English languageEnglish is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family. It originated in early medieval England and, today, is the most spoken language in the world and the third most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. English is the most widely learned second language and is either the official language or one of the official languages in 59 sovereign states. There are more people who have learned English as a second language than there are native speakers.
Greek alphabetThe Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BC, the Euclidean alphabet, with 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used for Greek writing today.
Latin scriptThe Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy (Magna Graecia). The Greek alphabet was adopted by the Etruscans, and subsequently their alphabet was adopted by the Romans. Several Latin-script alphabets exist, which differ in graphemes, collation and phonetic values from the classical Latin alphabet.
Phoenician alphabetThe Phoenician alphabet is an alphabet (more specifically, an abjad) known in modern times from the Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region. The name comes from the Phoenician civilization. The Phoenician alphabet is also called the Early Linear script (in a Semitic context, not connected to Minoan writing systems), because it is an early development of the Proto- or Old Canaanite or Proto-Sinaitic script, into a linear, purely alphabetic script, also marking the transfer from a multi-directional writing system, where a variety of writing directions occurred, to a regulated horizontal, right-to-left script.
Letter (alphabet)A letter is a segmental symbol of a phonemic writing system. The inventory of all letters forms an alphabet. Letters broadly correspond to phonemes in the spoken form of the language, although there is rarely a consistent and exact correspondence between letters and phonemes. The word letter, borrowed from Old French letre, entered Middle English around 1200 AD, eventually displacing the Old English term bōcstæf (bookstaff). Letter is descended from the Latin littera, which may have descended from the Greek "διφθέρα" (, writing tablet), via Etruscan.
Latin alphabetThe Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it forms the Latin script that is used to write many modern European languages, including English. With modifications, it is also used for other alphabets, such as the Vietnamese alphabet. Its modern repertoire is standardised as the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
Letter caseLetter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally majuscule) and smaller lowercase (or more formally minuscule) in the written representation of certain languages. The writing systems that distinguish between the upper- and lowercase have two parallel sets of letters: each in the majuscule set has a counterpart in the minuscule set. Some counterpart letters have the same shape, and differ only in size (e.g. {C,c} or {S,s}), but for others the shapes are different (e.
AlphabetAn alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) representing phonemes, units of sounds that distinguish words, of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllable, and logographic systems use characters to represent words, morphemes, or other semantic units. The Egyptians have created the first alphabet in a technical sense.
Dutch languageDutch (Nederlands ˈneːdərlɑnts), also known as Netherlandic or Netherlandish, is a West Germanic language spoken by about 25 million people as a first language and 5 million as a second language. It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language, after its close relatives German and English. Afrikaans is a separate but somewhat mutually intelligible daughter language spoken, to some degree, by at least 16 million people, mainly in South Africa and Namibia, evolving from the Cape Dutch dialects of Southern Africa.
Digraph (orthography)A digraph or digram (from the δίς , "double" and γράφω , "to write") is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme (distinct sound), or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined. Some digraphs represent phonemes that cannot be represented with a single character in the writing system of a language, like the English sh in ship and fish. Other digraphs represent phonemes that can also be represented by single characters.
