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Modern English is written with a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 letters, with each having both uppercase and lowercase forms. 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.
Definition and usage. A letter is a type of grapheme, the smallest functional unit within a writing system. Letters are graphemes that broadly correspond to phonemes, the smallest functional units of sound in speech. Similarly to how phonemes are combined to form spoken words, letters may be combined to form written words.
Alphabet. 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] Not all writing systems represent language in this way: a syllabary assigns ...
Some letters are neither: for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ʔ , originally had the form of a question mark with the dot removed. A few letters, such as that of the voiced pharyngeal fricative, ʕ , were inspired by other writing systems (in this case, the Arabic letter ﻉ , ʿayn, via the reversed apostrophe). [10]
In Pinyin alphabetical order, where words have the same basic letters in pinyin and differ only in modifying diacritics, the unmodified letter comes before the modified letter. For example, e comes before ê (額 (è) before 欸 (ê̄)), and u comes before and ü (路 (lù) before 驢 (lǘ) and 努 (nǔ) before 女 (nǚ)).
For example, the Arabic letters ب b, ت t, and ث th have the same basic shape, but with one dot added below, two dots added above, and three dots added above respectively. The letter ن n also has the same form in initial and medial forms, with one dot added above, though it is somewhat different in its isolated and final forms.
The ISO basic Latin alphabet is an international standard (beginning with ISO/IEC 646) for a Latin-script alphabet that consists of two sets ( uppercase and lowercase) of 26 letters, codified in [ 1] various national and international standards and used widely in international communication. They are the same letters that comprise the current ...
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