Alphabet

Alphabets form one of the three main types of writing systems. In Europe, there are currently three principal alphabets. English is written using the Roman alphabet. The other two commonly used alphabets in Europe are the Cyrillic and the Greek. Outside Europe, there are many others.

An alphabet is a writing system in which the aim is that one letter stands for one sound of the language. Largely because of historical changes, this aim is not always achieved - English is notoriously a language in which the sounds are not regularly represented by the letters of the alphabet. There are many reasons for this, but three general ones may be mentioned here. First, the sounds of the language have changed since the spellings became fixed (principally during the Great English Vowel Shift). Second, in the earlier periods, scribes spelled the sounds as they heard them - a word might be spelled one way in one part of the country and another way in another part, where the pronunciation was different. Third, after 1066 the words of the Germanic language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons were being written down by scribes whose mother-tongue was French - a Romance language.