Ciekawostka: The Hawaiian alphabet has only 12 letters

Evidence: 45 • authority: 72

The modifier letter turned comma ʻ is character resembling a comma that has been turned and raised to ascender level. Unlike a comma, it is a letter, not a piece of punctuation. It is used in a number of Polynesian alphabets as a letter representing a glottal stop, such as the ʻokina in Hawaiian. It was also used in the Uzbek alphabet to form the letters Oʻ and Gʻ, which corresponded to Ў and Ғ respectively in the Uzbek Cyrillic alphabet.

Evidence: 45 • authority: 72

The Polish alphabet (Polish: alfabet polski, abecadło) is the script of the Polish language, the basis for the Polish system of orthography. It is based on the Latin alphabet but includes certain letters (9) with diacritics: the stroke (acute accent or bar) – kreska: ⟨ć, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź⟩; the overdot – kropka: ⟨ż⟩; and the tail or ogonek – ⟨ą, ę⟩. The letters ⟨q⟩, ⟨v⟩, and ⟨x⟩, which are used only in foreign words, are usually absent from the Polish alphabet. Additionally, before the standardization of Polish spelling, ⟨qu⟩ was sometimes used in place of ⟨kw⟩, and ⟨x⟩ in place of ⟨ks⟩. Modified variations of the Polish alphabet are used for writing Silesian and Kashubian, whereas the Sorbian…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 72

An alphabet is a writing system that uses a standard set of symbols called graphemes – more commonly known as letters – to more or less represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, these graphemes largely correspond to phonemes, which are the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from another in a given language. Not all writing systems represent language in this way: a syllabary assigns symbols to spoken syllables, while logographies assign symbols to words, morphemes, or other semantic units. The first letters were invented in Ancient Egypt to serve as an aid in writing Egyptian hieroglyphs; these are referred to as Egyptian uniliteral signs by lexicogra…

Evidence: 41 • authority: 80

27–30–22–26 – How Many Letters Needs an Alphabet? The Case of Semitic

Evidence: 41 • authority: 72

The Danish and Norwegian alphabet is the set of symbols, forming a variant of the Latin alphabet, used for writing the Danish and Norwegian languages. It has consisted of the following 29 letters since 1917 (Norwegian) and 1948 (Danish): The letters ⟨c⟩, ⟨q⟩, ⟨w⟩, ⟨x⟩ and ⟨z⟩ are not used in the spelling of indigenous words. They are rarely used in Norwegian, where loan words routinely have their orthography adapted to the native sound system using ⟨k⟩, ⟨s⟩, and ⟨v⟩. Conversely, Danish has a greater tendency to preserve loan words' original spellings. In particular, a ⟨c⟩ that represents /s/ is almost never normalized to ⟨s⟩ in Danish, as would most often happen in Norwegian. Many words ori…

Evidence: 41 • authority: 72

Modern English is written with a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 letters, with each having both uppercase and lowercase forms. The word alphabet is a compound of alpha and beta, the names of the first two letters in the Greek alphabet. The earliest Old English writing during the 5th century used a runic alphabet known as the futhorc. The Old English Latin alphabet was adopted from the 7th century onward—and over the following centuries, various letters entered and fell out of use. By the 16th century, the present set of 26 letters had largely stabilised: There are 5 vowel letters (A, E, I, O, U) and 19 consonant letters—as well as 2 letters (W and Y) which may function as either type…

Evidence: 41 • authority: 72

Evidence: — • authority: 35