Alphabets consist of letters that represent sounds. By writing different combinations of letters, all the sounds in a language can be represented. The first alphabet was probably developed by the Phoenicians before 1500BC. Even if they use the same letter forms, not all languages have the same number of letters in their alphabets. English, for example, uses 26 letters to write all its sounds, but Italian uses just 21, with j, k, w, x and y seen only in foreign words. However, the most widely spoken language of all, Chinese, does not use an alphabet. Instead, it has over 50,000 characters, each representing a word or part of a word.
Alphabets, or phonemic alphabets, are sets of letters, usually arranged in a fixed order, each of which represents one or more phonemes, both consonants and vowels, in the language they are used to write. In some case combinations of letters are used to represent single phonemes, as in the English sh, ch and th.
The Greeks created the first phonemic alphabet when they adapted the Phoenican alphabet to write Greek. They used a number of Phoenician letters that represented consonant sounds not present in Greek to write Greek vowels.
The word alphabet comes, via the Latin word alphab?tum, from the Greek word ????????? (alphab?tos), which itself comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, ? (????/alpha) and ? (????/beta). The names of the Greek letters were based on Phoenican letter names. The first two letters of the Phoenican alphabet are ‘?leph (ox) and b?th (house).
The best-known and most widely-used alphabets are the Latin or Roman alphabet and the Cyrillic alphabet, which have been adapted to write numerous languages. Most other alphabets are used for a single language or just a few languages.
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