What's the deal with alphabets and different languages?

Posted by kaplanpower on November 24th, 2022

Are there too many alphabets or not enough? This has been a long-standing debate, with one side saying that the alphabet is fine as it is, and the other side saying that we need more. Well, here’s the thing: you’re both right! We need more alphabets in order to accommodate new languages, but we don’t need any more letters in the English alphabet. So what exactly are different alphabets made up of? Let's find out together!

The alphabet is not universal

The letters of the alphabet are not always universal. In many languages, for example, there is no letter for Q or X. In some cases, a letter may have multiple pronunciations. For example in French, A can be pronounced as either ah, or a, depending on where it appears in a word. It also turns out that how many letters are in the alphabet. English has more than 26 characters because its 26-letter system includes 7 Latin and Greek characters: C, D, F, J, K, O and U.

There are dozens of alphabets

Different cultures have created a variety of alphabets to represent their language. These scripts can be derived from or inspired by earlier scripts such as Aramaic, Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Greek, Hebrew, Latin or Syriac. Each alphabet has its own unique letter shapes and sound values. For example in English the letters b and d make different sounds but in German those same letters are pronounced identically.

Some languages have no alphabet

A few examples of languages without an alphabet are Hawaiian, Swahili, Arabic, Vietnamese and Korean. It is possible to write in these languages using the Latin alphabet, but it can be difficult. For example, in Japanese there are three sets of characters used: Hiragana (syllables), Katakana (syllables) and Kanji (Chinese characters).

Why do we have so many alphabets?

Alphabets are a form of writing that use symbols to represent sounds. The English alphabet has 26 letters, but other languages have varying numbers of letters. Some examples are: Arabic, which has 28 letters; Greek, which has 24; and Norwegian, which has 29. Why does each language need its own alphabet? Languages evolve over time, so the need for an updated or new alphabet will arise when old letters aren't adequate for the current sound system or grammar.

The history of the alphabet

The first alphabet ever was developed by Egyptian scribes who wrote in hieroglyphs. The hieroglyphs were stylized depictions of objects that each represented a letter of the alphabet. There were only 24 letters, so they doubled up on some to make two versions of some letters. Next came Hebrew which has 22 basic letters but 10 more called vowel points. These vowel points indicate what vowel sound the word should have based on how it is spelled. It might be confusing because there are both consonants and vowels used to write words in Hebrew.