An alphabet is a kind of collection of letters used in some kind of writing system, while the graphic symbols are arranged in a certain order that cannot be violated.
Various writing systems
It is difficult to determine which alphabet is considered the most difficult. This is too controversial a concept, since when assessing complexity, one involuntarily has to start from the native language. Of course, Ukrainian and Belarusian languages will seem the simplest to native speakers.
Hieroglyphic writing
The hieroglyphic writing system can be called an alphabet only with a great deal of convention. A hieroglyph is the outline of some sign in some writing systems, which can mean both a certain sound and a word or sentence.
It does not indicate the correct pronunciation, while the letter reflects the phonetic features of the language. This is why Chinese or Japanese is difficult for people whose mother tongues are based on a letter system.
Ethiopian writing system
Ethiopian writing is also quite difficult to master, but it cannot be attributed to the classical alphabet either. This is a hybrid letter that is official in Eritrea and Ethiopia.
But if you still evaluate the Ethiopian script as an alphabet, then the Ahmar dialect will be the most difficult to write. Letters are written with additional signs that are introduced to indicate specific sounds. The Ethiopian system is abugida, that is, a letter in which any character is a combination of a vowel and a consonant sound, and they are grouped depending on what sounds they represent. The characters are written from left to right.
The most complex classical alphabet
Arabic script
If he speaks exclusively about letter systems, then perhaps the most difficult can be considered Arabic. This is one of the most difficult to master sign systems. The same letter can be written in different ways, up to 4 spellings depending on the location of the letter in the word. There is not a single lowercase character, hyphenation is strictly prohibited, and vowel sounds are not reflected in written language. Another feature is that the words are written from right to left.
Other complex letter systems
The Guinness Book of Records got the Eskimo alphabet. There are 54 letters in Tabasaran, and, for example, in the Abkhaz language there are only three vowels - “aa”, “a” and “y”. All other vowel sounds, which are denoted by the symbols "y", "e", "o", "and", are formed from combinations of different sounds.
But Abkhazian has a very large number of consonants - 58. The Bzyb dialect contains an even greater number of them - 67. The basis of the Abkhazian writing system is Cyrillic, the alphabet was developed in 1862, and the first alphabet was published three years later.
Therefore, our alphabet is not as difficult as it sometimes seems.
Speech at the Day of Science
Topic: "Letters of different alphabets"
History of the origin of the alphabet
We, with students of grade 1 A, considering this topic, for a whole month, studied in detail the history of different alphabets. The guys defended their projects.
We talked about the origin of writing, the history of the origin of the Russian alphabet, and also got acquainted with the history of the Greek, Latin, Chinese, English, German, Spanish and even Elvish alphabets.
The history and development of each of these alphabets is interesting and even unique in its own way. And today we would like to bring to your attention several projects on this topic.
How did the first alphabet appear on earth?
Writing appeared in ancient Sumer. It was a syllabic script, in which words did not yet consist of letters, but of syllables. Such a letter was used not only by the Sumerians, but also by the inhabitants of Crete, the Easter Islands, the ancient Egyptians, Persians, Babylonians, Icarians, Greeks and Phoenicians.
Compared to picture writing, this was more convenient. Writing became easier, but only until the number of words increased hundreds of times and it was no longer possible to remember all the syllables denoting different words.
And so people thought, is it possible to divide the word into parts smaller than syllables? Split the word into letters! So that each letter represents each vowel and consonant!
Scientists do not have a single point of view on the origin of the first alphabet, but, most likely, this brilliant idea did not appear as a result of a sudden insight of one person, but came to people gradually, like all changes in the language.
Perhaps at first some peoples had letters denoting consonant sounds, but carrying some other vowel sound. There were 22 such syllabic consonants, for example, in the Phoenician language. The Phoenicians had enough of them, because in this language it was the consonants that carried the main conceptual load.
For the Greeks, such a letter was not enough. In their writing, vowel sounds played an important role, and the Greeks, taking the Phoenician syllabary as a basis, improved it. They decomposed the syllabary of the Phoenicians separately into vowels and consonants!
So syllabic signs turned into letters, which were transmitted to a complex of sounds, and individual sounds of human speech. So the first alphabet appeared!
The word "alphabet" comes from the names of the first two Greek letters - alpha and beta.
Now there are dozens of alphabets, but they all go back to the first alphabet, born on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea more than three thousand years ago.
The alphabet is:
A set of letters and other signs of this writing system.
The order of the letters in the alphabet.
An index is a list of things. According to the order of the letters in the alphabet.
