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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]
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:
The second new vowel letter, ɥ, was used to represent or . Franklin proposed the use of doubled letters to represent what he called long vowels, represented by modern phonemes in IPA thus: long / ɔː / versus short / ɒ / (or, in his notation, versus ), long / eɪ / versus short / ɛ / (ee versus e), and long / iː / for short / ɪ / (ii ...
Reading by using phonics is often referred to as decoding words, sounding-out words or using print-to-sound relationships.Since phonics focuses on the sounds and letters within words (i.e. sublexical), [13] it is often contrasted with whole language (a word-level-up philosophy for teaching reading) and a compromise approach called balanced literacy (the attempt to combine whole language and ...
Less commonly, a single letter can represent multiple successive sounds. The most common example is x , which normally represents the consonant cluster /ks/ (for example, in tax / t æ k s /). The same letter (or sequence of letters) may be pronounced differently when occurring in different positions within a word.
Alphabetic writing systems that use an (in principle) almost perfectly phonemic orthography have a single letter (or digraph or, occasionally, trigraph) for each individual phoneme and a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and the letters that represent them, although predictable allophonic alternation is normally not shown.
A spelling alphabet (also called by various other names) is a set of words used to represent the letters of an alphabet in oral communication, especially over a two-way radio or telephone. The words chosen to represent the letters sound sufficiently different from each other to clearly differentiate them.
Some authors omit the carrier letter, for e.g. suffixed [kʰuˣt̪s̟]ʷ or prefixed [ʷkʰuˣt̪s̟], [note 22] or place a spacing variant of a diacritic such as ˔ or ˜ at the beginning or end of a word to indicate that it applies to the entire word.