Letter (alphabet)

A letter is a grapheme (written character) in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters also appear in abjads and abugidas (variants of alphabets in which vowel marking is secondary or absent). Letters broadly denote phonemes in the spoken form of the language, although there is rarely a consistent exact correspondence between letters and phonemes.

Written signs in other writing systems are best called syllabograms (which denote a syllable) or logograms (which denote a word or phrase).

Definition and usage

"Letter," borrowed from Old French lettre, entered Middle English around AD 1200, eventually displacing the native English term bocstaf (i.e. bookstaff). Letter derives from Latin littera, which may have derived, via Etruscan, from the Greek "διφθέρα" (writing tablet). The Middle English plural lettres could refer to an epistle or written document, reflecting the use of the Latin plural litteræ. Use of the singular letter to refer to a written document emerged in the 14th century.

Alphabet

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 syllabaries (in which each character represents a syllable) and logographies (in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic unit).

The Proto-Canaanite script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is the first fully phonemic script. Thus the Phoenician alphabet is considered to be the first alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is the ancestor of most modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and possibly Brahmic. According to terminology introduced by Peter T. Daniels, an "alphabet" is a script that represents both vowels and consonants as letters equally. In this narrow sense of the word the first "true" alphabet was the Greek alphabet, which was developed on the basis of the earlier Phoenician alphabet. In other alphabetic scripts such as the original Phoenician, Hebrew or Arabic, letters predominantly or exclusively represent consonants; such a script is also called an abjad. A third type, called abugida or alphasyllabary, is one where vowels are shown by diacritics or modifications of consonantal base letters, as in Devanagari and other South Asian scripts.

Alphabet song

An alphabet song is any of various songs used to teach children an alphabet. Alphabet songs typically follow the alphabetic principle (though the phonics method offers variants). In languages such as English with morphophonemic variation (e.g. "cake" is /ˈkeɪk/, not [ˈkaːkɛ]), an alphabet song usually chooses a particular pronunciation for each letter in the alphabet and also typically for some words in the song.

The A.B.C. (Verse 1)

"The A.B.C." /ˌeɪˌbiːˈsiː/ or "A.B.Cs" /ˌeɪˌbiːˈsiːz/ is one of the best-known English language alphabet songs, and perhaps the one most frequently referred to as "the alphabet song", especially in the United States.

The song was first copyrighted in 1835 by the Boston-based music publisher Charles Bradlee, and given the title "The A.B.C., a German air with variations for the flute with an easy accompaniment for the piano forte". The musical arrangement was attributed to Louis Le Maire (sometimes Lemaire), an 18th-century composer. This was "Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1835, by C. Bradlee, in the clerk's office of the District Court of Massachusetts", according to the Newberry Library, which also says, "The theme is that used by Mozart for his piano variations, Ah, vous dirai-je, maman." This tune is the same as the tune for "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep".

Alphabet (disambiguation)

An alphabet is a standardized set of characters used in writing a language, such as:

Alphabet or The Alphabet may also refer to:

Art, entertainment, and media

Films

Literature

Music

Brands and enterprises

See also

English alphabet

The modern English alphabet is a Latin alphabet consisting of 26 letters (each having an uppercase and a lowercase form) – the same letters that are found in the ISO basic Latin alphabet:

The exact shape of printed letters varies depending on the typeface. The shape of handwritten letters can differ significantly from the standard printed form (and between individuals), especially when written in cursive style. See the individual letter articles for information about letter shapes and origins (follow the links on any of the uppercase letters above).

Written English uses a number of digraphs, such as ch, sh, th, ph, wh, etc., but they are not considered separate letters of the alphabet. Some traditions also use two ligatures, æ and œ, or consider the ampersand (&) part of the alphabet.

History

Old English

The English language was first written in the Anglo-Saxon futhorc runic alphabet, in use from the 5th century. This alphabet was brought to what is now England, along with the proto-form of the language itself, by Anglo-Saxon settlers. Very few examples of this form of written Old English have survived, these being mostly short inscriptions or fragments