sound in modern English pronunciation. Examples include the l in talk , half , calf , etc., the w in two and sword , gh as mentioned above in numerous words such as though , daughter , night , brought , and the commonly encountered silent e (discussed further below).
For broader coverage of this topic, see Writing. A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a script, as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing was invented during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each writing system invented without prior knowledge of writing gradually evolved from a system of proto-writing that ...
Onomastics (or onomatology in older texts) is the study of proper names, including their etymology, history, and use. An alethonym ('true name') or an orthonym ('real name') is the proper name of the object in question, the object of onomastic study. Scholars studying onomastics are called onomasticians.
Get AOL Mail for FREE! Manage your email like never before with travel, photo & document views. Personalize your inbox with themes & tabs. You've Got Mail!
An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and emphasis.. Most national and international languages have an established writing system that has undergone substantial standardization, thus exhibiting less dialect variation than the spoken language.