Talk:Alphabet

Name Change Suggestion

Perhaps we should change the name of this article to Alphabets; or something along those lines? The article talks about the history, use, and changes of multiple alphabets, not just one singular alphabet. Just a suggestion more than anything else. SomeoneOK (talk) 17:38, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia usually uses the singular form in article titles, even when there are lots of items: Tree rather than Trees. Certes (talk) 18:38, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Ah, Alright. That makes sense. Just thought it might be confusing about how hearing Alphabet would sort of specify, at least on this Wikipedia, the Latin alphabet. SomeoneOK (talk) 14:14, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Potential GAN?

I've gone through and cited most of the article. I would really like for this Article to become a Good Article again after 16 years. Can anyone see any nitpicks that may lead it to be rejected? Only thing I might think of is perhaps source reliability, haven't been around too much to know what is and isn't good in terms of essentially everything. SomeoneOK (talk) 15:12, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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This review is transcluded from Talk:Alphabet/GA2. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: TompaDompa (talk · contribs) 14:38, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

I will review this. TompaDompa (talk) 14:38, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Thank you, let me know what I can improve if you see any problems. SomeoneOK (talk) 18:30, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

General comments

• I think this article would benefit quite a bit from a "Terminology" section. A lot of it is rather technical.
• There is an excess of images to the point of redundancy. Per MOS:PERTINENCE, strive for variety and consider what each image adds to the article besides being decorative. I would retain the Venn diagram and the map, but beyond that all other images are questionable—pick the best one for each aspect you want to illustrate. I would consider some sort of diagram to illustrate how different alphabets descend from each other.
• There are several {{Citation needed}} tags. Generally, that indicates that the article is not ready for WP:Good article nomination, and this is no exception.
• omniglot.com is cited multiple times. Going by previous WP:RSN discussions, it is not a reliable source.
• Keep a WP:GLOBAL perspective in mind when working on this article.

Lead

• The WP:LEAD will need further work at a later stage since the body requires a lot of work (see below) and WP:LEADFOLLOWSBODY.
• Gloss "phoneme".
• the Proto-Sinaitic script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet – "later known as"?
• While most alphabets have letters composed of lines, there are also exceptions such as the alphabets used in Braille. – not in the body.
• Having two images in the WP:LEAD is very rarely warranted, and this is not one of those few exceptions.
• The "Orbis eruditi" image is pretty much illegible due to image quality and size, and so adds nothing. Remove.

Etymology

• The names for the Greek letters came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet; aleph, which also meant ox, and bet, which also meant house. – unsourced.

