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Hebrew Alphabet
The Hebrew alphabet (, ), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is a unicase, unicameral abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Judaeo-Spanish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic languages, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian. In modern Hebrew, vowels are increasingly introduced. It is also used informally in Israel to write Levantine Arabic, especially among Druze in Israel, Druze. It is an offshoot of the Aramaic alphabet, Imperial Aramaic alphabet, which flourished during the Achaemenid Empire and which itself derives from the Phoenician alphabet. Historically, a different abjad script was used to write Hebrew: the original, old Hebrew script, now known as the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, has been largely preserved in a variant form as the Samaritan script, Samaritan alphabet, and is still used by the Samaritans. The present ''Jewish script'' or ''square script'', on the cont ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ḥāʾ
Heth, sometimes written Chet or Ḥet, is the eighth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ''ḥēt'' 𐤇, Hebrew ''ḥēt'' , Aramaic ''ḥēṯ'' 𐡇, Syriac ''ḥēṯ'' ܚ, and Arabic ''ḥāʾ'' . It is also related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪂, South Arabian , and Ge'ez . Heth originally represented a voiceless fricative, either pharyngeal , or velar . In Arabic, two corresponding letters were created for both phonemic sounds: unmodified ' represents , while ' represents . The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek eta , Etruscan , Latin H, and Cyrillic И. While H is a consonant in the Latin alphabet, the Greek and Cyrillic equivalents represent vowel sounds, though the letter was originally a consonant in Greek and this usage later evolved into the rough breathing character. The Phoenician letter also gave rise to the archaic Greek letter '' heta'', as well as a variant of Cyrillic letter I, short I. The Arabic letter (ح ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phoenician Alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most of the 1st millennium BC. It was one of the first alphabets, attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean basin. In the history of writing systems, the Phoenician script also marked the first to have a fixed writing direction—while previous systems were multi-directional, Phoenician was written horizontally, from right to left. It developed directly from the Proto-Sinaitic script used during the Late Bronze Age, which was derived in turn from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Phoenician alphabet was used to write Canaanite languages spoken during the Early Iron Age, sub-categorized by historians as Phoenician, Hebrew, Moabite, Ammonite and Edomite, as well as Old Aramaic. It was widely disseminated outside of the Canaanite sphere by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean, where it was adopted and adap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ħ (IPA)
The voiceless pharyngeal fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is an h-bar, , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is X\. In the transcription of Arabic, Berber (and other Afro-Asiatic languages) as well as a few other scripts, it is often written , . Typically characterized as fricative in the upper pharynx, it is often characterized as a whispered . Features Features of the voiceless pharyngeal fricative: Occurrence This sound is the most commonly cited realization of the Semitic letter hēth, which occurs in all dialects of Arabic, Classical Syriac, Western Neo-Aramaic, Central Neo-Aramaic, Ge'ez, Tigre, Tigrinya as well as Biblical, Mishnaic and Mizrahi Hebrew. It has also been reconstructed as appearing in Ancient Egyptian, a related Afro-Asiatic language. Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Ashkenazi Hebrew and most speakers of Modern Hebrew have merged the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voiceless Pharyngeal Fricative
The voiceless pharyngeal fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some Speech communication, spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is an h with stroke, h-bar, , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is X\. In the transcription of Arabic, Berber (and other Afro-Asiatic languages) as well as a few other scripts, it is often written , . Typically characterized as fricative in the upper pharynx, it is often characterized as a whispering, whispered . Features Features of the voiceless pharyngeal fricative: Occurrence This sound is the most commonly cited realization of the Semitic letter hēth, which occurs in all dialects of Arabic language, Arabic, Syriac language, Classical Syriac, Western Neo-Aramaic, Central Neo-Aramaic, Ge'ez language, Ge'ez, Tigre language, Tigre, Tigrinya language, Tigrinya as well as Biblical Hebrew, Biblical, Mishnaic Hebrew, Mishnaic and Mizrahi Hebrew, Mizrahi Hebrew language, Hebrew. I ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ancient South Arabian Script
