Alphabet

alphabet

the aggregate of graphic signs—letters (for example, the Latin and Russian alphabets)—or of syllabic signs (for example, the Devanagari alphabet of India) arranged in a traditionally established order.

Alphabets came into being at the end of the second millennium B.C. in the most ancient phonetic writing systems—the Ugaritic and Phoenician. Earlier there apparently existed a system of enumerating Egyptian hieroglyphics. The majority of the modern letter alphabets and some of the syllabic alphabets are derived from the Phoenecian alphabet through the Aramaic (Hebrew and Arabic) and Greek alphabets (Latin, Georgian, Armenian, Cyrillic) and others. The majority of the modern national writing systems are based on (1) the Latin alphabet—the writing systems of all peoples of America and Australia, the majority of the peoples of Europe, and some countries of Asia and Africa (for example, Turkey and Indonesia); (2) the Cyrillic alphabet—the writing systems of the majority of the peoples of the USSR (except those of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which use the Latin alphabet, and Armenia and Georgia, which have their own alphabets) and the Bulgarian and Serbian writing systems; (3) the Arabic alphabet—the writing systems of all Arab countries as well as those of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Chinese province of Sinkiang; and (4) the syllabic alphabets used by many peoples of India.