History

• representing syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. – needs copyediting for clarity.
• known as the Proto-Sinaitic script – link.
• John and Deborah Darnell – link and gloss.
• at Wadi el-Hol – gloss.
• Dating to circa 1800 BCE and showing evidence of having been adapted from specific forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs that could be dated to circa 2000 BCE, strongly suggesting that the first alphabet had developed about that time. – sentence fragment.
• Based on letter appearances and names, believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. – sentence fragment.
• Originally, it probably was a syllabary, with symbols that were not needed being removed. – gloss "syllabary".
• An alphabetic cuneiform script with 30 signs, including three that indicate the following vowel invented in Ugarit before the 15th century BCE. – sentence fragment.
• after the destruction of Ugarit – when?
• conventionally called "Proto-Canaanite" – link.
• before c. 1050 BCE – either use Template:Circa or simply write "circa". I'd suggest the latter for consistency.
• The oldest text in Phoenician script is an inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram. – when?
• By the tenth century – BCE, presumably. That needs to be included.
• two other forms distinguish themselves, Canaanite and Aramaic. – the links go to Canaanite languages and Aramaic alphabet, respectively. The former seems inappropriate when the text is discussing writing systems.
• The Aramaic gave rise to the Hebrew script. – link "Hebrew script", not just "Hebrew". If I click a link that says "Hebrew", I expect to end up at Hebrew language, not Hebrew alphabet.
• the Ge'ez alphabet – gloss.
• an abugida – meaning what? Either gloss or include in a "Terminology" section.
• in others such as, Arabic – stray comma.
• The omission of vowels was not always a satisfactory solution – why?
• some "weak" consonants sometimes being used to indicate the vowel quality of a syllable) – this is difficult to parse and has an unpaired right parenthesis. Is there a part of it that is missing?
• The Proto-Sinaitic script and the Ugaritic script were the first scripts with a limited number of signs, in contrast to the other widely used writing systems at the time, Cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Linear B. – it needs to be clarified what "a limited number of signs" means in this context. How do they differ from the other ones?
• and it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for traders to learn. Another advantage of Phoenician was that it could write different languages since it recorded words phonemically. – unsourced.
• What does the Acta Eruditorum image add that the other images do not?
• The script was spread across the Mediterranean by the Phoenicians. – the Phoenician script, presumably. At the start of a new paragraph, this should be made explicit.
• In Greece, they added vowels to the alphabet – who is "they"? Greeks? Phoenicians?
• giving rise to the ancestor of all alphabets in the West. – is this to say that the Greek alphabet is the ancestor of all alphabets in the West? If so, state that explicitly.
• It was the first alphabet in which vowels have independent letter forms separate from those of consonants. – again, does "it" refer to the Greek alphabet? Also, the meaning of this is not entirely clear.
• The Greeks chose letters representing sounds that did not exist in Greek to represent vowels. – is this to say that they adapted letters from the Phoenician script representing sounds without counterparts in Greek to represent Greek vowels?
• Vowels are significant in the Greek language. – this seems... trivial. What am I missing?
• The syllabical Linear B script – link and gloss "syllabical".
• was carried over by Greek colonists to the Italian peninsula – when?
• as the Romans expanded their empire – strictly speaking, Roman expansion happened before the Roman Empire even existed. Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars were certainly expansive, but occurred during the late Roman Republic.
• Even after the fall of the Roman state – this is not a great phrasing. I'm assuming it refers to the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, but it should really be rephrased.
• It eventually became used – "came to be used" is a much more standard phrasing.
• Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet have ligatures – gloss "ligatures".
• such as æ in Danish and Icelandic – shouldn't the links be to the alphabets rather than to the languages?
• Some adaptations [...] foreign words. – this entire paragraph is unsourced.
• Beyond the logographic Chinese writing, many phonetic scripts exist in Asia. The Arabic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet, and other abjads of the Middle East are developments of the Aramaic alphabet. – unsourced.
• Most alphabetic scripts of India and Eastern Asia descend from the Brahmi script, believed to be a descendant of Aramaic. – unsourced.
• In Korea, Sejong the Great created the Hangul alphabet – when? Also missing period.
• Hangul is a unique alphabet: it is a featural alphabet, where design of many of the letters comes from a sound's place of articulation (P to look like the widened mouth, L to look like the tongue pulled in); creation of Hangul was planned by the government of the day; and it places individual letters in syllable clusters with equal dimensions, in the same way as Chinese characters, to allow for mixed-script writing (one syllable always takes up one type-space no matter how many letters get stacked into building that one sound-block). – colon, comma, parenthetical, semicolon, semicolon, comma, comma, parenthetical, period. Split and rewrite the sentence.
• It transcribes Mandarin phonetically 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. However, it is still widely used in Taiwan, where the Republic of China governs. – is the first sentence meant to say that it currently transcribes Mandarin in the Republic of China (Taiwan) or that it used to do so in the Republic of China (1912–1949)? This needs to be rewritten for clarity. Include links to the polities.
• European alphabets, especially Latin and Cyrillic, have been adapted for many languages of Asia. Arabic is also widely used, sometimes as an abjad (as with Urdu and Persian) and sometimes as a complete alphabet (as with Kurdish and Uyghur). – unsourced.

Types

• In a larger sense – when contrasted with "narrower sense", the term to use is "broader", "wider", or looser", not "larger".
• two other types of segmental script, abjads, and abugidas – the second comma is extraneous.
• In Kurdish [...] became logographic. – unsourced.
• one could argue – but does anyone? This needs attribution or at minimum proper sourcing.
• Ironically – definitely a MOS:Word to watch in this context.
• Such scripts are to tone what abjads are to vowels. – this analysis needs to come from the sources.
• thaialphabet.net hardly seems like a reliable source.

Size

• What is this section meant to be about, exactly? It seems to just list a bunch of sizes of different scripts.
• the Hawaiian alphabet claimed to be that small. However, it consists of 18 letters, including the ʻokina and five long vowels – this is unsourced and really comes off as editors arguing in mainspace.
• conflated – why the italics?
• The –or, (em dash, "or", comma) construction is highly conspicuous and used twice.
• The largest known abjad is Sindhi, with 52 letters. The largest alphabets in the narrow sense [...] – this is under the "Abjads" subheading, so surely the latter part is misplaced?
• https://character-table.netlify.com/sk/ is a WP:Dead link, and I doubt if it was reliable in the first place.
• Syllabaries typically contain 50 to 400 glyphs. Glyphs of logographic systems typically number from the many hundreds into the thousands. Thus a simple count of the number of distinct symbols is an important clue to the nature of an unknown script. – unsourced.