The Ancient South Arabian script (Old South Arabian: ; modern ) branched from the Proto-Sinaitic script in about the late 2nd millennium BCE, and remained in use through the late sixth century CE. It is an abjad, a writing system where only consonants are obligatorily written, a trait shared with its predecessor, Proto-Sinaitic, as well as some of its sibling writing systems, including Arabic and Hebrew. It is a predecessor of the Ge'ez script, and a sibling script of the Phoenician alphabet and, through that, the modern Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabets. History The earliest instances of the Ancient South Arabian (''ASA'') script are painted pottery sherds from Raybun in Hadhramaut in Yemen, which are dated to the late 2nd millennium BCE. It is an abjad script, meaning that only consonants are usually written in the script, with vowels inferred from context; it shares this feature both with its predecessor, the Proto-Sinaitic script, and modern Semitic languages. It is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voiceless Velar Fricative
The voiceless velar fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It was part of the consonant inventory of Old English and can still be found in some dialects of English, most notably in Scottish English, e.g. in ''loch'', ''broch'' or ''saugh'' (willow). The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , the Latin letter x. It is also used in broad transcription instead of the symbol , the Greek chi, for the voiceless uvular fricative. There is also a voiceless post-velar fricative (also called pre-uvular) in some languages, which can be transcribed as or . For voiceless pre-velar fricative (also called post-palatal), see voiceless palatal fricative. Some scholars also posit the voiceless velar approximant distinct from the fricative, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , but this symbol is not suitable in case of the voiceless velar appr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ḫāʾ
, , or Xe (, transliterated as ( DIN-31635), ( Hans Wehr), (ALA-LC) or (ISO 233)) is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet (the others being , , , , ). It is based on the ' . It is related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪍, South Arabian , and Ge'ez . It represents the sound or in Modern Standard Arabic. The pronunciation of is very similar to German, Irish, and Polish unpalatalised " ch", Russian х (Cyrillic Kha), Greek χ and Peninsular Spanish and Southern Cone " j". In name and shape, it is a variant of . South Semitic also kept the phoneme separate, and it appears as South Arabian , Ge'ez ኀ. Its numerical value is 600 (see Abjad numerals). In most European languages, it is mostly romanized as the digraph ''kh''. When representing this sound in transliteration of Arabic into Hebrew, it is written as ח׳. The most common transliteration in English is "kh", e.g. ''Khartou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Syriac Alphabet
The Syriac alphabet ( ) is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language since the 1st century. It is one of the Semitic languages, Semitic abjads descending from the Aramaic alphabet through the Palmyrene alphabet, and shares similarities with the Phoenician alphabet, Phoenician, Hebrew alphabet, Hebrew, Arabic alphabet, Arabic and Sogdian alphabet, Sogdian, the precursor and a direct ancestor of the traditional Mongolian scripts. Syriac is written from right to left in horizontal lines. It is a cursive script where most—but not all—letters connect within a word. There is no letter case distinction between upper and lower case letters, though some letters change their form depending on their position within a word. Spaces word divider, separate individual words. All 22 letters are consonants (called , ). There are optional diacritic marks (called , ) to indicate the vowel (, ) and #Letter alterations, other features. In addition to the sounds of the language, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aramaic Alphabet
The ancient Aramaic alphabet was used to write the Aramaic languages spoken by ancient Aramean pre-Christian peoples throughout the Fertile Crescent. It was also adopted by other peoples as their own alphabet when empires and their subjects underwent linguistic Aramaization during a language shift for governing purposes — a precursor to Arabization centuries later — including among the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Assyrians and Neo-Babylonian Empire, Babylonians who permanently replaced their Akkadian language, Akkadian language and its cuneiform script with Aramaic and its script, and among Jews, but not Samaritans, who adopted the Aramaic language as their vernacular and started using the Aramaic alphabet, which they call "Ktav Ashuri, Square Script", even for writing Hebrew language, Hebrew, displacing the former Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. The modern Hebrew alphabet derives from the Aramaic alphabet, in contrast to the modern Samaritan script, Samaritan alphabet, which derives from Pa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Letter (alphabet)
In a writing system, a letter is a grapheme that generally corresponds to a phoneme—the smallest functional unit of speech—though there is rarely total one-to-one correspondence between the two. An alphabet is a writing system that uses letters. Definition and usage A letter is a type of grapheme, the smallest functional unit within a writing system. Letters are graphemes that broadly correspond to phonemes, the smallest functional units of sound in speech. Similarly to how phonemes are combined to form spoken words, letters may be combined to form written words. A single phoneme may also be represented by multiple letters in sequence, collectively called a ''multigraph (orthography), multigraph''. Multigraphs include ''digraphs'' of two letters (e.g. English ''ch'', ''sh'', ''th''), and ''trigraphs'' of three letters (e.g. English ''tch''). The same letterform may be used in different alphabets while representing different phonemic categories. The Latin H, Greek eta , an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