The largest number of letters in the Guinness Book of Records is the Khmer alphabet. It has 72 letters. This language is spoken in Cambodia.
However the largest number letters contains the Ubykh alphabet - 91 letters. The Ubykh language (the language of one of the Caucasian peoples) is considered one of the champions in terms of sound diversity: according to experts, there are up to 80 consonant phonemes in it.
Under the Soviet regime, serious changes were made to the alphabets of all peoples living on the territory of the USSR: in the Russian language, in the direction of reducing the number of letters, and in other languages, mainly in the direction of increasing them. After perestroika, the number of letters in the alphabets of many peoples living on the territory of the former Soviet republics decreased.
Modern Russian has 33 letters. According to official sources, before the reform of Cyril and Methodius, there were 43 letters in the Russian language, and according to unofficial sources - 49.
The first 5 letters were thrown out by Cyril and Methodius, because there was no Greek corresponding sounds, and four were given Greek names. Yaroslav the Wise removed one more letter, leaving 43. Peter I reduced it to 38. Nicholas II to 35. As part of the Lunacharsky reform, the letters “yat”, “fita” and “and decimal” were excluded from the alphabet (E, F should be used instead , And ), and also the solid sign (Ъ) at the end of words and parts of compound words would be excluded, but preserved as a separating sign (rise, adjutant).
In addition, Lunacharsky removed the images from the Initial Letter, leaving only phonemes, i.e. language has become unfigurative = ugly. So instead of the Primer, the Alphabet appeared.
Until 1942, it was officially believed that there were 32 letters in the Russian alphabet, since E and Yo were considered as variants of the same letter.
The Ukrainian alphabet includes 33 letters: in comparison with the Russian one, Ъё, Ъъ, Yы, Еэ are not used, but Ґґ, Єє, Іі and Її are present.
The Belarusian alphabet has 32 letters today. Compared with Russian alphabet i, u, ъ are not used, but the letters i and ў are added, and the digraphs j and dz are sometimes considered to have the status of letters.
The Yakut language uses an alphabet based on Cyrillic, which contains the entire Russian alphabet, plus five additional letters and two combinations. 4 diphthongs are also used.
The Kazakh and Bashkir Cyrillic alphabet contains 42 letters.
The current Chechen alphabet contains 49 letters (compiled on a graphic basis Russian alphabet in 1938). In 1992, the Chechen leadership decided to introduce an alphabet based on the Latin script of 41 letters. This alphabet was used to a limited extent in parallel with Cyrillic between 1992 and 2000.
The Armenian alphabet contains 38 letters, but after the reform in 1940, the ligature "
և "undeservedly received the status of a letter that does not have a capital letter - thus the number of letters became, as it were," thirty-eight and a half."The Tatar alphabet after the translation in 1939 of the Tatar script from romanized alphabet on the alphabet based on Russian graphics contained 38 letters, and after 1999 the alphabet based on the Latin script of 34 letters is widely used.
The Kirghiz Cyrillic alphabet, adopted in 1940, contains 36 letters.
The modern Mongolian alphabet contains 35 letters and differs from Russian in two additional letters: Ө and Y.
In 1940, the Uzbek alphabet, like the alphabets of other peoples of the USSR, was translated into Cyrillic and contained 35 letters. In the 90s of the last century, the Uzbek authorities decided to translate the Uzbek language into the Latin alphabet and the alphabet became 28 letters.
Modern Georgian alphabet consists of 33 letters.
There are 31 letters in the Macedonian and Moldavian Cyrillic alphabet. The Finnish alphabet also consists of 31 letters.
The Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet includes 30 letters - compared to Russian, it lacks the letters Y, E and Yo.
The Tibetan alphabet consists of 30 syllable letters, which are considered consonants. Each of them, composing the initial letter of the syllable and not having another vowel sign, is accompanied by the sound “a” during pronunciation.
The Swedish and Norwegian alphabets have 29 letters.
The Arabic alphabet contains 28 letters. The Spanish alphabet has 27 letters.
There are 26 letters in the Latin, English, German and French alphabets.
The Italian alphabet "officially" consists of the 21st letter, but actually has 26 letters.
The Greek alphabet has 24 letters, while the standard Portuguese alphabet has 23 letters.
There are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, the difference between uppercase and lower case is absent.
The smallest number of letters in the alphabet of the Rotokas tribe from the island of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. There are only eleven of them (a, b, e, g, i, k, o, p, t, u) - of which 6 are consonants.
