The most complex alphabet in the world. Alphabets Letters of different alphabets

The Khmer alphabet has the largest number of letters in the Guinness Book of Records. It has 72 letters. This language is spoken in Cambodia.

However, the Ubykh alphabet contains the largest number of letters - 91 letters. The Ubykh language (the language of one of the Caucasian peoples) is considered one of the record holders for sound diversity: according to experts, it has up to 80 consonant phonemes.

Under Soviet rule, serious changes were made to the alphabets of all peoples living on the territory of the USSR: in the Russian language towards reducing the number of letters, and in other languages, mainly towards increasing them. After perestroika, the number of letters in the alphabets of many peoples living on the territory of the former Soviet republics decreased.

In modern Russian there are 33 letters. According to official sources, before the reform of Cyril and Methodius, the Russian language had 43 letters, and according to unofficial sources - 49.

The first 5 letters were thrown out by Cyril and Methodius, because there were no corresponding sounds in the Greek language, and for four they were given Greek names. Yaroslav the Wise removed one more letter, leaving 43. Peter I reduced it to 38. Nicholas II to 35. As part of Lunacharsky’s reform, the letters “yat”, “fita” and “and decimal” were excluded from the alphabet (E, F should be used instead , И), and also the hard sign (Ъ) at the end of words and parts of complex words would be excluded, but retained as separator(rise, adjutant).

In addition, Lunacharsky removed images from the Initial Letter, leaving only phonemes, i.e. the language has become unimaginative = ugly. So instead of the Primer, the Alphabet appeared.

Until 1942, it was officially believed that there were 32 letters in the Russian alphabet, since E and E were considered to be variants of the same letter.

The Ukrainian alphabet includes 33 letters: compared to Russian, Ёё, Ъъ, ыы, Ее are not used, but Ґґ, Єє, Іі and Її are present.

The Belarusian alphabet currently has 32 letters. Compared with Russian alphabet i, ь, ъ are not used, but the letters i and ў are added, and the digraphs j and d are also sometimes considered to have the status of letters.

The Yakut language uses an alphabet based on Cyrillic, which contains the entire Russian alphabet, plus five additional letters and two combinations. 4 diphthongs are also used.

The Kazakh and Bashkir Cyrillic alphabet contains 42 letters.

The current Chechen alphabet contains 49 letters (compiled on a graphical basis Russian alphabet in 1938). In 1992, the Chechen leadership decided to introduce an alphabet based on the Latin script of 41 letters. This alphabet was used to a limited extent in parallel with the Cyrillic alphabet in the period from 1992 to 2000.

The Armenian alphabet contains 38 letters, however, after the reform in 1940, the ligature "և “undeservedly received the status of a letter that does not have a capital letter - thus the number of letters became, as it were, “thirty-eight and a half.”

The Tatar alphabet after the translation of Tatar writing in 1939 from Latinized alphabet on alphabet based on Russian graphics contained 38 letters, and after 1999 an alphabet based on the Latin script of 34 letters was widely used.

The Kyrgyz Cyrillic alphabet, adopted in 1940, contains 36 letters.

The modern Mongolian alphabet contains 35 letters and differs from Russian by two additional letters: Ө and Ү.

In 1940, the Uzbek alphabet, like the alphabets of other peoples of the USSR, was translated into Cyrillic and contained 35 letters. In the 90s of the last century, the Uzbek authorities decided to translate the Uzbek language into the Latin alphabet and the alphabet became 28 letters.

The modern Georgian alphabet consists of 33 letters.

There are 31 letters in the Macedonian and Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet. The Finnish alphabet also consists of 31 letters.

The Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet includes 30 letters - compared to Russian, it lacks the letters Y, E and E.

The Tibetan alphabet consists of 30 letter-syllables, which are considered consonants. Each of them, constituting the initial letter of a syllable and not having another vowel sign, is accompanied by the sound “a” when pronounced.

