An alphabet is a standard set of letters (basic written symbols or graphemes) which is used to write one or more languages based on the general principle that the letters represent phonemes (basic significant sounds) of the spoken language. This is in contrast to other types of writing systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme or semantic unit, and syllabaries, in which each character represents a syllable.

A true alphabet has letters for the vowels of a language as well as the consonants. The first true alphabet is believed to be the Greek alphabet,^[1][2] which is a modified form of the Phoenician alphabet. In other types of alphabet either the vowels are not indicated at all, as was the case in the Phoenician alphabet (such systems are known as abjads), or else the vowels are shown by diacritics or modification of consonants, as in the devanagari used in India and Nepal (these systems are known as abugidas or alphasyllabaries).

There are dozens of alphabets in use today, the most common being the Latin alphabet^[3] (which was derived from the Greek). Many languages use modified forms of the Latin alphabet, with additional letters formed using diacritical marks. While most alphabets have letters composed of lines (linear writing), there are also exceptions such as the alphabets used in Braille, fingerspelling, and Morse code.

Alphabets are usually associated with a standard ordering of their letters. This makes them useful for purposes of collation, specifically by allowing words to be sorted in alphabetical order. It also means that their letters can be used as an alternative method of "numbering" ordered items, in such contexts as numbered lists.

Etymology[link]

The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum, which in turn originated in the Ancient Greek ἀλφάβητος (alphabētos), from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.^[4] Alpha and beta in turn came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet, and originally meant ox and house respectively.

History[link]

A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia.

Middle Eastern scripts[link]

The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. By the 27th century BCE Egyptian writing had a set of some 24 hieroglyphs which are called uniliterals,^[5] to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names.^[6]

A specimen of Proto-Sinaitic script, one of the earliest (if not the very first) phonemic scripts

In the Middle Bronze Age an apparently "alphabetic" system known as the Proto-Sinaitic script is thought by some to have been developed in the Sinai peninsula during the 19th century BCE, by Canaanite workers in the Egyptian turquoise mines.^[7] Others suggest the alphabet was developed in central Egypt during the 15th century BCE for or by Semitic workers, but only one of these early writings has been deciphered and their exact nature remains open to interpretation.^[8] Based on letter appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs.^[8] This script had no characters representing vowels. An alphabetic cuneiform script with 30 signs including three which indicate the following vowel was invented in Ugarit before the 15th century BCE. This script was not used after the destruction of Ugarit.^[9]

The Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, which is conventionally called "Proto-Canaanite" before ca. 1050 BCE.^[10] The oldest text in Phoenician script is an inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram. This script is the parent script of all western alphabets. By the tenth century two other forms can be distinguished namely Canaanite and Aramaic. The Aramaic gave rise to Hebrew.^[11] The South Arabian alphabet, a sister script to the Phoenician alphabet, is the script from which the Ge'ez alphabet (an abugida) is descended. Note that the scripts mentioned above are not considered proper alphabets, as they all lack characters representing vowels. These vowelless alphabets are called abjads, currently exemplified in scripts including Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac. The omission of vowels was not a satisfactory solution and some "weak" consonants were used to indicate the vowel quality of a syllable (matres lectionis). These had dual function since they were also used as pure consonants.^[12]

The Proto-Sinatic or Proto Canaanite script and the Ugaritic script were the first scripts with limited number of signs, in contrast to the other widely used writing systems at the time, Cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Linear B. The Phoenician script was probably the first phonemic script^[8][10] and it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for common traders to learn. Another advantage of Phoenician was that it could be used to write down many different languages, since it recorded words phonemically.

The script was spread by the Phoenicians, across the Mediterranean.^[10] In Greece, the script was modified to add the vowels, giving rise to the ancestor of all alphabets in the West. The indication of the vowels is the same way as the indication of the consonants, therefore it was the first true alphabet. The Greeks took letters which did not represent sounds that existed in Greek, and changed them to represent the vowels. The vowels are significant in the Greek language, and the syllabical Linear B script which was used by the Mycenaean Greeks from the 16th century BCE had 87 symbols including 5 vowels. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, a situation which caused many different alphabets to evolve from it.

European alphabets[link]

Codex Zographensis in the Glagolitic alphabet from Medieval Bulgaria

The Greek alphabet, in its Euboean form, was carried over by Greek colonists to the Italian peninsula, where it gave rise to a variety of alphabets used to write the Italic languages. One of these became the Latin alphabet, which was spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their empire. Even after the fall of the Roman state, the alphabet survived in intellectual and religious works. It eventually became used for the descendant languages of Latin (the Romance languages) and then for most of the other languages of Europe.

Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet are augmented with ligatures, such as æ in Old English and Icelandic and Ȣ in Algonquian; by borrowings from other alphabets, such as the thorn þ in Old English and Icelandic, which came from the Futhark runes; and by modifying existing letters, such as the eth ð of Old English and Icelandic, which is a modified d. Other alphabets only use a subset of the Latin alphabet, such as Hawaiian, and Italian, which uses the letters j, k, x, y and w only in foreign words.

