The alphabet(Uda Communication)

byTravaglini Giorgio

class: I AEnglish Teacher:Miscia Roberta

What is the alphabet?

• The alphabet is a group of letters that we arrange in a customary order to form words and communicate with other people. The letters, which are not many, correspond to one or more sounds.

• In other alphabets, like the Japanese and Chinese ones, letters are replaced by ideograms: a symbol represents a word or an idea. That’s why there are thousands of ideograms.

World alphabets • The most used alphabet is the Roman one. It is

made of 26 letters. It is also used for international communication.

• In Russia and in neighbouring countries people use the Cyrillic alphabet. It consists of other letters, 33 in total.

• The Arabic alphabet has strange signs. It is used in the Arabic countries.

• The Chinese alphabet has more then 2,000 different symbols that are called ideograms.

Alphabets currently used

Armenian Bassa (Vah) Cyrillic Freser

Georgian (Mkhedruli) Greek Kayah Li Korean (hangul)

Latin/Roman Manchu Mongolian

N’Ko

Ol Camet’ (santali)Oirat Clear Script

Shorthand Pollard Miao

Sutton Sign Writing Tai Dam Thaana Tifinagh

Alphabets used mainly for religious and/or decorative purposes

Copitic Deseret Fraktur

Irish Unicial Old Church Slavonic Runic

Dead alphabets

Avestan Beitha Kukju Borama (Somali) Carian

Carpathian Basin Rovas Caucasica Albanian Decarlian runes Elbasan

Etruscan Georgian (Nuskhuri) Glagotic Gotic

Lycian Lydian Merotic

Ogham

Old Italic Old Permic (abur) Osmanya (Somali) Uighur

1° stepThe origins: the Phoenicians

Around 1800 B.C. a clever man in Byblos wanted to write documents in his language: Caananite. He managed to do it by choosing some Egyptian symbols and tried to link each of them to a Caananite sound, so the first alphabet had its birthday. The Phoenicians were sailors and traders. When they sold things they had to write the prices and the names of people and objects on them. That’s why they used this alphabet, which was made of 22 consonants without vowels.

2° stepThe Greeks

They were sailors and traders, too and they also wrote the prices of things on the objects they intended to sell, but differently from the Phoenicians,they did not use any sounds. So the Greeks introduced the vowels that were “extra” symbols and sounds.

3° stepThe Romans

In the Roman Empire, which was extremely wide, people spoke Latin. This language whose alphabet was formed by 19 letters, included most of the Greek ones. It rapidly spread in many parts of the world.

4° stepModern world

The Roman alphabet also arrived in America thanks to the Spanish and the Portuguese empires. Many countries used it and added letters to mean extra sounds. It was exported to India, Australia and Asia, that’s why today it is used in any part of the world and many of its terms have entered English vocabulary, too.