The Swedish and Norwegian alphabet has 29 letters.

The Arabic alphabet contains 28 letters. The Spanish alphabet has 27 letters.

There are 26 letters in the Latin, English, German and French alphabet.

The Italian alphabet “officially” consists of 21 letters, but in reality it has 26 letters.

The Greek alphabet has 24 letters, and the standard Portuguese alphabet has 23 letters.

There are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet; there is no difference between uppercase and lowercase letters.

The smallest number of letters in the alphabet of the Rotokas tribe from the island of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. There are only eleven of them (a, b, e, g, i, k, o, p, t, u) - 6 of them are consonants.

Considering how many letters there are in the language of one of the Papuan tribes, it is interesting that in all alphabets the number of letters gradually changes, usually downward.

A change in the number of letters in the alphabet in all countries of the world, as a rule, occurs with the advent of new government so that the younger generation finds itself cut off from the language, literature, culture and traditions of their ancestors, and after a while speaks a completely different language.

An alphabet is a kind of collection of letters used in some writing system, with graphic symbols arranged in a certain order that cannot be violated.

Various writing systems

It is difficult to determine which alphabet is considered the most difficult. This is too controversial a concept, since when assessing complexity one involuntarily has to start from native language. Of course, native speakers will find Ukrainian and Belarusian the simplest languages.

Hieroglyphic writing

The hieroglyphic writing system can be called an alphabet only with a large degree of convention. A hieroglyph is the outline of a character in some writing systems, which can mean a sound, a word or a sentence.

It does not in any way indicate the correct pronunciation, while the letter reflects the phonetic features of the language. This is why Chinese or Japanese languages difficult for people whose native languages ​​are based on a letter system.

Ethiopian writing system

The Ethiopian script is also quite difficult to master, but it cannot be classified as a classical alphabet. This is a hybrid letter that is official in Eritrea and Ethiopia.

But if you still evaluate the Ethiopian script as an alphabet, then the Ahmar dialect will be the most difficult to write. Letters are written with additional symbols, which are introduced to indicate specific sounds. The Ethiopian system is abugida, that is, a letter in which any character is a combination of a vowel and a consonant, and they are grouped depending on what sounds they represent. In this case, the signs are written from left to right.

The most complex classical alphabet

Arabic script

If he speaks exclusively about letter systems, then perhaps the most complex can be considered Arabic. This is one of the most difficult to master sign systems. The same letter can be written in different ways, there are up to 4 spelling options depending on the location of the letter in the word. There is not a single lowercase character, hyphenation is strictly prohibited, and vowel sounds are not reflected in written language. Another feature is that words are written from right to left.

Other complex letter systems

The Eskimo alphabet was included in the Guinness Book of Records. Tabasaran has 54 letters, but, for example, in the Abkhaz language there are only three vowels - “aa”, “a” and “s”. All other vowel sounds, which are indicated by the symbols “u”, “e”, “o”, “i”, are formed from combinations of different sounds.

But Abkhazian has a very large number of consonants - 58. The Bzyb dialect contains an even larger number - 67. The basis of the Abkhaz writing system is the Cyrillic alphabet, the alphabet was developed in 1862, and the first alphabet was published three years later.

That's why our alphabet is not as difficult as it sometimes seems.

In the modern era, there are many alphabets. There are alphabets of the peoples of the world used for communication, “dead” and lost, international and alphabets for technical purposes.

Popular alphabets

In addition to the Russian alphabet, there are other popular and in demand alphabets:

The Latin alphabet is also called the Latin alphabet, the Latin language is called Latin. The phrase “write in Cyrillic” means writing using Russian letters; the phrase “writing in Latin” generally means writing using English letters.

Each language has its own alphabet: English, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, German, Italian and others. English is considered to be an international language; it is studied in educational institutions, it is used on international conferences, negotiations are conducted on it, it is often installed by default in computer programs And information systems. Most languages ​​are offshoots Latin language Therefore, in the fields of science and medicine, Latin is the undisputed leader.