Another notable script is Elder Futhark, which is believed to have evolved out of one of the Old Italic alphabets. Elder Futhark gave rise to a variety of alphabets known collectively as the Runic alphabets. The Runic alphabets were used for Germanic languages from CE 100 to the late Middle Ages. Its usage is mostly restricted to engravings on stone and jewelry, although inscriptions have also been found on bone and wood. These alphabets have since been replaced with the Latin alphabet, except for decorative usage for which the runes remained in use until the 20th century.

The Old Hungarian script is a contemporary writing system of the Hungarians. It was in use during the entire history of Hungary, albeit not as an official writing system. From the 19th century it once again became more and more popular.

The Glagolitic alphabet was the initial script of the liturgical language Old Church Slavonic and became, together with the Greek uncial script, the basis of the Cyrillic script. Cyrillic is one of the most widely used modern alphabetic scripts, and is notable for its use in Slavic languages and also for other languages within the former Soviet Union. Cyrillic alphabets include the Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, and Russian alphabets. The Glagolitic alphabet is believed to have been created by Saints Cyril and Methodius, while the Cyrillic alphabet was invented by the Bulgarian scholar Clement of Ohrid, who was their disciple. They feature many letters that appear to have been borrowed from or influenced by the Greek alphabet and the Hebrew alphabet.

Asian alphabets[link]

Beyond the logographic Chinese writing, many phonetic scripts are in existence in Asia. The Arabic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet, and other abjads of the Middle East are developments of the Aramaic alphabet, but because these writing systems are largely consonant-based they are often not considered true alphabets.

Most alphabetic scripts of India and Eastern Asia are descended from the Brahmi script, which is often believed to be a descendent of Aramaic.

Zhuyin on a cell phone

In Korea, the Hangul alphabet was created by Sejong the Great^[13] Hangul is a unique alphabet: it is a featural alphabet, where many of the letters are designed from a sound's place of articulation (P to look like widened mouth, L sound to look like tongue pulled in, etc.); its design was planned by the government of the time; and it places individual letters in syllable clusters with equal dimensions, in the same way as Chinese characters, to allow for mixed script writing^{[citation needed]} (one syllable always takes up one type-space no matter how many letters get stacked into building that one sound-block).

Zhuyin (sometimes called Bopomofo) is a semi-syllabary used to phonetically transcribe Mandarin Chinese in the Republic of China. After the later establishment of the People's Republic of China and its adoption of Hanyu Pinyin, the use of Zhuyin today is limited, but it's still widely used in Taiwan where the Republic of China still governs. Zhuyin developed out of a form of Chinese shorthand based on Chinese characters in the early 1900s and has elements of both an alphabet and a syllabary. Like an alphabet the phonemes of syllable initials are represented by individual symbols, but like a syllabary the phonemes of the syllable finals are not; rather, each possible final (excluding the medial glide) is represented by its own symbol. For example, luan is represented as ㄌㄨㄢ (l-u-an), where the last symbol ㄢ represents the entire final -an. While Zhuyin is not used as a mainstream writing system, it is still often used in ways similar to a romanization system—that is, for aiding in pronunciation and as an input method for Chinese characters on computers and cell phones.

European alphabets, especially Latin and Cyrillic, have been adapted for many languages of Asia. Arabic is also widely used, sometimes as an abjad (as with Urdu and Persian) and sometimes as a complete alphabet (as with Kurdish and Uyghur).

Types[link]

The term "alphabet" is used by linguists and paleographers in both a wide and a narrow sense. In the wider sense, an alphabet is a script that is segmental at the phoneme level—that is, it has separate glyphs for individual sounds and not for larger units such as syllables or words. In the narrower sense, some scholars distinguish "true" alphabets from two other types of segmental script, abjads and abugidas. These three differ from each other in the way they treat vowels: abjads have letters for consonants and leave most vowels unexpressed; abugidas are also consonant-based, but indicate vowels with diacritics to or a systematic graphic modification of the consonants. In alphabets in the narrow sense, on the other hand, consonants and vowels are written as independent letters. The earliest known alphabet in the wider sense is the Wadi el-Hol script, believed to be an abjad, which through its successor Phoenician is the ancestor of modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin (via the Old Italic alphabet), Cyrillic (via the Greek alphabet) and Hebrew (via Aramaic).

Examples of present-day abjads are the Arabic and Hebrew scripts; true alphabets include Latin, Cyrillic, and Korean hangul; and abugidas are used to write Tigrinya Amharic, Hindi, and Thai. The Canadian Aboriginal syllabics are also an abugida rather than a syllabary as their name would imply, since each glyph stands for a consonant which is modified by rotation to represent the following vowel. (In a true syllabary, each consonant-vowel combination would be represented by a separate glyph.)

All three types may be augmented with syllabic glyphs. Ugaritic, for example, is basically an abjad, but has syllabic letters for /ʔa, ʔi, ʔu/. (These are the only time vowels are indicated.) Cyrillic is basically a true alphabet, but has syllabic letters for /ja, je, ju/ (я, е, ю); Coptic has a letter for /ti/. Devanagari is typically an abugida augmented with dedicated letters for initial vowels, though some traditions use अ as a zero consonant as the graphic base for such vowels.