Considering how many letters there are in the language of one of the Papuan tribes, it is interesting that in all alphabets the number of letters gradually changes, usually downwards.
A change in the number of letters in the alphabet in all countries of the world, as a rule, occurs with the advent of new government in order for the younger generation to be cut off from the language, literature, culture and traditions of their ancestors, and after a while speak a completely different language.
Graphic arts
Term "graphic arts"(from Greek grapho - written) is used in two meanings. They call both a set of descriptive means of a particular letter (letters, punctuation and stress), and a special section of linguistics that studies the relationship between graphemes (letters) and phonemes.
Modern writing uses all the techniques developed over the centuries-old history of writing.
For example, pictography applied: based on an illiterate or semi-literate reader - these are pictures on signs: boots, kalach; signs of fire duty in the villages: planks depicting a bucket, an ax, etc., nailed at the entrance to the house; in primers, where children must first "read" the picture, and then "spel"; or when the reader's language is unknown, for example, drawings of a cleaning lady, a waiter, etc. at the bell buttons in hotels.
Ideography used as road signs (zigzag as a sign of turns, cross as a sign of an intersection, exclamation mark as a sign of "caution", etc.), or skull and bones signs on a high-voltage electrical network, or medicine emblems in pharmacies: a snake and a bowl of poison; ideography includes a variety of conventional signs in cartography and topography (signs of minerals, circles and dots to indicate settlements etc.)
To hieroglyphics include numbers expressing the concept of number, special symbols of sciences, for example, mathematical signs, which can be numbers, letters, and special images:>,<, =, S, %, +, -, : т.д.
In the languages of the world, in their national writing systems, Latin, Cyrillic or Arabic graphics are most often used, while there is no ideal graphics in any alphabet (when one grapheme corresponds to only one phoneme). This is explained by the fact that 24 letters of the ancient Greek alphabet could not convey the whole variety of sounds of different languages. In the course of the historical development of each language, as a result of the processes of phonetic changes that took place in it, the gap between letters and individual sounds increased even more, which led to the appearance of complex graphemes. A particularly strong gap between modern spoken language and the traditional graphic system occurred in English and French, whose orthography does not adequately convey the living, evolving language. For example, in English, 26 characters of the alphabet correspond to 46 phonemes, so digraphs (ph - [f]), trigraphs (oeu -) and polygraphs (augh - [e:]) are widely used here.
The Russian alphabet has 33 letters. Most of them appear in two varieties - lowercase and uppercase (with the exception of ъ and ь, which are used only in the form of lowercase letters). Modern Russian graphics are distinguished by a number of features that have developed historically and represent a certain graphic system.
Russian graphics do not have such an alphabet, in which for each sound pronounced in the speech stream there is a special letter. In the Russian alphabet, letters. much less than the sounds in live speech. As a result, the letters of the alphabet turn out to be multi-valued, i.e. may have several sound values. So, for example, the letters "es" can denote such sounds: [ with] –garden, [with"] – here, [h] – change, [h"] – mowing, [w] – sew, [well] – squeeze.
The second feature of Russian graphics is the division of letters according to the number of sounds they designate. In this regard, the letters of the Russian alphabet fall into three groups:
a) letters devoid of sound meaning. These are letters b and b , which do not denote any sounds, as well as the so-called "unpronounceable consonants" in such, for example, words : sun, heart and etc.;
b) letters denoting two sounds, - e , yo ,Yu , I ;
c) letters denoting one sound. These are all the letters of the Russian alphabet, with the exception of the letters included in the first and second groups.
The third feature of Russian graphics is the presence of single-digit and double-digit letters in it. The first are letters that have one basic meaning: a, o, u, uh, s; f, c, h, w, w, d .
So, for example, the letters h, c are among the unambiguous, since the letter h in all positions denotes the same soft sound [h"] , and the letter c - hard sound [c] .
To the second, i.e. two-digit letters include:
- all letters denoting consonants, paired in hardness-softness;
- letters denoting vowel sounds: e, yo, yu, i.
For example, a letter b can denote both hard and soft sounds - [b] and [b"]:was - was; letter I in some cases denotes a sound [a] after a soft consonant, in others - a combination .
The ambiguity of the indicated letters of the Russian alphabet is due to the specifics of Russian graphics - its syllabic principle. It is expressed in the fact that the sign of hardness / softness of the consonant is indicated by a vowel following the consonant (sword) or a special sign of softness (mole). In addition, in the Russian language there are syllabograms (i, e, e, u), which allow one letter to convey a whole syllable, consisting of a combination of a consonant [j] and a vowel. This makes Russian graphics extremely economical.