International alphabet

Exists international alphabet, developed in 1956 by ICAO. This is the phonetic alphabet accepted for use by most international organizations, including NATO. The basis for its creation was English language. The alphabet includes letters and numbers with a fixed sound. Essentially, the international alphabet is a set of sound signals. The alphabet is used for radio communications, transmission of digital codes, military signals and identification names. The alphabet is also known as the radio alphabet. In addition to the international phonetic alphabet, there are phonetic alphabets in different languages, including in Russian.

Technical alphabets

Alphabets (alphabets) of a technical nature have been developed, encoding the letters of the alphabets into symbols and designations. They are used to exchange information in environments where writing or sounding conventional letters is not possible. The most popular alphabets:

• Morse code (Morse code or Morse code);
• Braille alphabet (the alphabet for the visually impaired and blind or the Braille alphabet);
• Zhestuno alphabet (the alphabet of the deaf and dumb or the dactyl alphabet);
• semaphore alphabet (flag alphabet).

History of the alphabet

Today it is difficult to imagine the life of mankind without the alphabet. However, once upon a time he was not there. It is interesting to look at the origins of the first alphabets, to understand the idea of ​​their creation, the first experience of use.

With the development of Homo sapiens, an urgent need arose to develop a unified way of transmitting history, advice and traditions from generation to generation. Initially, drawings and spoken word were used to solve this problem. The carriers of information were people who passed on their knowledge to generations through speech. However, this method was ineffective. The accumulation of knowledge, changes in speech concepts and the subjective perception of oral transmission of data led to inaccuracies and the loss of many important aspects of history. Therefore, humanity is faced with the need to develop unified system transfer of accumulated knowledge.

Northern Syria is considered the ancestor of the alphabet; the creation of the alphabet marked the beginning of the development of writing. Egypt is called the ancestor of writing, but it was used in the 27th century BC. Egyptian hieroglyphs cannot be considered an alphabet in the usual sense. Over time, the alphabet developed, changed by various peoples, and new systems and letters were developed.

The word "alphabet" itself has ancient history, the word appeared after the emergence of the first alphabet only 700 years later. The word “alphabet” in its familiar sound appeared in the Phoenician alphabet by combining its first two letters into one word.

Graphic arts

Term "graphic arts"(from the Greek grapho - written) is used in two meanings. It refers to both the set of descriptive means of a particular letter (letters, punctuation and stress marks), and a special branch of linguistics that studies the relationships between graphemes (letters) and phonemes.

Modern writing uses all the techniques developed over the centuries-old history of writing.

For example, pictography applied: for an illiterate or semi-literate reader - these are drawings on signs: boot, kalach; signs of fire duty in villages: boards with the image of a bucket, ax, etc., nailed at the entrance to the house; in ABC books, where children must first “read” the picture and then “spell by letter”; or when the reader’s language is unknown, for example, drawings of a cleaning lady, a waiter, etc. at call buttons in hotels.

Ideography used as road signs (a zigzag as a turn sign, a cross as an intersection sign, an exclamation mark as a “caution” sign, etc.), or skull and crossbones signs on a high voltage electrical network, or medicine emblems in pharmacies: a snake and a bowl of poison; Ideography includes a variety of conventional signs in cartography and topography (mineral signs, circles and dots to indicate settlements and so on.)

TO hieroglyphics These include numbers expressing the concept of number, special symbols of sciences, for example, mathematical signs, which can be numbers, letters, and special images: >,<, =, S, %, +, -, : т.д.

