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From: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: What's an alphabet?
In-Reply-To: hubey@pegasus.montclair.edu's message of 9 Sep 1996 14:08:58 -0400
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Date: Wed, 11 Sep 1996 19:21:46 GMT
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In article <hubey.842292470@pegasus.montclair.edu> hubey@pegasus.montclair.edu
(H. M. Hubey) writes:

>What's the definition of an alphabet? Does an alphabet have to have signs for
>vowels to be an alphabet? Was the Phonecian alphabet an alphabet?

The generally accepted definition of "alphabet" in *linguistic* contexts (thus
leaving aside the irrelevancies of mathetics, musical notations, and the like)
is a set of arbitrarily ordered symbols representing consonants and vowels.

There are those who disagree that vowels must be included, and thereby number
the Semitic and Indic syllabaries among the alphabets of the world.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
