An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written symbols or graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes [音素] of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllable [音节], for instance, and logographic systems use characters to represent words, morphemes [词素], or other semantic units.
Of the dozens of alphabets in use today, the most popular is the Latin [拉丁] alphabet, which was derived [派生] from the Greek, and which many languages modify by adding letters formed using diacritical marks. A diacritic is a mark placed over, under, or through a letter in some languages, to show that the letter should be pronounced differently from the same letter without a mark.
The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum, which in turn originated in a Greek word, which was made from the first two letters, alpha(α) and beta(β). The names for the Greek letters came from the first two letters of the Phoenician [腓尼基] alphabet; aleph, which also meant ox, and bet, which also meant house. 汉字"家":
A Venn diagram showing the Greek (left), Cyrillic (bottom) and Latin (right) alphabets, which share many of the same letters, although they have different pronunciations:
Alphabets often come to be associated with a standard ordering of their letters, which can then be used for purposes of collation [排序] - namely for the listing of words and other items in what is called alphabetical order.
Zhuyin (sometimes called Bopomofo) is a semi-syllabary used to phonetically [语音的] transcribe [抄写] Mandarin Chinese in the Republic of China. After the later establishment of the People's Republic of China and its adoption of Hanyu Pinyin, the use of Zhuyin today is limited, but it is still widely used in the Taiwan region.
注音符号又称注音字母。它以章太炎的记音字母作蓝本，1913年由中国读音统一会制定，1918年北洋政府教育部正式颁行。注音符号取代了中国一千多年来用的“反切”的注音方法(如珠翁:中, ㄓㄨㄥ:中)。区位码的第8区为注音符号:
六级/考研单词: alphabet, derive, modify, pronounce, ox, diagram, seldom, namely
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