Alphabetical order

• Alphabets often come to be associated with a standard ordering of their letters, which is for collation—namely, for the listing words and other items in alphabetical order. – unsourced.
• The ll and ch got considered single letters – "were" or "used to be", not "got".
• but in 1994 the tenth congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies. – incomplete.
• The collating order got changed – was changed.
• in 2010 the Real Academia Española changed it to where they are longer letters at all – missing "no". And probably missing "considered". Perhaps also missing "separate".
• instead of appearing after the initial sz – without explaining what the Eszett is, this is a complete non sequitur.
• Which contrasts several languages – ungrammatical. There are several sentences starting with "Which" in this manner.
• a word like tüfek would come after tuz, in the dictionary – remove the comma.
• travelsignposts.com hardly seems like a reliable source.
• The Danish and Norwegian alphabets end with æ—ø—å, whereas the Swedish and Finnish ones conventionally put å—ä—ö at the end. – missing the rather important context that æ corresponds to ä and ø to ö. Also unsourced.
• Arabic uses its sequence – if "its" refers to Arabic, this is trivially obvious. If it refers to something else, it's unclear.
• Arabic retains the traditional abjadi order for numbering – explain.

Names of letters

• With two exceptions were – anacoluthon.
• which were borrowed from the Greek alphabet rather than Etruscan – earlier in the article it's stated that the Latin alphabet derived from the Greek alphabet, but this seems to imply that it largely derived from the Etruscan alphabet. This is in fact the first mention of the Etruscan alphabet in the article.
• study.com does not appear to be a reliable source.
• language-translation-help.com does not appear to be a reliable source.
• masterrussian.com does not appear to be a reliable source.
• Letters of the Armenian alphabet also have distinct letter names. – that doesn't seem especially surprising. Is there any particular reason to mention this?
• This is certainly not a reliable source.

Orthography and pronunciation

• a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a speaker would always know the pronunciation of a word given its spelling, and vice versa – "and vice versa" is completely redundant here.
• However, this ideal is usually never achieved in practice. – "usually never" is a self-contradiction.
• Writing systems have gotten borrowed for languages they did not design to have in mind. – "they did not design to have in mind"?
• A language may use different sets of symbols or rules for distinct vocabulary items. – explain.
• The Japanese hiragana and katakana syllabaries. The rules in English for spelling words from Latin and Greek. Along with rules in the original Germanic vocabulary. – each of these sentences is incomplete and borderline incomprehensible.
• French, with its silent letters and its heavy use of nasal vowels and elision, may seem to lack much correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, it's rules on pronunciation, though complex, are actually consistent and predictable with a fair degree of accuracy. – needs copyediting for readability and grammar.
• and when Kazakh changed from an Arabic script to a Cyrillic script due to the Soviet Union's influence, and in 2021, having a transition to the Latin alphabet, just like Turkish. – anacoluthon.
• The standard system of symbols used by linguists to represent sounds in any language, independently of orthography, is called the International Phonetic Alphabet. – unsourced.

Summary

GA review – see WP:WIAGA for criteria

1. Is it well written?

   A. The prose is clear and concise, and the spelling and grammar are correct:

   Lots of copyediting needed.

   B. It complies with the manual of style guidelines for lead sections, layout, words to watch, fiction, and list incorporation:

   See my comments above.

2. Is it verifiable with no original research?

   A. It contains a list of all references (sources of information), presented in accordance with the layout style guideline:

   B. All in-line citations are from reliable sources, including those for direct quotations, statistics, published opinion, counter-intuitive or controversial statements that are challenged or likely to be challenged, and contentious material relating to living persons—science-based articles should follow the scientific citation guidelines:

   Spotchecking reveals several unreliable sources.

   C. It contains no original research:

   Large portions of the article are unsourced.

   D. It contains no copyright violations nor plagiarism:

   Earwig reveals no overt copyvio. Because the article will need to be extensively rewritten before it can be promoted to WP:Good article status, I have not checked for WP:Close paraphrasing at this point.

3. Is it broad in its coverage?

   A. It addresses the main aspects of the topic:

   The Etruscan alphabet is just namechecked, as an example (for comparison, Britannica devotes three paragraphs to it). I'm also missing any information about directionality.

   B. It stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style):

   See my comments about the "Size" section above.

4. Is it neutral?

   It represents viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each:

   The article does not clearly distinguish between fact and opinion.

5. Is it stable?

   It does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute:

6. Is it illustrated, if possible, by images?

   A. Images are tagged with their copyright status, and valid non-free use rationales are provided for non-free content:

   All media are public domain or use licenses that are acceptable per WP:CFAQ.

   B. Images are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions:

   There is an excess of images to the point of redundancy, as noted above.

7. Overall:

   Pass or Fail:

   This is far from ready and qualifies for a WP:QUICKFAIL.

@SomeoneOK: I'm closing this as unsuccessful. The list of issues above is not exhaustive, but a sample of issues I noted while reading through the article. I don't think this can be brought up to WP:Good article standards within a reasonable time frame. I gather that you are fairly new to this, and I don't want to discourage you from contributing to Wikipedia. To that end, I'll suggest WP:Peer review as a a more appropriate venue to bring this article to at this stage to get feedback and suggestions for improving the article. You may also wish to consult the WP:Guild of Copy Editors. I will add some maintenance templates to the article. TompaDompa (talk) 06:33, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Deleting/Moving the Size Section.