In the languages ​​of the world, in their national writing systems, Latin, Cyrillic or Arabic graphics are most often used, while not a single alphabet has ideal graphics (when one grapheme corresponds to only one phoneme). This is explained by the fact that the 24 letters of the ancient Greek alphabet could not convey the entire variety of sounds of different languages. In the process of the historical development of each language, due to the processes of phonetic changes that took place in it, the gap between letters and individual sounds increased even more, which entailed the appearance of complex graphemes. A particularly strong gap between modern auditory speech and the traditional graphic system has occurred in the English and French languages, the spelling of which does not adequately convey a living, developing language. For example, in the English language, 26 characters of the alphabet correspond to 46 phonemes, so digraphs (ph - [f]), trigraphs (oeu -) and polygraphs (augh - [e:]) are widely used here.

The Russian alphabet has 33 letters. Most of them appear in two varieties - lowercase and uppercase (with the exception of ъ and ь, which are used only in the form of lowercase letters). Modern Russian graphics are distinguished by a number of features that have developed historically and represent a specific graphic system.

Russian graphics do not have an alphabet in which there is a special letter for each sound pronounced in the speech stream. Letters in the Russian alphabet. significantly less than sounds in live speech. As a result, the letters of the alphabet turn out to be polysemantic, i.e. may have several sound meanings. So, for example, the letters “es” can represent the following sounds: [ With] –garden, [With"] – here, [h] – change, [z"] – mowing, [w] – sew, [and] – compress.

The second feature of Russian graphics is the division of letters according to the number of sounds indicated. In this regard, the letters of the Russian alphabet fall into three groups:

a) letters without sound meaning. These are letters ъ And b , which do not denote any sounds, as well as the so-called “unpronounceable consonants” in such, for example, words : sun, heart and etc.;

b) letters denoting two sounds - e , e ,Yu , I ;

c) letters denoting one sound. These are all the letters of the Russian alphabet with the exception of the letters included in the first and second groups.

The third feature of Russian graphics is the presence of single-digit and double-digit letters in it. The first are letters that have one basic meaning: a, o, y, e, s; w, c, h, w, sch, th .

So, for example, the letters h, ts are classified as unambiguous, since the letter h in all positions denotes the same soft sound [h"] , and the letter ts – hard sound [ts] .

To the second, i.e. two-digit, the letters include:

– all letters denoting consonant sounds, paired according to hardness and softness;

– letters denoting vowel sounds: e, e, yu, i.

For example, the letter b can denote both hard and soft sounds - [b] And [b"]:was - beat; letter I in some cases it means sound [A] after a soft consonant, in others - a combination .

The ambiguity of these letters of the Russian alphabet is due to the specifics of Russian graphics - its syllabic principle. It is expressed in the fact that the sign of hardness/softness of a consonant is indicated by a vowel letter following the consonant (sword) or a special sign of softness (moth). In addition, in the Russian language there are syllabograms (ya, e, ё, yu), which allow one letter to convey an entire syllable consisting of a combination of a consonant [j] and a vowel. This makes Russian graphics extremely economical.

In many graphic systems of the world (including Russian), there is the phenomenon of polyphony, when the same letter, depending on its position in a word, can have different sounds (for example, in German, the letter s before a vowel corresponds to the sound [z]: Sanger, and before consonants (but not p, t) - [c]: Ski, before p,t [ш]: Stadt. This phenomenon is expressed even more clearly in the Russian language, where almost all letters are polysemantic: in one position they mean one thing sounds, in the other - others (the letter g in the position of the end of a word or before a voiceless consonant corresponds to the sound [k]: stack, before a back vowel or voiced vowel - to the sound [g]: bunch. The phenomenon of polyphony reflects not only the positional principle of Russian graphics, but also phonemic, when the same version of different phonemes is denoted by different letters.

Russian writing is sound-letter. It is called so because its basic units - letters - correspond to units of the sound (phonetic) system of the language, and not directly to words or their significant parts (morphemes), as is the case in hieroglyphic writing. For example, the word meaning “sun” is expressed in Russian writing by six letter signs, and in Chinese by one hieroglyph.

Alphabet. Types of alphabets.