The boundaries between the three types of segmental scripts are not always clear-cut. For example, Sorani Kurdish is written in the Arabic script, which is normally an abjad. However, in Kurdish, writing the vowels is mandatory, and full letters are used, so the script is a true alphabet. Other languages may use a Semitic abjad with mandatory vowel diacritics, effectively making them abugidas. On the other hand, the Phagspa script of the Mongol Empire was based closely on the Tibetan abugida, but all vowel marks were written after the preceding consonant rather than as diacritic marks. Although short a was not written, as in the Indic abugidas, one could argue that the linear arrangement made this a true alphabet. Conversely, the vowel marks of the Tigrinya abugida and the Amharic abugida (ironically, the original source of the term "abugida") have been so completely assimilated into their consonants that the modifications are no longer systematic and have to be learned as a syllabary rather than as a segmental script. Even more extreme, the Pahlavi abjad eventually became logographic. (See below.)

Thus the primary classification of alphabets reflects how they treat vowels. For tonal languages, further classification can be based on their treatment of tone, though names do not yet exist to distinguish the various types. Some alphabets disregard tone entirely, especially when it does not carry a heavy functional load, as in Somali and many other languages of Africa and the Americas. Such scripts are to tone what abjads are to vowels. Most commonly, tones are indicated with diacritics, the way vowels are treated in abugidas. This is the case for Vietnamese (a true alphabet) and Thai (an abugida). In Thai, tone is determined primarily by the choice of consonant, with diacritics for disambiguation. In the Pollard script, an abugida, vowels are indicated by diacritics, but the placement of the diacritic relative to the consonant is modified to indicate the tone. More rarely, a script may have separate letters for tones, as is the case for Hmong and Zhuang. For most of these scripts, regardless of whether letters or diacritics are used, the most common tone is not marked, just as the most common vowel is not marked in Indic abugidas; in Zhuyin not only is one of the tones unmarked, but there is a diacritic to indicate lack of tone, like the virama of Indic.

The number of letters in an alphabet can be quite small. The Book Pahlavi script, an abjad, had only twelve letters at one point, and may have had even fewer later on. Today the Rotokas alphabet has only twelve letters. (The Hawaiian alphabet is sometimes claimed to be as small, but it actually consists of 18 letters, including the ʻokina and five long vowels.) While Rotokas has a small alphabet because it has few phonemes to represent (just eleven), Book Pahlavi was small because many letters had been conflated—that is, the graphic distinctions had been lost over time, and diacritics were not developed to compensate for this as they were in Arabic, another script that lost many of its distinct letter shapes. For example, a comma-shaped letter represented g, d, y, k, or j. However, such apparent simplifications can perversely make a script more complicated. In later Pahlavi papyri, up to half of the remaining graphic distinctions of these twelve letters were lost, and the script could no longer be read as a sequence of letters at all, but instead each word had to be learned as a whole—that is, they had become logograms as in Egyptian Demotic. The alphabet in the Polish language contains 32 letters.

The largest segmental script is probably an abugida, Devanagari. When written in Devanagari, Vedic Sanskrit has an alphabet of 53 letters, including the visarga mark for final aspiration and special letters for kš and jñ, though one of the letters is theoretical and not actually used. The Hindi alphabet must represent both Sanskrit and modern vocabulary, and so has been expanded to 58 with the khutma letters (letters with a dot added) to represent sounds from Persian and English.

The largest known abjad is Sindhi, with 51 letters. The largest alphabets in the narrow sense include Kabardian and Abkhaz (for Cyrillic), with 58 and 56 letters, respectively, and Slovak (for the Latin script), with 46. However, these scripts either count di- and tri-graphs as separate letters, as Spanish did with ch and ll until recently, or uses diacritics like Slovak č. The largest true alphabet where each letter is graphically independent is probably Georgian, with 41 letters.

Syllabaries typically contain 50 to 400 glyphs (though the Múra-Pirahã language of Brazil would require only 24 if it did not denote tone, and Rotokas would require only 30), and the glyphs of logographic systems typically number from the many hundreds into the thousands. Thus a simple count of the number of distinct symbols is an important clue to the nature of an unknown script.

Alphabetical order[link]

Alphabets often come to be associated with a standard ordering of their letters, which can then be used for purposes of collation – namely for the listing of words and other items in what is called alphabetical order.

The basic ordering of the Latin alphabet (ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ) is well established, although languages using this alphabet have different conventions for their treatment of modified letters (such as the French é, à, and ô) and of certain combinations of letters (multigraphs). In French, these are not considered to be additional letters for the purposes of collation. However, in Icelandic, the accented letters such as á, í, and ö are considered to be distinct letters of the alphabet. In Spanish, ñ is considered a separate letter, but accented vowels such as á and é are not. The ll and ch were also considered single letters, but in 1994 the Real Academia Española changed collating order so that ll is between lk and lm in the dictionary and ch is between cg and ci, and in 2010 the tenth congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies changed it so they were no longer letters at all^[14][15]

In German, words starting with sch- (constituting the German phoneme /ʃ/) would be intercalated between words with initial sca- and sci- (all incidentally loanwords) instead of this graphic cluster appearing after the letter s, as though it were a single letter—a lexicographical policy which would be de rigueur in a dictionary of Albanian, i.e. dh-, ë-, gj-, ll-, rr-, th-, xh- and zh- (all representing phonemes and considered separate single letters) would follow the letters d, e, g, l, n, r, t, x and z respectively. Nor is, in a dictionary of English, the lexical section with initial th- reserved a place after the letter t, but is inserted between te- and ti-. German words with umlaut would further be alphabetized as if there were no umlaut at all—contrary to Turkish which allegedly adopted the German graphemes ö and ü, and where a word like tüfek, "gun", would come after tuz, "salt", in the dictionary.

