"In a syllabary, each character represents a syllable, and logographic systems use characters to represent words, morphemes, or other semantic units."
An alphabet is a finite set of symbols, while a language is a set of words (strings) built from symbols in an alphabet.
Linguistics: The scientific study of language and its structure.
Phonetics: The study of the physical properties of speech sounds.
Phonology: The study of the sound system of a language.
Morphology: The study of the structure of words and how they are formed.
Syntax: The study of the structure of sentences and how they are formed.
Semantics: The study of the meaning of words and sentences.
Pragmatics: The study of the use of language in context.
Orthography: The study of the conventional spelling system of a language.
Typology: The study of the similarities and differences among the world's languages.
Historical linguistics: The study of the evolution of languages over time.
Sociolinguistics: The study of the relationship between language and society.
Language acquisition: The study of how individuals acquire a first or second language.
Language teaching: The study of how to teach a language to others.
Writing systems: The study of different scripts and writing systems, such as the Latin alphabet, Arabic script, and Chinese characters.
Dialectology: The study of the differences in language use among speakers of the same language in different regions or social groups.
Latin Alphabet: The Latin Alphabet is a writing system that is widely used in the Western world. It consists of 26 letters and is used to write many different languages including English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and many more.
Arabic Alphabet: The Arabic Alphabet is an abjad writing system used to write the Arabic language. It consists of 28 letters and is read from right to left.
Cyrillic Alphabet: The Cyrillic Alphabet is a writing system used to write many different Slavic languages such as Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, and many more. It consists of 33 letters and has roots in the Greek alphabet.
Devanagari Alphabet: Devanagari is an abugida writing system used to write Hindi, Sanskrit, and many other languages of the Indian subcontinent. It consists of 46 letters and is read from left to right.
Chinese Characters: The Chinese writing system uses characters or symbols to represent words and concepts. The symbols are known as Hanzi and are a logographic writing system used to write modern standard Chinese, as well as many other varieties of Chinese.
Hebrew Alphabet: The Hebrew Alphabet is a writing system used to write Hebrew and Yiddish. It consists of 22 letters and is read from right to left.
Japanese Scripts: There are three writing systems used in Japanese: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana and katakana are syllabic writing systems, while kanji uses characters borrowed from Chinese.
Thai Alphabet: The Thai Alphabet consists of 44 consonants, 15 vowel symbols, and four tone marks. It is used to write the Thai language and is read from left to right.
Hangul: Hangul is the Korean language writing system. It consists of 24 letters, 14 consonants, and 10 vowels, and is read from left to right.
Tengwar Alphabet: The Tengwar Alphabet is a fictional writing system created by J.R.R. Tolkien for his books The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It is used to write the Elvish languages in his books.
"The short uniliteral signs are used to write pronunciation guides for logograms, or a character that represents a word, or morpheme, and later on, being used to write foreign words."
"The Proto-Sinaitic script, which developed into the Phoenician alphabet, is considered to be the first alphabet and is the ancestor of most modern alphabets, abjads, and abugidas..."
"It was created by Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in the Sinai Peninsula in modern-day Egypt..."
"...an abugida, a set of graphemes that represent consonantal base letters that diacritics modify to represent vowels, like in Devanagari and other South Asian scripts, an abjad, in which letters predominantly or exclusively represent consonants such as the original Phoenician, Hebrew or Arabic, and an alphabet, a set of graphemes that represent both consonants and vowels."
"The first true alphabet was the Greek alphabet, which was based on the earlier Phoenician abjad."
"Alphabets are usually associated with a standard ordering of letters. This makes them useful for purposes of collation, which allows words to be sorted in a specific order, commonly known as the alphabetical order."
"It also means that their letters can be used as an alternative method of 'numbering' ordered items, in such contexts as numbered lists and number placements."
"There are also names for letters in some languages. This is known as acrophony; It is present in some modern scripts, such as Greek, and many Semitic scripts, such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac."
"However, this system is not present in all languages, such as the Latin alphabet, which adds a vowel after a character for each letter."
"Some systems also used to have this system but later on abandoned it for a system similar to Latin, such as Cyrillic." Note: The selected quotes may be slightly edited for clarity or brevity.