The word "alphabet" comes from the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet - alpha And beta. It was the Greeks who contributed to the spread of alphabetic writing in most countries of the world. The English word is structured in a similar way. abecedary or Russian ABC(according to the names in the first case of four, and in the second - the first two letters, respectively, of the English and Church Slavonic alphabets).

Alphabet (from the Greek alphábētos) is a set of letters (graphemes) containing the basic characters of writing. Letters in the alphabet are arranged in a specific alphabetical order. The principle of alphabetical arrangement is used in dictionaries and reference books.

An ideal phonographic alphabet should consist of as many letters as there are phonemes in a given language. But since writing developed historically and much of the writing reflected outdated traditions, there are no ideal alphabets, but there are more or less rational ones. Among the existing alphabets, two are the most common and graphically convenient: Latin and Russian.

In alphabetic writing systems, a single letter usually conveys one sound. Sometimes letters are combined in groups of two, three or four to represent one phoneme: Polish combinations sz= w, cz= h, szcz = ь, German combinations sch= w, tsch = h and etc.

It is believed that the principle of the alphabet was invented by the Western Semitic peoples, in particular, the ancient Haanites used it already in cuneiform. The ancestors of all types of alphabets are often considered to be the Phoenician alphabet, which consisted of 22 letters following each other in a certain sequence. Phoenician letters had a simple and easy-to-write and memorize form. In the Phoenician alphabet, as in many Western Semitic ones, the names of the letters were derived from words that designate objects beginning with the corresponding sounds: a - aleph (ox), b - bet (house), d - gimel (camel), d - dalet (door), h - xe (cross), c - vav (nail) etc. It is believed that subsequently about 4/5 of the known alphabets arose directly or indirectly from the Phoenician alphabet. In its primary form, the Phoenician linear alphabet was adopted in Asia Minor (the Asia Minor alphabets, extinct at the beginning of our era), Greece and Italy, giving rise to the Western alphabets. In cursive or cursive form, probably through the Aramaic script, it spread throughout the Near and Middle East, giving rise to the Eastern alphabets.

The source of all Western alphabets is the Greek alphabet, based on the transformed Phoenician alphabet. Based on the Greek alphabetic writing in the IV-III centuries. BC. The Latin alphabet itself was formed. Most of the Greek letters retained their original meaning and style. Over the course of many centuries, the Latin alphabet underwent certain changes, acquiring a modern character: in the 11th century. the outline of the letter appeared w, in the 16th century letters have been entered j, u And etc.

Slavic The alphabet arose at the end of the 9th - beginning of the 10th century, and two alphabets were created - Glagolitic and Cyrillic. The creation of the alphabet is associated with the names of the Slavic enlighteners, the brothers Cyril and Methodius. Name Glagolitic derived from Old Church Slavonic verb- word, speech. Coinciding with the Cyrillic alphabet almost completely in alphabetical composition, the Glagolitic alphabet differed sharply from it in the shape of the letters. It is believed that many letters of the Glagolitic alphabet are related to the Greek letter. Glagolitic was widely used in the 9th century. in Moravia, from where it spread to Bulgaria and Croatia. There it was used until the 18th century. Then the Glagolitic letter was supplanted in the east and south by the Cyrillic alphabet, and in the west by the Latin alphabet. Cyrillic is a reworking of the Byzantine alphabet - the modern Greek charter letter of the 7th-8th centuries. It was widely used among the southern, eastern and, probably, for some time among the western Slavs. In Rus', the Cyrillic alphabet was introduced in the 10th-11th centuries. in connection with Christianization. Initially, the Cyrillic alphabet had 38 letters, and then the number of its letters increased to 44. 24 letters were borrowed from the Greek statutory letter, the remaining 20 letters are either borrowings from other alphabets, or graphic modifications of Greek letters, or ligature combinations of Cyrillic letters.

