Misplaced Pages

Africa Alphabet

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.

The lists and tables below summarize and compare the letter inventories of some of the Latin-script alphabets . In this article, the scope of the word " alphabet " is broadened to include letters with tone marks , and other diacritics used to represent a wide range of orthographic traditions, without regard to whether or how they are sequenced in their alphabet or the table.

#401598

14-690: The Africa Alphabet (also International African Alphabet or IAI alphabet ) is a set of letters designed as the basis for Latin alphabets for the languages of Africa . It was initially developed in 1928 by the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures from a combination of the English alphabet and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Development was assisted by native speakers of African languages and led by Diedrich Hermann Westermann , who served as director of

28-418: A work in progress. Eventually, table cells with light blue shading will indicate letter forms that do not constitute distinct letters in their associated alphabets. Please help with this task if you have the required linguistic knowledge and technical editing skill. For the order in which the characters are sorted in each alphabet, see collating sequence . West Frisian alphabet Depending on

42-500: Is most commonly considered to consist of the two letters I and J, although in dictionaries there is an entry IJ between X and Z telling the user to look browse back to I. Alternatively, Y and IJ are rarely considered either variants of one letter positioned between X and Z, or two separate letters ordered in the alphabet as X – IJ – Y – Z. Gouden Gids bv has used the latter ordering system in the past for its bilingual (Frisian/Dutch) telephone directory "Nationale telefoongids". Capital IJ

56-590: Is needed as it is for Turkic alphabets. The chart above lists a variety of alphabets that do not officially contain all 26 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet. In this list, one letter is used by all of them: A. For each of the 26 basic ISO Latin alphabet letters, the number of alphabets in the list above using it is as follows: Some languages have extended the Latin alphabet with ligatures , modified letters , or digraphs . These symbols are listed below. The tables below are

70-546: Is quite rare. It only shows in the word ijsko (ice-cream) and in some names. Capital C, V and Z are mainly used for English loanwords like cake , virtual reality and ZIP and proper nouns like Chantal , Veldman and Zorro . Both capital and lower-case C are mainly restricted to the digraph CH. Proper nouns and English loans are exceptions. Both capital and lower case Q and X are restricted to proper nouns and English loans. Common digraphs are: A, E, U and O may be accompanied by circumflex or acute diacritics, as shown in

84-450: Is used in two distinct versions in Turkic languages: dotless (I ı) and dotted (İ i) . They are considered different letters, and case conversion must take care to preserve the distinction. Irish traditionally does not write the dot, or tittle , over the small letter i , but the language makes no distinction here if a dot is displayed, so no specific encoding and special case conversion rule

98-520: The Interglossa and Occidental alphabets include all 26 letters. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) includes all 26 letters in their lowercase forms, although g is always single-storey ( ɡ ) in the IPA and never double-storey ( [REDACTED] ). This list is based on official definitions of each alphabet. However, excluded letters might occur in non-integrated loan words and place names. The I

112-878: The 26 letters, while the Toki Pona uses a 14-letter subset. Among alphabets for natural languages the Afrikaans , Aromanian , Azerbaijani (some dialects) , Basque , , Celtic British , Catalan , Cornish , Czech , Danish , Dutch , Emilian-Romagnol , Filipino , Finnish , French , , German , Greenlandic , Hungarian , Javanese , Karakalpak , Kurdish , Modern Latin , Luxembourgish , Norwegian , Oromo , Papiamento , Polish , Portuguese , Quechua , Rhaeto-Romance , Romanian , Slovak , Spanish , Sundanese , Swedish , Tswana , Uyghur , Venda , Võro , Walloon , West Frisian , Xhosa , Zhuang , Zulu alphabets include all 26 letters, at least in their largest version. Among alphabets for constructed languages

126-455: The IPA. List of Latin-script alphabets Parentheses indicate characters not used in modern standard orthographies of the languages, but used in obsolete and/or dialectal forms. Among alphabets for natural languages the English , Indonesian , and Malay alphabets only use the 26 letters in both cases. Among alphabets for constructed languages the Ido and Interlingua alphabets only use

140-455: The diacritics on the letters, the word with the unaccented letter precedes the one with the circumflex . That one precedes the word with the acute . Hence the order: tut , tût , tút . Proper nouns and loanwords that are originally written in one of the Latin-script alphabets usually retain their diacritics as far as the keyboard at hand allows for. The same holds for letters not common in

154-552: The organization from 1926 to 1939. The aim of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, later renamed the International African Institute (IAI), was to enable people to write for practical and scientific purposes in all African languages without the need of diacritics . The Africa Alphabet influenced the development of orthographies of many African languages, serving "as the basis for

SECTION 10

#1732845661402

168-465: The table above this article. The accented letters have sound values of their own. In handwriting, diacritics are fairly common though not obligatory on capitals. In print, diacritics are not commonly used on capital letters, and these vowels are normally replaced by their unaccented counterparts. Letters with diacritics take no independent position in the alphabet. They are listed in the same places as their unaccented counterparts. When words differ only by

182-771: The transcription" of about 60 by one count. Discussion of how to harmonize these with other systems led to several largely abortive proposals such as the African Reference Alphabet and the World Orthography . The Africa Alphabet was built from the consonant letters of the English alphabet and the vowel letters, and any additional consonants, of the IPA. Capital forms of IPA letters were invented as necessary. Thus J and Y are pronounced [ d͡ʒ ] and [ j ] as in English, while Ɔ, Ɛ and Ŋ are pronounced [ ɔ ] , [ ɛ ] and [ ŋ ] as in

196-487: The way one counts, the West Frisian alphabet contains between 25 and 32 characters. In alphabetical listings both I and Y are usually found between H and J. When two words differ only because one has I and the other one has Y (stikje or stykje), the word with I precedes the one with Y. In handwriting, IJ is written as a single letter (see IJ (digraph) ), whereas in print the string IJ is used. In alphabetical listings IJ

#401598