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A historiated initial (the letter O) from an illuminated manuscript. In a written or published work, an initial [a] is a letter at the beginning of a word, a chapter, or a paragraph that is larger than the rest of the text. The word is ultimately derived from the Latin initiālis, which means of the beginning.
(The names of the Santali letters are related to the sound they represent through the acrophonic principle, as in the original alphabet, but it is the final consonant or vowel of the name that the letter represents: le 'swelling' represents e, while en 'thresh grain' represents n.)
Letter symbolism concerns the symbolic meaning and value of letters (graphic signs representing a phoneme or group of phonemes in written language), whether read or written, in alphabetical script or elsewhere. While the meaning may not be immediately apparent, studying the symbols can reveal the significance of each letter.
These names were not arbitrary: each Phoenician letter was based on an Egyptian hieroglyph representing an Egyptian word; this word was translated into Phoenician (or a closely related Semitic language), then the initial sound of the translated word became the letter's Phoenician value. [28] For example, the second letter of the Phoenician ...
Letters are associated with specific names, which may differ between languages and dialects. Z, for example, is usually called zed outside of the United States, where it is named zee. Both ultimately derive from the name of the parent Greek letter zeta Ζ . In alphabets, letters are arranged in alphabetical order, which also may vary by language.
The letter Y when introduced was probably called "hy" /hyː/ as in Greek, the name upsilon not being in use yet, but this was changed to i Graeca ("Greek i") as Latin speakers had difficulty distinguishing its foreign sound /y/ from /i/. Z was given its Greek name, zeta. This scheme has continued to be used by most modern European languages ...
The word alphabet is a compound of alpha and beta, the names of the first two letters in the Greek alphabet. Old English was first written down using the Latin alphabet during the 7th century. During the centuries that followed, various letters entered or fell out of use. By the 16th century, the present set of 26 letters had largely stabilised:
Most first names in East Slavic languages originate from two sources: Eastern Orthodox Church tradition; native pre-Christian Slavic lexicons; Almost all first names are single. Doubled first names (as in, for example, French, like Jean-Luc) are very rare and are from foreign influence. Most doubled first names are written with a hyphen: Mariya ...