The Cyrillic alphabet existed in Rus' without significant changes until the 18th century. Modern look Russian The alphabet was prepared by the reforms of Peter I, and later by the reforms of the Academy of Sciences. Letters were excluded from the Cyrillic alphabet psi, xi, omega, Izhitsa, etc. and some others, the styles of individual letters have been simplified, new letters have been introduced: I, uh, y. The reform of the Russian alphabet was completed in 1917-1918: letters were excluded from the alphabet yat, fita, i. The Russian alphabet served as the basis for the creation of writing for many peoples of the Far North and Siberia, and the writing of most peoples of the former USSR was translated into the Russian alphabet. The Russian alphabet was adopted as the basis of the modern Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian alphabets.

The culture of the young Romano-Germanic barbarians arose from the ruins of the Roman Empire; Latin came to them as the language of the church, science and literature and the Latin alphabet, which corresponded well to the phonetic structure of the Latin language, but did not at all correspond to the phonetics of the Romance and Germanic languages. 24 Latin letters could not graphically display 36–40 phonemes of new European languages. Thus, in the area of ​​consonants, most European languages ​​needed signs

for sibilant fricatives and affricates, which did not exist in Latin. Five Latin vowels (A , e, o, i, i and later at ) did not correspond in any way to the vocalism system of French, English, Danish and other European languages. Attempts to invent new letters (for example, signs for interdental consonants proposed by the Frankish king Chilperic I) were not successful. Tradition turned out to be stronger than need. Minor alphabetic innovations (such as the French "se cedille" ҫ , German "eszet" β or Danish ø ) didn't save the situation. The most radical and correct thing

the Czechs did it without resorting to multi-letter combinations like the Polish ones sz = [w], cz = [h], szcz = [ш], and using superscript diacritics, when they got regular rows of sibilants s, s, z hissing Š,Č, Ž.

Most alphabets have between 20 and 30 letters, although some, such as the adaptation of the Latin alphabet to the Hawaiian language, have only 12 letters, and others, such as the Sinhalese used in the state of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), or some alphabets North Caucasian languages ​​contain 50 or more characters. The relative complexity of the phonetic systems of different languages ​​results in alphabets of unequal size. According to the Guinness Book of Records, the Khmer language alphabet contains the most letters - 72. The oldest letter of the alphabet is the letter "o", which has remained unchanged in the same form in which it was adopted in the Phoenician alphabet (about 1300 BC). (This letter there denoted a consonant sound, but the modern “o” came from it).

The following types of alphabets are distinguished:

· Consonantal-vocalic alphabets- a type of writing in which letters represent both vowels and consonants. In writing as a whole, the correspondence “one grapheme (written sign) is one phoneme” is observed.

· Consonantal alphabets- a type of writing in which the letters represent only consonants; vowels can be indicated using a special system of diacritics (vowels). Examples of fully consonantal writing are Ugaritic and Phoenician writing, examples of partially consonantal writing are modern Hebrew and Arabic writing, which contain signs for some vowels.

· Syllabic alphabets- letters denote entire syllables, and syllables with the same consonant, but different vowels can be indicated by similar signs, or they can be completely different. Syllabary is used in a variant of Greek, the language of China, and ancient Philippine writing. Logographic writing in Chinese, Mayan, and cuneiform is also largely syllabic.

The Japanese language uses two types of syllabary, which are called kana, namely katakana and hiragana (appeared around 700 AD). Hiragana is used to write words and grammatical elements of the native language, along with the kanji hieroglyphic writing. Katakana is used to write loanwords and foreign proper names. For example, the word hotel written in three kana - ホテル ( ho-te-ru). Since Japanese has a large number of syllable patterns consonant + vowel, then the syllabary is the most suitable for the given language. As in many variants of syllabary writing, the following vowels and final consonants are indicated by separate signs. Yes, both words atta And kaita written in three kana: あった ( a-t-ta) and かいた ( ka-i-ta).

The use of signs for individual phonemes leads to a significant simplification of writing as a result of reducing the number of signs used. Also, the order of letters in the alphabet is the basis of alphabetical sorting.