The Danish and Norwegian alphabets end with æ—ø—å, whereas the Swedish, Finnish and Estonian ones conventionally put å—ä—ö at the end.

It is unknown whether the earliest alphabets had a defined sequence. Some alphabets today, such as the Hanuno'o script, are learned one letter at a time, in no particular order, and are not used for collation where a definite order is required. However, a dozen Ugaritic tablets from the fourteenth century BCE preserve the alphabet in two sequences. One, the ABCDE order later used in Phoenician, has continued with minor changes in Hebrew, Greek, Armenian, Gothic, Cyrillic, and Latin; the other, HMĦLQ, was used in southern Arabia and is preserved today in Ethiopic.^[16] Both orders have therefore been stable for at least 3000 years.

The historical order was abandoned in Runic and Arabic, although Arabic retains the traditional "abjadi order" for numbering.

The Brahmic family of alphabets used in India use a unique order based on phonology: The letters are arranged according to how and where they are produced in the mouth. This organization is used in Southeast Asia, Tibet, Korean hangul, and even Japanese kana, which is not an alphabet.

Names of letters[link]

The Phoenician letter names, in which each letter was associated with a word that begins with that sound, continue to be used to varying degrees in Samaritan, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew, Greek and Arabic. The names were abandoned in Latin, which instead referred to the letters by adding a vowel (usually e) before or after the consonant (the exception is zeta, which was retained from Greek). In Cyrillic originally the letters were given names based on Slavic words; this was later abandoned as well in favor of a system similar to that used in Latin.

Orthography and pronunciation[link]

When an alphabet is adopted or developed for use in representing a given language, an orthography generally comes into being, providing rules for the spelling of words in that language. In accordance with the principle on which alphabets are based, these rules will generally map letters of the alphabet to the phonemes (significant sounds) of the spoken language. In a perfectly phonemic orthography there would be a consistent one-to-one correspondence between the letters and the phonemes, so that a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a speaker could predict the pronunciation of a word given its spelling. However this ideal is not normally achieved in practice; some languages (such as Spanish and Finnish) come close to it, while others (such as English) deviate from it to a much larger degree.

The pronunciation of a language often evolves independently of its writing system, and writing systems have been borrowed for languages they were not designed for, so the degree to which letters of an alphabet correspond to phonemes of a language varies greatly from one language to another and even within a single language.

Languages may fail to achieve a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds in any of several ways:

• A language may represent a given phoneme with a combination of letters rather than just a single letter. Two-letter combinations are called digraphs and three-letter groups are called trigraphs. German uses the tesseragraphs (four letters) "tsch" for the phoneme [tʃ] and "dsch" for [dʒ], although the latter is rare. Kabardian also uses a tesseragraph for one of its phonemes.
• A language may represent the same phoneme with two different letters or combinations of letters. An example is modern Greek which may write the phoneme [i] in six different ways: ⟨ι⟩, ⟨η⟩, ⟨υ⟩, ⟨ει⟩, ⟨οι⟩, and ⟨υι⟩ (although the last is rare).
• A language may spell some words with unpronounced letters that exist for historical or other reasons. For example, the spelling of the Thai word for "beer" [เบียร์] retains a letter for the final consonant "r" present in the English word it was borrowed from, but silences it. Otherwise, according to Thai pronunciation rules, the word might be pronounced more like "bean".
• Pronunciation of individual words may change according to the presence of surrounding words in a sentence (sandhi).
• Different dialects of a language may use different phonemes for the same word.
• A language may use different sets of symbols or different rules for distinct sets of vocabulary items, such as the Japanese hiragana and katakana syllabaries, or the various rules in English for spelling words from Latin and Greek, or the original Germanic vocabulary.

National languages generally elect to address the problem of dialects by simply associating the alphabet with the national standard. However, with an international language with wide variations in its dialects, such as English, it would be impossible to represent the language in all its variations with a single phonetic alphabet.

Some national languages like Finnish, Turkish, Serbo-Croatian (Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian) and Bulgarian have a very regular spelling system with a nearly one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes. Strictly speaking, these three languages lack a word corresponding to the verb "to spell" (meaning to split a word into its letters), the closest match being a verb meaning to split a word into its syllables. Similarly, the Italian verb corresponding to 'spell', compitare^{[dubious – discuss]}, is unknown to many Italians because the act of spelling itself is rarely needed: Italian spelling is highly phonemic. In standard Spanish, it is possible to tell the pronunciation of a word from its spelling, but not vice versa; this is because certain phonemes can be represented in more than one way, but a given letter is consistently pronounced. French, with its silent letters and its heavy use of nasal vowels and elision, may seem to lack much correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, but its rules on pronunciation, though complex, are actually consistent and predictable with a fair degree of accuracy.

