Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind

Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications

Page 555

554
THE ALPHABET combination, that is schtsch. English has some combinations of two signs for single sounds, such as ch, sh, th, ph.
(3) The new language, in order not to increase the number of its letters, prefers in some instances, to use letters representing two or more sounds; in English, for instance, the letter c is used for two distinct sounds (for the sound k in "cap," "colour," "cursive"; and for the sound s in "cell," "cereal," "cider"), in addition to entering into the combination ch, and replacing the k in ck.
(4) Some languages have prefered to add to the borrowed alphabet signs taken over from another alphabet to represent sounds which could not be expressed by the alphabet mainly adopted; for instance, the Anglo-Saxons, in adopting the Latin alphabet, added to it three new letters, one of which (for the sound th) was borrowed from the runie script.
(5) In other instances, new signs have been invented; the additional letters of the early Greek alphabet in adapting the Semitic alphabet to the Greek speech belong to this group.
(6) In more recent times, the most common way of representing sounds which could not be represented by the letters of the borrowed alphabet, has been the addition of diacritical points or other marks, inserted above or under the letter, to its right or its left or inside it; to this group belong the German vowels is (ue), ä () and ö (re), the French cedilla in c. the n con tilde in Spanish, the accents in Italian (à, i, o, e), but particularly
great number of marks in the Latin-Slavonic scripts (Polish, Czech, Croatian, and so forth), such as č, 4, 5, $, , , , , and many more. The Latin-Turkish alphabet, introduced into Turkey by the law passed in November, 1928, by the Grand National Assembly, and which became general throughout Turkey in 1930, contains 29 letters, of which two vowels (ö and ) and three consonants (c, § and $) are distinguished by diacritical marks, and in one instance there is a distinction in reverse that is by eliminating the dot from i(t) a new sound is represented. In the scientific phonetic alphabets, a whole apparatus of diacritical marks is necessary to express the exact distinction of the sounds.
(7) In other cases, new letters had to be invented to represent the long vowels (for instance, in some African languages); this has been done by inserting a colon after the vowel, also reversed and upside-down letters are employed; in this connection mention may be made of K. R. Lepsius's Standard Alphabet, of 1855, and the studies of E. Norris, Librarian of the Foreign Office, H. Sweet, Melville Bell (Visible Speech), and Sir William Hunter, the authority on the Indian languages, as well as the works by O. Jespersen, D. Jones and P. Passy.