In many graphic systems of the world (including Russian), there is a phenomenon of polyphony, when the same letter, depending on its position in a word, can have a different sound (for example, in German, the letter s before a vowel corresponds to the sound [з]): Sanger, and before consonants (but not p, t) - [c]: Ski, before p, t [w]: Stadt. This phenomenon is even more pronounced in Russian, where almost all letters are ambiguous: in one position they denote one sounds, in the other - others (the letter g in the position of the end of a word or before a deaf consonant corresponds to the sound [k]: haystack, before a back vowel or voiced vowel - to the sound [g]: cluster. The phenomenon of polyphony reflects not only the positional principle of Russian graphics, but also phonemic, when the same variant of different phonemes is indicated by different letters.
Russian writing is sound-letter. It is called so because its main units - letters - correspond with the units of the sound (phonetic) system of the language, and not directly with words or their significant parts (morphemes), as is the case in hieroglyphic writing. For example, the word for “sun” is transmitted in Russian with six letter characters, and in Chinese with one hieroglyph.
Alphabet. Types of alphabets.
The word "alphabet" comes from the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet - alpha and beta. It was the Greeks who contributed to the spread of alphabetic writing in most countries of the world. The English word is arranged in a similar way abecedary or Russian ABC(according to the names in the first case, four, and in the second - the first two letters, respectively, of the English and Church Slavonic alphabets).
Alphabet (from Greek alphábētos) - a set of letters (graphemes) containing the main characters of writing. Letters in the alphabet are arranged in a specific, alphabetical, order. The principle of alphabetical arrangement is used in dictionaries, reference books.
The ideal phonographic alphabet should consist of as many letters as there are phonemes in a given language. But since writing developed historically and much of the writing reflected obsolete traditions, there are no ideal alphabets, but there are more or less rational ones. Among the existing alphabets, two are the most common and graphically convenient: they are Latin and Russian.
In alphabetical writing systems, a single letter conveys, as a rule, one sound. Sometimes letters are combined in twos, threes or fours to represent the same phoneme: Polish combinations sz= w, cz= h, szcz = u, German combinations sch= w, tsch = h and etc.
It is believed that the principle of the alphabet was invented by the West Semitic peoples, in particular, the ancient Canaanites used it already in cuneiform. The founders of all types of alphabets often include the Phoenician alphabet, which consisted of 22 letters following one after another in a certain sequence. The Phoenician letters had a simple and easy to write and remember form. In the Phoenician alphabet, as in many Western Semitic ones, the names of the letters were formed from words that denote objects that begin with the corresponding sounds: a - aleph (bull), b - bet (house), d - gimel (camel), d - dalet (door), h - xe (cross), c - vav (nail) etc. It is believed that in the future, about 4/5 of the known alphabets arose directly or indirectly from the Phoenician alphabet. In its primary form, the Phoenician linear alphabet was adopted in Asia Minor (the Asia Minor alphabets that died out at the beginning of our era), Greece and Italy, giving rise to Western alphabets. In a cursive or cursive form, probably through Aramaic writing, it spread throughout the Near and Middle East, laying the foundation for the Eastern alphabets.
The original for all Western alphabets is the Greek alphabet, based on the transformed Phoenician alphabet. On the basis of the Greek alphabetic writing in the IV-III centuries. BC. developed the Latin alphabet. Most of the Greek letters retained their original meaning and style in it. For many centuries, the Latin alphabet has undergone certain changes, acquiring a modern character: in the XI century. lettering appeared w, in the 16th century letters were entered j, u and etc.
Slavic the alphabet arose at the end of the 9th - beginning of the 10th century, and two alphabets were created - Glagolitic and Cyrillic. The creation of the alphabet is associated with the names of the Slavic enlighteners, the brothers Cyril and Methodius. Name Glagolitic derived from Old Church Slavonic verb- word, speech. Coinciding with the Cyrillic alphabet almost completely in alphabetical composition, the Glagolitic differed sharply from it in the shape of the letters. It is believed that many letters of the Glagolitic alphabet are associated with Greek writing. The Glagolitic was widely used in the 9th century. in Moravia, from where it penetrated into Bulgaria and Croatia. It was used there until the 18th century. Then the Glagolitic writing was supplanted in the east and south by Cyrillic, in the west by Latin. Cyrillic is a processing of the Byzantine alphabet - the modern Greek statutory letter of the 7th-8th centuries. It was widely used among the southern, eastern and, probably, for some time among the western Slavs. In Russia, the Cyrillic alphabet was introduced in the X-XI centuries. in connection with Christianization. Initially, the Cyrillic alphabet had 38 letters, and then the number of its letters increased to 44. 24 letters were borrowed from the Greek statutory letter, the remaining 20 letters are either borrowings from other alphabets, or graphic modifications of Greek letters, or ligature combinations of Cyrillic letters.