At the other extreme, are languages such as English, where the spelling of many words simply has to be memorized as they do not correspond to sounds in a consistent way. For English, this is partly because the Great Vowel Shift occurred after the orthography was established, and because English has acquired a large number of loanwords at different times, retaining their original spelling at varying levels. Even English has general, albeit complex, rules that predict pronunciation from spelling, and these rules are successful most of the time; rules to predict spelling from the pronunciation have a higher failure rate.

Sometimes, countries have the written language undergo a spelling reform to realign the writing with the contemporary spoken language. These can range from simple spelling changes and word forms to switching the entire writing system itself, as when Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet to a Turkish alphabet of Latin origin.

The sounds of speech of all languages of the world can be written by a rather small universal phonetic alphabet. A standard for this is the International Phonetic Alphabet.

See also[link]

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Coulmas, Florian (1989). The Writing Systems of the World. Blackwell Publishers Ltd.. ISBN 0-631-18028-1. http://books.google.com/?id=VOywmavmZ3UC. 
• Daniels, Peter T.; Bright, William (1996). The World's Writing Systems. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-507993-0.  Overview of modern and some ancient writing systems.
• Driver, G. R. (1976). Semitic Writing (Schweich Lectures on Biblical Archaeology S.) 3Rev Ed. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-725917-0. 
• Haarmann, Harald (2004). Geschichte der Schrift (2nd ed.). München: C. H. Beck. ISBN 3-406-47998-7 
• Hoffman, Joel M. (2004). In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language. NYU Press. ISBN 0-8147-3654-8. http://www.newjewishbooks.org/ITB/toc.html.  Chapter 3 traces and summarizes the invention of alphabetic writing.
• Logan, Robert K. (2004). The Alphabet Effect: A Media Ecology Understanding of the Making of Western Civilization. Hampton Press. ISBN 1-57273-523-6. 
• McLuhan, Marshall; Logan, Robert K. (1977). Alphabet, Mother of Invention. Etcetera. Vol. 34, pp. 373–383
• Millard, A. R. (1986). "The Infancy of the Alphabet". World Archaeology 17 (3): 390–398. DOI:10.1080/00438243.1986.9979978 
• Ouaknin, Marc-Alain; Bacon, Josephine (1999). Mysteries of the Alphabet: The Origins of Writing. Abbeville Press. ISBN 0-7892-0521-1. 
• Powell, Barry (1991). Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-58907-X. 
• Powell, Barry B. 2009. Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization, Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-6256-2
• Sacks, David (2004) (PDF). Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet from A to Z. Broadway Books. ISBN 0-7679-1173-3. http://www.uca.edu.ar/esp/sec-ffilosofia/esp/docs-institutos/s-cehao/boletin/damqatum3_eng2007.pdf. 
• Saggs, H. W. F. (1991). Civilization Before Greece and Rome. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-05031-3.  Chapter 4 traces the invention of writing

External links[link]

Look up alphabet in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• The Origins of abc
• "Language, Writing and Alphabet: An Interview with Christophe Rico", Damqātum 3 (2007)
• Alphabetic Writing Systems
• Michael Everson's Alphabets of Europe
• Evolution of alphabets, animation by Prof. Robert Fradkin at the University of Maryland
• How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs—Biblical Archaeology Review

Fun
Lead singer Nate Ruess at Electric Ballroom, Camden, London.
Background information
Origin	New York City, New York, U.S.
Genres	indie pop, alternative rock, power pop[1]
Years active	2008–present
Labels	Fueled by Ramen Records/Nettwerk Records (US) Hassle Records (UK)
Associated acts	The Format, Steel Train, Anathallo
Website	ournameisFun.com
Members
Nate Ruess Andrew Dost Jack Antonoff

Fun (often stylized as fun.) is an American alternative rock band based in New York City that was formed by Nate Ruess, formerly of The Format. After the 2008 breakup of The Format, Ruess formed Fun with Andrew Dost and Jack Antonoff of Anathallo and Steel Train respectively.^[2] Fun has released two albums: their debut Aim and Ignite in 2009 and their latest Some Nights in February 2012.

The band is best known for its hit single "We Are Young" featuring Janelle Monáe. "We Are Young" reached number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and Digital Songs charts, becoming the first alternative song to top the Billboard Hot 100 chart since Coldplay's "Viva la Vida" in 2008. It also peaked at number one on the UK Singles Chart.

History[link]

2007–2008: Career beginning and formation[link]

The Format split in February 2008. Immediately afterward Nate Ruess asked Andrew Dost and Jack Antonoff to join his new project. Dost had toured with The Format and provided various instrumentation. Ruess met Antonoff after The Format toured with Steel Train.^[3] The three began working together in New Jersey within a week. Ruess sang melodies while the other two provided music for them.^[4] The first demo song the band recorded was "Benson Hedges," which was made available for free in Spin's September 20, 2008 article on the band.^[5] Fun approached Steven McDonald, who produced The Format's album Dog Problems with Ruess, to produce their debut album. McDonald was enthusiastic about the project and stated, "I can’t believe what we’re working on here. This crushes anything I’ve ever done."^[4]

