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ʿayn
''Ayin'' (also ''ayn'' or ''ain''; transliterated ) is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic scripts, including Phoenician ''ʿayin'' 𐤏, Hebrew ''ʿayin'' , Aramaic ''ʿē'' 𐡏, Syriac ''ʿē'' ܥ, and Arabic ''ʿayn'' (where it is sixteenth in abjadi order only). It is related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪒, South Arabian , and Ge'ez . The letter represents a voiced pharyngeal fricative () or a similarly articulated consonant. In some Semitic languages and dialects, the phonetic value of the letter has changed, or the phoneme has been lost altogether. In the revived Modern Hebrew it is reduced to a glottal stop or is omitted entirely. The Phoenician letter is the origin of the Greek, Latin and Cyrillic letters O, O and O. It is also the origin of the Armenian letters Ո and Օ. The Arabic character is the origin of the Latin-script letter Ƹ. Origins The letter name is derived from Proto-Semitic "eye", and the Phoenician letter had the shape of a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Abjad Numerals
The Abjad numerals, also called Hisab al-Jummal (, ), are a decimal alphabetic numeral system/alphanumeric code, in which the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet are assigned numerical values. They have been used in the Arab world, Arabic-speaking world since before the eighth century when Positional notation, positional Arabic numerals were adopted. In modern Arabic, the word ' () means 'alphabet' in general. In the Abjad system, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, aleph#Arabic, ʾalif, is used to represent 1; the second letter, Bet (letter)#Arabic bāʾ, bāʾ, 2, up to 9. Letters then represent the first nine intervals of 10s and those of the 100s: Yodh#Arabic yāʼ, yāʾ for 10, Kaph#Arabic kāf, kāf for 20, Qoph#Arabic Qāf, qāf for 100, ending with 1000. The word ''abjad, ʾabjad'' () itself derives from the first four letters (A-B-G-D) of the Semitic alphabet, including the Aramaic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Phoenician alphabet, and other scripts for Semitic languag ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ancient North Arabian
Languages and scripts in the 1st Century Arabia Ancient North Arabian (ANA) is a collection of scripts and a language or family of languages under the North Arabian languages branch along with Old Arabic that were used in north and central Arabia and south Syria from the 8th century BCE to the 4th century CE. The term "Ancient North Arabian" is defined negatively. It refers to all of the South Semitic scripts except Ancient South Arabian (ASA) regardless of their genetic relationships. Classification Many scholars believed that the various ANA alphabets were derived from the ASA script, mainly because the latter was employed by a major civilization and exhibited more angular features. Others believed that the ANA and ASA scripts shared a common ancestor from which they both developed in parallel. Indeed, it seems unlikely that the various ANA scripts descend from the monumental ASA alphabet, but that they collectively share a common ancestor to the exclusion of ASA is also s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ancient South Arabian Script
The Ancient South Arabian script (Old South Arabian: ; modern ) branched from the Proto-Sinaitic script in about the late 2nd millennium BCE, and remained in use through the late sixth century CE. It is an abjad, a writing system where only consonants are obligatorily written, a trait shared with its predecessor, Proto-Sinaitic, as well as some of its sibling writing systems, including Arabic and Hebrew. It is a predecessor of the Ge'ez script, and a sibling script of the Phoenician alphabet and, through that, the modern Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabets. History The earliest instances of the Ancient South Arabian (''ASA'') script are painted pottery sherds from Raybun in Hadhramaut in Yemen, which are dated to the late 2nd millennium BCE. It is an abjad script, meaning that only consonants are usually written in the script, with vowels inferred from context; it shares this feature both with its predecessor, the Proto-Sinaitic script, and modern Semitic languages. It is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Letter (alphabet)
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. Definition and usage A letter is a type of grapheme, the smallest functional unit within a writing system. Letters are graphemes that broadly correspond to phonemes, the smallest functional units of sound in speech. Similarly to how phonemes are combined to form spoken words, letters may be combined to form written words. A single phoneme may also be represented by multiple letters in sequence, collectively called a ''multigraph (orthography), multigraph''. Multigraphs include ''digraphs'' of two letters (e.g. English ''ch'', ''sh'', ''th''), and ''trigraphs'' of three letters (e.g. English ''tch''). The same letterform may be used in different alphabets while representing different phonemic categories. The Latin H, Greek eta , an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Egyptian Hieroglyphs
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs ( ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined Ideogram, ideographic, logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters.In total, there were about 1,000 graphemes in use during the Old Kingdom period; this number decreased to 750–850 during the Middle Kingdom, but rose instead to around 5,000 signs during the Ptolemaic period. Antonio Loprieno, ''Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction'' (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), p. 12. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for Ancient Egyptian literature, religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic (Egyptian), 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. Moreov ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Greek Alphabet
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and is the earliest known alphabetic script to systematically write vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic Greece, Archaic and early Classical Greece, Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in Archaic Greek alphabets, many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BC, the Ionia, Ionic-based Euclidean alphabet, with 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard throughout the Greek-speaking world and is the version that is still used for Greek writing today. The letter case, uppercase and lowercase forms of the 24 letters are: : , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of several scripts, such as the Latin script, Latin, Gothic alphabet, Gothic, Coptic script, Coptic, and Cyrillic scripts. Throughout antiquity, Greek had only a single uppercas ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cyrillic Script
The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic, Uralic languages, Uralic, Caucasian languages, Caucasian and Iranian languages, Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, North Asia, and East Asia, and used by many other minority languages. , around 250 million people in Eurasia use Cyrillic as the official script for their national languages, with Russia accounting for about half of them. With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official script of the Languages of the European Union#Writing systems, European Union, following the Latin script, Latin and Greek alphabet, Greek alphabets. The Early Cyrillic alphabet was developed during the 9th century AD at the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulga ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
O (Armenian Letter)
O or Oh (majuscule: Օ, minuscule: օ, ) is the 38th letter of the reformed Armenian alphabet and the 37th letter of the classical Armenian alphabet. This letter was first noticed in a text from the year 1046 at the work փափագանօք (p'ap'aganok'). Unlike many Armenian letters, O has no numeric value. It represents the /o/ sound in both Eastern Armenian, Eastern and Western Armenian. Computing codes Related characters and other similar characters * O o : Latin letter O * Ο ο : Greek letter Omicron References External links * wikt:Օ, Օ on Wiktionary * wikt:օ, օ on Wiktionary {{Armenian letters Armenian letters Armenian alphabet Armenian language ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Omega
Omega (, ; uppercase Ω, lowercase ω; Ancient Greek ὦ, later ὦ μέγα, Modern Greek ωμέγα) is the twenty-fourth and last letter in the Greek alphabet. In the Greek numerals, Greek numeric system/isopsephy (gematria), it has a value of 800. The word literally means "great O" (''o mega'', mega meaning "great"), as opposed to omicron, which means "little O" (''o mikron'', mikron meaning "little"). In Phonetics, phonetic terms, the Ancient Greek Ω represented a vowel length, long open-mid back rounded vowel , comparable to the "aw" of the English language, English word ''raw'' in dialects without the cot–caught merger, in contrast to omicron, which represented the close-mid back rounded vowel , and the digraph (orthography), digraph ''ου'', which represented the vowel length, long close-mid back rounded vowel . In Modern Greek, both omega and omicron represent the mid back rounded vowel or . The letter omega is transliteration, transliterated into a Lati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