Cyrillic existed in Russia without significant changes until the 18th century. Modern look Russian alphabet was prepared by the reforms of Peter I, and later by the reforms of the Academy of Sciences. Letters were excluded from the Cyrillic alphabet psi, xi, omega, izhitsa, etc. and some others, the styles of individual letters are simplified, new letters are introduced: i, uh, y. The reform of the Russian alphabet was completed in 1917-1918: the letters were excluded from the alphabet yat, fita, i. The Russian alphabet served as the basis for the creation of the writing of many peoples of the Far North and Siberia, and the writing of most of the peoples of the former USSR was translated into the Russian alphabet. The Russian alphabet was adopted as the basis for the modern Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian alphabets.
The culture of the young Romano-Germanic barbarians originated on the ruins of the Roman Empire, Latin came to them as the language of the church, science and literature and the Latin alphabet, which corresponded well to the phonetic structure of the Latin language, but did not at all correspond to the phonetics of the Romance and Germanic languages. 24 Latin letters could not graphically represent 36-40 phonemes of new European languages. So, in the field of consonants for most European languages, signs were needed
for sibilant fricatives and affricates, which did not exist in Latin. Five Latin vowels (a , e, o, i, i and later at ) did not correspond in any way to the system of vocalism of French, English, Danish and other European languages. Attempts to invent new letters (for example, signs for interdental consonants proposed by the Frankish king Chilperic I) were not successful. Tradition was stronger than need. Minor alphabetical innovations (such as the French "se cedilla" ҫ , German "escet" β or Danish ø ) did not save the situation. The most radical and correct
Czechs entered without resorting to multi-letter combinations such as Polish sz = [w], cz = [h], szcz = [u], and using superscript diacritics, when they got regular rows of whistling s, c, z sizzling Š,Č, Ž.
Most alphabets have between 20 and 30 letters, although some, such as the adaptation of the Latin alphabet to Hawaiian, have only 12 letters, while others, such as the Sinhalese used in the state of Sri Lanka (former Ceylon), or some alphabets North Caucasian languages contain 50 or more characters. The relative complexity of the phonetic systems of different languages leads to the existence of alphabets of unequal size. According to the Guinness Book of Records, the most letters - 72 - are contained in the Khmer alphabet. The most ancient letter of the alphabet is the letter "o", which has remained unchanged in the same form in which it was adopted in the Phoenician alphabet (about 1300 BC). (This letter there denoted a consonant sound, but the modern "o" came from it).
The following types of alphabets are distinguished:
· Consonant-vocal alphabets- a type of writing in which letters represent both vowels and consonants. In the letter as a whole, the correspondence “one grapheme (written sign) is one phoneme” is observed.
· Consonant alphabets- a type of writing in which letters denote only consonants, vowels can be denoted using a special system of diacritical marks (vowels). The Ugaritic and Phoenician scripts can serve as examples of a fully consonant script, while modern Hebrew and Arabic scripts containing signs for some vowels can serve as examples of a partially consonant script.
· Syllabic alphabets- letters denote whole syllables, and syllables with the same consonant, but different vowels can be denoted by similar signs, or they can be completely different. The syllabary is used in a variant of Greek, the language of Yi in China, the ancient Filipino script. Also, logographic writing in Chinese, Maya, and cuneiform is largely syllabic.
The Japanese language uses two types of syllabary at once, which are called kana, namely katakana and hiragana (appeared around 700 AD). Hiragana is used to write words and grammatical elements of the native language, along with kanji characters. Katakana is used for writing loanwords and foreign proper names. For example, the word hotel written in three kana - ホテル ( ho-te-ru). Since Japanese has a large number of model syllables consonant + vowel, then the syllabary is the most suitable for this language. As in many variants of a syllabary, the following vowels and final consonants are indicated by separate signs. Yes, both words atta and kaita are written in three kana: あった ( a-t-ta) and かいた ( ka-i-ta).
The use of characters for individual phonemes leads to a significant simplification of writing by reducing the number of characters used. Also, the order of the letters in the alphabet is the basis of alphabetical sorting.