Alphabet

An alphabet (Early New High German from ecclesiastical Latin alphabetum, from Ancient Greek ἀλφάβητος alphábētos) is the set of the smallest characters or letters of a language or languages in a fixed order. The letters can be linked together to form words using orthographic rules and thus represent the language in writing. The order of letters defined in the alphabet allows words and names to be sorted alphabetically, for example in dictionaries. According to some definitions, the alphabet does not mean the set of letters in their fixed order, but the order itself.

The name alphabet goes back to the first two letters of the Greek alphabet (alpha - α, beta - β). Starting from the first three letters of the German alphabet (or the Latin alphabet), one also says Abc (the spelling Abece clarifies the pronunciation, but is rarely used).

Alphabetic scripts, like syllabic scripts, belong to the phonographic scripts and are thus in contrast to pictographic or logographic systems, in which the characters stand for concepts (e.g. cattle, sunrise, friendship). In contrast to syllabic scripts, alphabetic letters usually designate only one sound (phoneme) at a time. In this way, the abstraction already achieved and indispensable for learning to speak is highly transferred to writing and the learning of completely new symbols for the objects of everyday life is saved. An intermediate form of alphabetic writing and syllabic writing is represented by the so-called Abugidas, to which the Indian scripts belong.

The alphabet is also used to learn how to read and write; a mnemonic device for this purpose were the alphabet boards. Someone who can read is also technically called an alphabet, the opposite is the illiterate. An important goal of cultural policy is the literacy of the respective population - that is, the mastery of reading and writing by all.

German alphabet

The German alphabet is a variant of the Latin alphabet. There are 26 letters from this alphabet:

In the German alphabet, there are also the three umlauts (Ä/ä, Ö/ö, Ü/ü) as well as the eszett (ẞ/ß).

How it works

The letters of an alphabet are written symbols for the smallest meaning-distinguishing phonetic units of language, the phonemes; for example, ⟨t⟩ and ⟨s⟩ in ⟨skin⟩ and ⟨house⟩ distinguish the meaning of words (see also minimal pair and allophone).

In an ideal alphabet, each letter corresponds to a phoneme and vice versa. In practice, however, deviations are always found:

• The same sign may apply to different sounds (e.g. ⟨v⟩ for [f] in bird and [v] in vase, or the three ⟨e⟩ in give away [ˈvɛkˌgeːbən]).
• The same sound can be notated with different characters (e.g. [f] in ⟨Bird⟩ and ⟨Fish⟩).
• Several characters can stand for a single phoneme (⟨sch⟩).
• Multiple sounds can be represented by a single character (e.g. ⟨x⟩ for /ks/).
• A sound may be left unsigned (e.g. the glottal stop in ⟨beachten⟩ /bəˈʔaxtən/).

Moreover, the correspondence of phoneme and grapheme, once established, is also lost through language change (compare English ⟨sign⟩ /saɪn/ and ⟨signal⟩ /ˈsɪgnəl/ versus Latin ⟨signum⟩).

If a writing system lacks signs for phonemes, linguistic (content-related) differences may not be reproduced in writing. For example, some alphabets originally consisted only of consonants (consonant writing). Later, they were supplemented with signs for vowels, which could be placed as small additions (e.g. dots, dashes) to the consonants (e.g. Arabic and Hebrew alphabets).

If, on the other hand, signs for phonemes are present in abundance in a writing system, semantic (content-related) differences can be expressed in writing even if the phonemes are the same. For example, in German ⟨Lerche⟩ and ⟨Lärche⟩.

The writing systems for most European languages use variants of the Latin alphabet. Similar sounds of the respective language were assigned to the characters for Latin sounds. The same characters stood for partially different sounds in the different languages. In addition, further changes in pronunciation have occurred in the course of language development (cf. ⟨j⟩ in German and English).

Since the number and type of phonemes differ in the various languages, the character set of the Latin alphabet was often not sufficient. Therefore, letter combinations (e.g. ⟨ou⟩, ⟨ch⟩, ⟨sz⟩) and diacritical marks (e.g. in ⟨ö⟩, ⟨š⟩) were introduced to represent the phonemes in question.

In addition, variants of the original Latin characters (⟨i⟩ > ⟨j⟩, ⟨v⟩ > ⟨u⟩) and ligatures (⟨ae⟩ > ⟨æ⟩, ⟨uu⟩/⟨vv⟩ > ⟨w⟩, ⟨ſz⟩/⟨ſs⟩ > ⟨ß⟩) evolved into characters in their own right, occasionally adopting letters from other alphabets (⟨þ⟩).