ABSTRACT
Alphabet derives from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta, and is a term meant to designate an inventory of letters (or signs) which correspond, often very roughly, to the sounds of a particular language. An alphabet which provided a perfect one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds would be a ‘phonemic’ alphabet. No European language has a phonemic alphabet, although the Spanish alphabet is much closer to being phonemic than the English one is. In English, for example, the same sound can be represented by different letters:
machine sheep sugar
and the same letter can represent different sounds as in:
cat ceiling
Linguists have constructed the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which offers a set of letters and diacritics (signs that can be placed above and below letters) which can represent all the sounds of every language.
