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Several varieties of the Greek alphabet developed. One, known as the Cumae alphabet, was used west of Athens and in southern Italy. The other variation, known as Eastern Greek, was used in Asia Minor. The Athenians (c. 400 BC) adopted that latter variation and eventually the rest of the Greek-speaking world followed. After first writing right ...
Depending on the context in which the letter is used, it is typically based either on the numeral 2 or the Latin letter S. Ƨ was used in the Zhuang alphabet from 1957 to 1986 to indicate the second, or falling, tone ( [ ˧˩ ] ), due to its resemblance to the numeral 2, along with four other letters resembling numbers.
W originated as a doubled V (VV) used to represent the sound [w] found in Old English as early as the 7th century. It came into common use in the later 11th century, replacing the runic Wynn letter which had been used for the same sound.
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]
It was not until the Middle Ages that the letter W (originally a ligature of two V s) was added to the Latin alphabet, to represent sounds from the Germanic languages which did not exist in medieval Latin, and only after the Renaissance did the convention of treating I and U as vowels, and J and V as consonants, become established.
In some words of French origin, s is silent, as in 'isle' or 'debris'. The letter s is the seventh most common letter in English and the third-most common consonant after t and n . [7] It is the most common letter for the first letter of a word in the English language. [8] [9]
The letter now known as sigma took its name from sāmekh but its form from šin, while the letter San, which occurred in a few dialects only, took its name from šin but its place in the alphabet from ṣādē. A further Greek letter of uncertain origin, sampi, is found occasionally, and may represent an affricate, such as [t͡s].
The letter eth ð was an alteration of Latin d , and the runic letters thorn þ and wynn ƿ are borrowings from futhorc. Also used was a symbol for the conjunction and , a character similar to the number seven ( ⁊ , called ond or a Tironian et ) which is still used in Irish and Scottish Gaelic , and a symbol for the relative pronoun þæt , a ...