The Alphabet

So called from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha and beta. Alphabet is the term applied to the collection of letters from which the words of a language are made up.

It's a set of graphical symbols which, either singly or in combinations, represent the sounds of a language. The characters in an alphabet each identify a consonant or a vowel. Alphabets which have different symbols for each sound are often called phonetic, or regular, alphabets. Finnish and Spanish are considered to be regular, but English is not. Different symbols in English are often used to represent the same sound as, for example, the f sound in 'fear', 'physics', and 'cough'. Other languages, such as Irish Gaelic, are even less regular. Attempts have been made to create regular alphabets.

The letters of an alphabet are really signs which stand for sounds. When we see a p or an s or a d, we know that each letter stands for a certain soundl when we find them in a word, we know what sounds to make when we pronounce the word.