[edit] 2009–2010: Aim and Ignite

Recording took place in the fall of 2008. The band's first single, "At Least I'm Not as Sad (As I Used to Be)" was made available as a free download on the band's Myspace page on April 6, 2009.^[6] Aim and Ignite was released on August 25, 2009 and had positive reviews. AbsolutePunk.net's Drew Beringer praised the album, stating it was "what a pop album 'should' sound like" and "the most essential pop album of 2009."^[7] Allmusic called the album "progressive, but in the best possible way" and admired Ruess's lyrics for "investigating the larger truths of life...with a witty approach that keeps the songs bubbling merrily along on a positive note".^[8] Dave de Sylvia of Sputnikmusic wrote, "Aim and Ignite isn’t the most consistent pop album around," but he ultimately commended the album as "a superbly mixed and arranged album made by musicians who clearly understand the limits and potential of pop music".^[9] Estella Hung of PopMatters was less impressed with the album. She praised songs "Be Calm" and "The Gambler", but criticized the lyrics and production of the album's early tracks. Hung concluded that while Aim and Ignite is "pretty original to say the least", it "fails to live up to the Format’s last outing."^[10] Popdose's Ken Shane called the album "an interesting and unusual listen." Shane applauded the album's songwriting and said "many of the songs are really good," but he objected to the "cute" production, desiring to hear the band "in a more stripped-down form." He ended his review with: "I have a similar problem with Dr. Dog, a band that was recommended to me by a number of people. I think much of their recorded work is too fussed over, but when I saw them live and their sound was more stripped down out of necessity, emphasizing their powerful songwriting, I thought they were wonderful. Perhaps the same fate awaits me with Fun."^[11] The album reached number 26 on Sputnikmusic's top 50 albums of 2009. The album peaked at 71 on the US album charts.

Fun began its first North American tour on November 8, 2008 with Jack's Mannequin.^[12] The debut album Aim and Ignite was released on August 25, 2009.^[13] In reviewing the album, The Washington Post called some of the arrangements "theatrical, much like those on Panic! at the Disco's 2005 debut".^[14] In February 2010, Fun supported Jack's Mannequin on their headline tour, along with Vedera which was followed by their first UK appearances in March. Their current touring band also includes Will Noon, Rob Kroehler, Emily Moore, Nate Harold, and Jon "Jonny Thunder" Goldstein.^[15] In April 2010, Fun supported Paramore's headline tour. Other support for the tour includes Relient K and Harriet Ellis of Summer Beats.^[16] The band then embarked on a full UK tour in May. On August 4, 2010, Fun announced that they had signed with label Fueled by Ramen.^[17]

On August 14, 2010, it was announced via the Official Paramore Fan Club that Fun would be opening for Paramore on their November UK tour.^[18] In 2010 Fun's single, "Walking the Dog," was used in a commercial for the travel site Expedia.com.^[19] In 2010, Will Noon (formerly of Straylight Run) played drums with Fun on tour, according to Noon's Twitter page.^[20] To celebrate the Paramore UK tour and the band’s new single ‘Walking The Dog’, Hassle Records gave away a free download of an acoustic version of the track.^[21] On April 27, 2011, a video of the band performing a new song entitled "Carry On" was uploaded to YouTube.^[22]

[edit] 2011–present: Some Nights

This section is in a list format that may be better presented using prose. You can help by converting this section to prose, if appropriate. Editing help is available. (April 2012)

On May 17, 2011, the band released "C'mon" as a joint single with Panic! at the Disco, who they opened for on their 2011 Vices & Virtues Tour.

On November 7, 2011, the band announced that their next album would be titled Some Nights and released on February 21, 2012. Its first single, called "We Are Young" and featuring Janelle Monáe, has since been used in several other media including:

• Gossip Girl season 5 episode 24 "The Return of the Ring"
• 90210 season 4 episode 24 "Forever Hold Your Peace"
• Glee episode "Hold On to Sixteen"
• introducing the Game Changer of the Year at the 2011 WWE Slammy Awards
• Chuck episode "Chuck Versus the Baby"
• Chevrolet Chevy Sonic Super Bowl XLVI commercial "Stunt Anthem", also featuring American professional skateboarder Rob Dyrdek and the rock band OK Go.^[23]
• a vignette promoting the WWE Wrestlemania XXVIII Main event match between John Cena and The Rock
• BBC Radio One as Scott Mills' Big Thing
• The trailer for the Judd Apatow film This is 40

On December 12, 2011, the band's song "One Foot" was available for instant streaming and free download on Nylon's website.^[24]

On February 13, 2012, the band released an album stream on their website along with a note from Ruess thanking fans for their ongoing support. Ruess states he is "over the moon about what you're about to hear and falling asleep knowing that as soon as I wake up, this will no longer be a dream."^[25]

On March 7, 2012, Fun's single "We Are Young" reached the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. This makes Fun the first multi-member rock band to have a #1 Billboard debut on the Hot 100 since Nickelback's "How You Remind Me" in December 2001/January 2002.^[26] On the same day, "We Are Young" was used by Apple in a promotional video of their recent retail development in Grand Central Terminal.^[27] On April 11, 2012, Billboard.com announced that Fun's "We Are Young" also made Digital Sales history. As the song was at the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for a sixth consecutive week, it has become the first, and at this time only, song that has ever gained 300,000+ downloads for seven weeks straight.^[28]

On March 19, 2012, Fun was announced as a performing band at the Bonnaroo 2012 music festival.

On June 3, 2012, Fun will perform "We Are Young" at the 2012 MTV Movie Awards.