It seems out of place; it got stated in the earlier review, and a random section into the sizes of scripts I don't think is particularly needed. It's just four paragraphs, albeit on topic about size. It is not with the article. I wanted to discuss this before taking action this large. SomeoneOK (talk) 13:31, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

Short summary

The current (new) short summary,

Standardized set of letters

seems to me to be a poor reflection of the main theme of the article. If you are a computer scientist, say, this is a totally adequate definition of an alphabet, but the focus of the article is on the alphabets used in writing by various cultures. Standardization is not an essential feature here (though, of course, without some degree of standardization, it is not really an alphabet). I think keywords like "writing", "symbols", "glyphs", "phonemes" would be expected in the summary. Suggestions? Or arguments why the current summary is the right one? If brevity is of the essence, I think the word "standardized" could be omitted. Nø (talk) 15:56, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

See the purpose section of Wikipedia:Short description. One thing its purpose is expressly not: "A short description is not a definition, and editors should not attempt to define the article's subject nor to summarise the lead." (It's OK if it also works as a definition, but that isn't the goal.) Further, "... avoid jargon, and use simple, readily comprehensible terms that do not require pre-existing detailed knowledge of the subject." Short descriptions aren't intended to recapitulate the content of the article to the extent you seem to have in mind.

As for "standardized", perhaps there's a better word, but an alphabet isn't just any set of letters. The set of letters {R, J, Q} isn't the alphabet of any language. Perhaps "Set of letters used to write a given language" would be suitable. Largoplazo (talk) 17:48, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

I think your latter suggestion would be an improvement. Nø (talk) 22:59, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Alphabet/GA3. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Benji man (talk · contribs) 19:42, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

GA review (see here for what the criteria are, and here for what they are not)

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a. (prose, spelling, and grammar):

   There are quite a few fragmentary sentences (incomplete sentences without a subject and a verb).

   The order of sections seems random.

   b. (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists):

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a. (reference section):

   Claims are appropriately sourced.

   b. (citations to reliable sources):

   In the long term, it would be good to use more expert sources like academic publications.

   c. (OR):

   d. (copyvio and plagiarism):

   Checked for copyvio, none detected.

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a. (major aspects):

   b. (focused):

   The lead is quite long.

   The History section goes into a lot of detail for something that has an elaborate stand-alone page. I'd suggest cutting it down a lot to a summary of History of the alphabet.

   Most importantly, it's unclear whether this article is about alphabets in the strict sense or writing systems more generally. I think it would be good to focus on just alphabets, maybe with a short section discussing the differences from abjads, abugidas, syllabaries, etc.

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars, etc.:

6. It is illustrated by images and other media, where possible and appropriate.

   a. (images are tagged and non-free content have non-free use rationales):

   b. (appropriate use with suitable captions):

7. Overall:

   Pass/fail:

   I think the article needs some substantial work before making GA status. There are a lot of relevant articles that it refers to, so it can be edited down to a more concise and more focused overview of alphabets proper. The prose also has to be brought in line throughout the article. I'm pretty interested in the subject and it's an important article, so if nobody minds, I'll probably start making some edits of my own over the coming time (subject to discussion, of course!). Hopefully we'll be able to get this to Good Article soon!

(Criteria marked are unassessed)

Wiki Education assignment: Linguistics in the Digital Age

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 21 August 2023 and 11 December 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Vberlucchi (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Fedfed2 (talk) 00:53, 9 December 2023 (UTC)

Umm Al Marra

A somewhat new study found that the alphabetical writings found at the archaeological site of Umm el-Marra could be the oldest in the world. I'm kinda shocked that this article doesn't mention them.

https://hub.jhu.edu/2021/07/13/alphabetic-writing-500-years-earlier-glenn-schwartz/

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2274831-the-alphabet-may-have-been-invented-500-years-earlier-than-we-thought/

"However, correspondences between the symbols on the cylinders and Early Alphabetic Semitic characters can be noted. It might therefore be hypothesized that the Umm el-Marra cylinders represent a very early manifestation of alphabetic writing."

It is not 100% confirmed yet that these writings were alphabetical.

George Washington University scholarChristopher Rollston, concluded that they were indeed alphabetical writings.

https://www.academia.edu/46910208/Tell_Umm_el_Marra_Syria_and_Early_Alphabetic_in_the_Third_Millennium_Four_Inscribed_Clay_Cylinders_as_a_Potential_Game_Changer

I believe these writings should be included in the article. Whatsupkarren (talk) 16:44, 21 December 2023 (UTC)