Alphabet in the context of "Mongolian script"

Romanization of Greek is the transliteration (letter-mapping) or transcription (sound-mapping) of text from the Greek alphabet into the Latin alphabet.

A symbol is a mark, sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, object, relationship, or mathematical formula. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or seen by creating linkages between otherwise different concepts and experiences. All communication is achieved through the use of symbols: for example, a red octagon is a common symbol for "STOP"; on maps, blue lines often represent rivers; and a red rose often symbolizes love and compassion. Numerals are symbols for numbers; letters of an alphabet may be symbols for certain phonemes; and personal names are symbols representing individuals. The academic study of symbols is called semiotics.

In the arts, symbolism is the use of a concrete element to represent a more abstract idea. In cartography, an organized collection of symbols forms a legend for a map.

A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a script, as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing appeared during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each independently invented writing system gradually emerged from a system of proto-writing, where a small number of ideographs were used in a manner incapable of fully encoding language, and thus lacking the ability to express a broad range of ideas.

Writing systems are generally classified according to how their symbols, called graphemes, relate to units of language. Phonetic writing systems – which include alphabets and syllabaries – use graphemes that correspond to sounds in the corresponding spoken language. Alphabets use graphemes called letters that generally correspond to spoken phonemes. They are typically divided into three sub-types: Pure alphabets use letters to represent both consonant and vowel sounds, abjads generally only use letters representing consonant sounds, and abugidas use letters representing consonant–vowel pairs. Syllabaries use graphemes called syllabograms that represent entire syllables or moras. By contrast, logographic (or morphographic) writing systems use graphemes that represent the units of meaning in a language, such as its words or morphemes. Alphabets typically use fewer than 100 distinct symbols, while syllabaries and logographies may use hundreds or thousands, respectively.

Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs (/ˈhaɪroʊˌɡlɪfs/ HY-roh-glifs) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined ideographic, logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet, the first widely adopted phonetic writing system. Moreover, owing in large part to the Greek and Aramaic scripts that descended from Phoenician, the majority of the world's living writing systems are descendants of Egyptian hieroglyphs—most prominently the Latin and Cyrillic scripts through Greek, and the Arabic and Brahmic scripts through Aramaic. Hieroglyphs are thought to be one of four writing systems developed without outside influence, the others being Cuneiforms, Chinese characters, and Mayan script.

The use of hieroglyphic writing arose from proto-literate symbol systems in the Early Bronze Age c. the 33rd century BC (Naqada III), with the first decipherable sentence written in the Egyptian language dating to the 28th century BC (Second Dynasty). Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs developed into a mature writing system used for monumental inscription in the classical language of the Middle Kingdom period; during this period, the system used about 900 distinct signs. The use of this writing system continued through the New Kingdom and Late Period, and on into the Persian and Ptolemaic periods. Late survivals of hieroglyphic use are found well into the Roman period, extending into the 4th century AD.

In a writing system, a letter is a grapheme that generally corresponds to a phoneme—the smallest functional unit of speech—though there is rarely total one-to-one correspondence between the two. An alphabet is a writing system that uses letters.

In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for [h], which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are [p] and [b], pronounced with the lips; [t] and [d], pronounced with the front of the tongue; [k] and [g], pronounced with the back of the tongue; [h], pronounced throughout the vocal tract; [f], [v], [s], and [z] pronounced by forcing air through a narrow channel (fricatives); and [m] and [n], which have air flowing through the nose (nasals). Most consonants are pulmonic, using air pressure from the lungs to generate a sound. Very few natural languages are non-pulmonic, making use of ejectives, implosives, and clicks. Contrasting with consonants are vowels.

Since the number of speech sounds in the world's languages is much greater than the number of letters in any one alphabet, linguists have devised systems such as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to assign a unique and unambiguous symbol to each attested consonant. The English alphabet has fewer consonant letters than the English language has consonant sounds, so digraphs like ⟨ch⟩, ⟨sh⟩, ⟨th⟩, and ⟨ng⟩ are used to extend the alphabet, though some letters and digraphs represent more than one consonant. For example, the sound spelled ⟨th⟩ in "this" is a different consonant from the ⟨th⟩ sound in "thin". (In the IPA, these are [ð] and [θ], respectively.)

An abjad (/ˈæbdʒæd/ or abgad) is a writing system in which only consonants are represented by letter signs, leaving the vowels to be inferred by the reader (unless represented otherwise, such as by diacritics). This contrasts with alphabets that provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels. The term was introduced in 1990 by Peter T. Daniels. Other terms for the same concept include partial phonemic script, segmentally linear defective phonographic script, consonantary, consonant writing, and consonantal alphabet.

Impure abjads represent vowels with either optional diacritics, a limited number of distinct vowel graphemes, or both.

An abugida (/ˌɑːbuːˈɡiːdə, ˌæb-/ ; from Geʽez: አቡጊዳ, 'äbugīda)—sometimes also called an alphasyllabary, neosyllabary, or pseudo-alphabet—is a segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as units; each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary, like a diacritical mark. This contrasts with a full alphabet, in which vowels have status equal to consonants, and with an abjad, in which vowel marking is absent, partial, or optional. In less formal contexts, all three types of script may be termed "alphabets". The terms also contrast them with a syllabary, in which a single symbol denotes the combination of a consonant and a vowel.

Related concepts were introduced independently in 1948 by James Germain Février (using the term néosyllabisme) and David Diringer (using the term semisyllabary), and in 1959 by Fred Householder (introducing the term pseudo-alphabet). The Ethiopic term "abugida" was chosen as a designation for the concept in 1990 by Peter T. Daniels. Faber suggested "segmentally coded syllabically linear phonographic script"; William O. Bright used the term alphasyllabary; and Gnanadesikan and Rimzhim, Katz, & Fowler suggested aksara or āksharik.