"We Are Young" peaked at number 1 on May 27, 2012 in the UK.

Band members[link]

Current members

• Jack Antonoff – vocals, guitars, trumpet (2008–present)
• Andrew Dost – vocals, piano, guitars, bass guitar, keyboards, synthesizers, trumpet, flugelhorn, glockenspiel, drums, percussion, beach ball, cardboard box (2008–present)
• Nate Ruess – lead vocals (2008–present)

Current touring members

• Nate Harold – bass guitar, vocals, sampler (2009–present)
• Emily Moore – guitars, vocals, keyboards, saxophone (2009–present)
• Will Noon – drums (2010–present)

Former touring members

• Jon Goldstein – drums (2008–2010)
• Rob Kroehler – guitar (2008–2010)
• Mike Schey - guitar (March 2010-May 2010)
• Michael Newsted (The Soil & The Sun) – bass guitar (2010)
• Maggie Malyn – violin (2008)
• Evan Winiker – bass guitar (2011)
• Ryan Lallier – guitar (2010–2011)

Discography[link]

Studio albums

• Aim and Ignite (2009)
• Some Nights (2012)

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website
• Fun on Myspace
• Fun on YouTube
• Fun coverage on Audioholic Media
• Alter the Press Interview
• March 18, 2012 NPR story and interview by Guy Raz

Ryan Lewis
Ryan Lewis (back) performing with Macklemore (front) at Sasquatch! Music Festival
Background information
Born	(1988-03-25) March 25, 1988 (age 24) Spokane, Washington, U.S.
Origin	Seattle, Washington, U.S.
Genres	Hip hop
Occupations	Producer, DJ
Years active	2006–present
Associated acts	Macklemore
Website	rlewis.com

Ryan Lewis (born March 25, 1988) is an American music producer, musician, music video director, photographer, graphic designer, rapper and DJ currently based in Seattle. He is best known for his collaboration with American rapper Macklemore (Ben Haggerty) producing Macklemore & Ryan Lewis — The VS. EP (2009), The Heist (2012) and a handful of other singles. Since the beginning of their collaboration in late 2008, Ryan has produced, recorded, engineered and mixed all of the music, directed music videos ("Same Love", "Thrift Shop", "And We Danced", "Otherside (Remix)"), designed visuals (album art, web design, posters) and DJed the live show.

In a recent mini-documentary, Lewis recalled meeting Macklemore for the first time. "When I met him, it was a really different time. It was less than a year after [2005's] Language of My World had come out. So he had buzz. For me being a young kid, it was very exciting to link with him. The bulk of our original relationship was photo shoots. I became kind of his photographer."^[1]

[edit] The Heist

On October 9, 2012, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis released The Heist. The album debuted at #2 on the Billboard charts and #1 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums and Top Rap Albums, selling 78,000 copies in the first week.^[2] The album also debuted at #1 on iTunes Digital Albums chart.^[3] The duo's album has received more than 1 million plays on SoundCloud, 70 million YouTube views and was accompanied by a sold-out 50-date U.S. and Canadian tour.^[4]

Discography[link]

(All credited to Macklemore & Ryan Lewis)

Studio albums[link]

EPs

Singles[link]

Notes[link]

• A ^ "Wing$" did not enter the R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, but peaked at number 7 on the Bubbling Under R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, which acts as an extension to the R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart.^[27]
• B ^ "Same Love" did not enter the Billboard Hot 100, but peaked at number 25 on the Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles chart, which acts as an extension to the Hot 100.^[28]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website

de:Ryan Lewis

Rube Goldberg
Born	Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg (1883-07-04)July 4, 1883 San Francisco, California, United States
Died	December 7, 1970(1970-12-07) (aged 87)
Resting place	Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York
Occupation	Engineer, Sculptor, News Reporter, Cartoonist
Known for	Rube Goldberg machines

Reuben Lucius Goldberg (July 4, 1883 – December 7, 1970) was an American cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer and inventor.

He is best known for a series of popular cartoons depicting complex gadgets that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways. These devices, now known as Rube Goldberg machines, are similar to those drawn by W. Heath Robinson in the UK and Storm P in Denmark^{[citation needed]}. Goldberg received many honors in his lifetime, including a Pulitzer Prize for his political cartooning in 1948 and the Banshees' Silver Lady Award 1959.^[1]

Goldberg was a founding member and the first president of the National Cartoonists Society,^[2] and he is the namesake of the Reuben Award, which the organization awards to the Cartoonist of the Year. He is the inspiration for various international competitions, known as Rube Goldberg Machine Contests, which challenge participants to make a complex machine to perform a simple task.

