A number of common wordsprepositions, &c.with only one consonant are spelled by single alphabetic signs in ordinary writing.
Appendix B, Fortran Library, is an alphabetic listing, by mnemonic name, of intrinsic functions and subroutines.
As a matter of fact the Egyptians might have passed about thirty-five centuries B.C. from the picture writing of hieroglyphs to genuine alphabetic signs.'
For some, alphabetic signs more than one likely origin might be found, while for others, again, no clear evidence of origin is yet forthcoming.
Hence according as the trains of oscillations are long or short so is the sound heard in the telephone, and these sounds can be arranged on the Morse code into alphabetic audible signals.
His poem is rather lyrical than narrative, which may account for some obscurities in the connexion of thought; but his alphabetic scheme proves that he designed twenty-two stanzas, not sixty-six detached couplets.
It is noteworthy that though words were so freely spelled in alphabetic characters, especially in the time of the Old Kingdom, no advance was ever made towards excluding the cumbersome word-signs and biliteral phonograms, which, by a judicious use of determinatives, might well have been rendered quite superfluous.
Like some other alphabetic symbols it was not borrowed by Greek in its original form.
N.B. I normally get learners to write the schwa symbol underneath the alphabetic script.
Some, however, see in it a corruption of the Semitic name samekh, the letter which corresponds in alphabetic position and in shape to the Greek (x).
The earliest alphabetic document which can be dated with comparative certainty is the famous Moabite stone, which was discovered in 1868, and after a controversy between rival claimants which led to its being broken in pieces by the Arabs, ultimately reached the Louvre, where in a restored form it remains.
The history of some of the alphabetic signs is still very obscure but a sufficient number of them have been explained to make it nearly certain that the values of all were obtained on the same principles.i Some of the ancient words from which the phonetic values were derived probably fell very early into disuse, and may, never be discoverable in the texts that have come down to us.
The old system of writing now dies out, and it is not till some three centuries later that the new alphabetic forms are introduced from a Semitic source.
The set consists of 26 alphabetic flags, 10 numeral pennants, 3 substitutes, and 1 answering pennant.
The tablets from Ugarit were found to have been written in an alphabetic cuneiform that might have preceded the Phoenician alphabet.
There seems to be no logical aim in this arrangement of the alphabetic characters and the series is incomplete.
Thus, HroXucuoi is spelt Ptwrmys, Antoninus, Ntnynws or Intnyns, &c. &c. Much earlier, throughout the New Kingdom, a special syllabic orthography, in which the alphabetic signs for the consonants are generally replaced by groups or single signs having the value of a consonant followed by a semi-vowel, was used for foreign names and words, e.g.
When more is known of the earliest Etruscan inscriptions it may become possible to date the Iguvine Tables by their alphabetic peculiarities as compared with their mother-alphabet, the Etruscan.