Life[link]

Goldberg was born July 4, 1883, in San Francisco, California, to Jewish parents Max and Hannah Goldberg. He was the second of four children (older brother Garrett, younger brother Walter, and younger sister Lillian). Rube married Irma Seeman in 1916. They lived at 88 Central Park West in New York City and had two sons named Thomas and George. He started drawing when he was only four years old. Goldberg did not share a surname with his children because of the amount of hatred towards him during World War II from the political nature of his cartoons. He ordered his sons to change their names from Goldberg for safety reasons. Both of his sons chose the last name of George, wanting to keep a sense of family cohesiveness. Thomas and George's children now run a company called RGI (Rube Goldberg Incorporated) to maintain the Goldberg name. John George (Thomas's son) is assisted by his cousin Jennifer George^[3] (George's daughter) and John's son Joshua George to keep the family name alive.^[4] Reuben died in 1970 at the age of 87, while his widow, Irma, died 20 years later on April 26, 1990 at the age of 95.^[5]

Career[link]

Rube Goldberg with family, 1929

Goldberg's father was a San Francisco police and fire commissioner, who encouraged the young Reuben to pursue a career in engineering. Rube graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1904 with a College of Mining degree^[1] and was hired by the city of San Francisco as an engineer for the Water and Sewers Department. After six months he resigned his position with the city to join the San Francisco Chronicle where he became a sports cartoonist.^[1] The following year, he took a job with the San Francisco Bulletin, where he remained until he moved to New York City in 1907.

Goldberg drew cartoons for five newspapers, including the New York Journal American|New York Evening Journal and the New York Evening Mail. His work entered syndication in 1915, beginning his nationwide popularity. He was syndicated by the McNaught Syndicate from 1922 until 1934.

A prolific artist, Goldberg produced several cartoon series simultaneously, including Mike and Ike (They Look Alike), Boob McNutt, Foolish Questions, Lala Palooza and The Weekly Meeting of the Tuesday Women's Club. The cartoons that brought him lasting fame involved a character named Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts. In that series, Goldberg drew labeled schematics of the comical "inventions" that would later bear his name.

Cultural legacy[link]

This postcard book, Rube Goldberg's Inventions!, was compiled by Maynard Frank Wolfe from the Rube Goldberg Archives. The cover illustration shows Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin. The "Self-Operating Napkin" is activated when the soup spoon (A) is raised to mouth, pulling string (B) and thereby jerking ladle (C), which throws cracker (D) past parrot (E). Parrot jumps after cracker and perch (F) tilts, upsetting seeds (G) into pail (H). Extra weight in pail pulls cord (I), which opens and lights automatic lighter (J), setting off skyrocket (K), which causes sickle (L) to cut string (M) and allow the pendulum with the attached napkin to swing back and forth, thereby wiping chin.

In 1931 the Merriam-Webster dictionary adopted the word "Rube Goldberg" as an adjective defined as accomplishing something simple through complex means.^[6]

Predating Goldberg, the corresponding term in the U.K. was, and still is, "Heath Robinson", after the English illustrator with an equal devotion to odd machinery (although Heath Robinson's creations did not have the same emphasis on the sequential or chain reaction element).

Goldberg's work was commemorated posthumously in 1995 with the inclusion of Rube Goldberg's Inventions, depicting Professor Butts' "Self-Operating Napkin" in the Comic Strip Classics series of U.S. postage stamps.^[7]

Film and television[link]

Rube Goldberg wrote a feature film featuring his machines and sculptures called Soup to Nuts, which was released in 1930 and starred Ted Healy and The Three Stooges.

In the 1962 John Wayne movie Hatari!, an invention to catch monkeys by character Pockets, played by Red Buttons, is described as a "Rube Goldberg."

In the late 1960s and early 70s, educational shows like Sesame Street and The Electric Company routinely showed bits that involved Rube Goldberg devices, including the Rube Goldberg Alphabet Contraption, and the What Happens Next Machine.^[8][9]

Various other films and cartoons have included highly complex machines that perform simple tasks. Among these are Flåklypa Grand Prix, Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, Wallace and Gromit, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, The Way Things Go, Edward Scissorhands, Back to the Future, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, The Goonies, Gremlins, the Saw film series, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Cat from Outer Space, Malcolm, Family Guy, and Waiting...

Also in the Final Destination film series the characters often die in Rube Goldberg-esque ways. In the film The Great Mouse Detective, the villain Ratigan attempts to kill the film's heroes, Basil of Baker Street and David Q. Dawson, with a Rube Goldberg style device. The classic video in this genre was done by the artist duo Peter Fischli & David Weiss in 1987 with their 30 minute video "Der Lauf der Dinge" or "The Way Things Go".

Honda produced a video in 2003 called "The Cog" using many of the same principles that Fischli and Weiss had done in 1987.

In 2005, the American indie/alternative rock band The Bravery released a video for their debut single, "An Honest Mistake," which features the band performing the song in the middle of a Rube Goldberg machine.

In 1999, an episode of The X-Files was titled "The Goldberg Variation". The episode intertwined characters FBI agents Mulder and Scully, a simple apartment super, Henry Weems (Willie Garson) and an ailing young boy, Ritchie Lupone (Shia LaBeouf) in a real-life Goldberg device.

The 2010 music video "This Too Shall Pass - RGM Version" by the rock band OK Go features a machine that, after four minutes of kinetic activity, shoots the band members in the face with paint. "RGM" presumably stands for Rube Goldberg Machine.^[10]

Games[link]

The popular 1963 board game Mouse Trap, as well as its sequels Crazy Clock (1964), and Fish Bait (1965) are based on Rube Goldberg machines.^{[citation needed]} Some examples of Goldberg-inspired video games are Incredibots, LittleBigPlanet, LittleBigPlanet 2, the 1990s-era series of The Incredible Machine games, and Crazy Machines.^{[citation needed]}