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unusual facts about alphabet



African reference alphabet

An African reference alphabet was first proposed in 1978 by a UNESCO-organized conference held in Niamey, Niger, and the proposed alphabet was revised in 1982.

Alef

Aleph, the reconstructed name of the first letter of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet

Alphabet Fleet

The last of the Alphabet Fleet was SS Meigle, built in Glasgow, Scotland in 1886 as Solway by the firm Barclay Curle and Co.

Alveolar fricative

Voiced alveolar fricative, written as z in English and the International Phonetic Alphabet

Assyrian script

Eastern Syriac alphabet (sometimes called the Assyrian alphabet), a variant of the Syriac alphabet

Azerbaijani language

If written in the Latin alphabet, all foreign words are transliterated, for example, "Bush" becomes "Buş", and "Schröder" becomes "Şröder".

Bitche

The town of Bitche was mentioned in BBC comedy panel game QI, in episode 9 of season 3 (or series "C", as the show refers to the series by letters of the alphabet).

Bodo language

Kalaguru Bishnu Prasad Rabha gathered a few specimen of the Deodhai alphabet from an informant of Dimapur area which was noted for the Kachari reign an remains representing the art and architecture.

Byblos syllabary

Malachi Martin read the body of characters as an alphabet and categorized the various signs into 27 "classes".

C Is For Cookie

According to the Muppet Central articles on the Songs from the Street Boxed Set, people really like cookies and,"In 1971, Jim Henson and his performers teamed with Jerry Juhl, Joe Raposo and Jeff Moss to write a sketch on each letter of the alphabet".

Cadmus of Miletus

A confused notice in the Suda mentions three persons of the name: the first, the inventor of the alphabet; the second, the son of Pandion, according to some the first prose writer, a little later than Orpheus, author of a history of the foundation of Miletus and of Ionia generally, in four books; the third, the son of Archelaus, of later date, author of a history of Attica in fourteen books, and of some poems of an erotic character.

Coelbren

Coelbren y Beirdd, a supposed "druidic" alphabet invented by forger Iolo Morganwg (1747-1826)

Deaf education in Kenya

Many Kenyan schools for the deaf were founded by those educated in the United States, such as Andrew Foster, an American missionary, and Michael Ndurumo, who introduced the use of the ASL manual alphabet, as well as many interpreters and volunteers associated with them.

Ė

This character is also used when transliterating the Cyrillic letter Э э into the Latin alphabet.

English Qabalah

The first appearance of a system of gematria using the natural order of the English alphabet was developed in 1532 by Michael Stifel, who also proposed a system called the trigonal alphabet, using successive triangular numbers.

Eucla, Western Australia

The station was important as a conversion point because South Australia and Victoria used American Morse code (locally known as the Victorian alphabet) while Western Australia used the international Morse code that is familiar today.

Fehu

The rune derives from the unattested but reconstructed Proto-Germanic *fehu in the Elder Futhark alphabet, with the original meaning of "money, cattle, wealth".

Gjergj Fishta

Participants of the congress accepted Fishta's proposal for the Latin Bashkimi alphabet to be the standard Albanian alphabet, rejecting proposals that the Arabic alphabet be used.

GSM 03.40

Some ASCII characters and the Euro sign did not fit into the GSM 7 bit default alphabet and must be encoded using two septets.

Hebrew alphabet

The original old Hebrew script is known as the paleo-Hebrew script (which has been largely preserved, in an altered form, in the Samaritan script), while the present "square" form of the Hebrew alphabet is a stylized form of the Assyrian script.

History of sign language

Sign language is composed of a system of conventional gestures, mimic, hand signs and finger spelling, plus the use of hand positions to represent the letters of the alphabet.

Initial Teaching Alphabet

The Initial Teaching Alphabet (or I.T.A. or i.t.a.) was a variant of the Latin alphabet developed by Sir James Pitman (the grandson of Sir Isaac Pitman, inventor of a system of shorthand) in the early 1960s.

Jan van Eyck

This is supported by records of an inscription from Ovid's Ars Amatoria, which was on the now-lost original frame of the Arnolfini Portrait, and by the many Latin inscriptions in van Eyck paintings, using the Roman alphabet, then reserved for educated men.

Kazakh alphabets

In the nineteenth century, Ibrahim Altynsarin, a prominent Kazakh educator, first introduced a Cyrillic alphabet for transcribing Kazakh.

Lasdon Park and Arboretum

William and Mildred Lasdon Memorial Garden (0.4 ha / 1 acre) - an entrance court with a fragrance garden; a formal garden with boxwood hedges, heather, flowering annuals and bulbs, and a central fountain; and a synoptic garden featuring hundreds of shrubs whose names represent every letter in the alphabet, from "A" (Abelia) through "Z" (Zenobia).

Letter B

B, the second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet

Linden Lodge School

Linden Lodge was the first school in the UK to use the Perkins Upward Brailler to enable their students to type using the Braille alphabet.

Logic alphabet

The considerable aesthetic appeal of the logic alphabet has led to exhibitions of Zellweger's work at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, among other places.

Magna Graecia

The most important cultural transplant was the Chalcidean/Cumaean variety of the Greek alphabet, which was adopted by the Etruscans; the Old Italic alphabet subsequently evolved into the Latin alphabet, which became the most widely used alphabet in the world.

Ṇaviyani

This letter does not appear on Thaana tables printed after the 1950s and should not be confused with letter Gnaviyani or Nyaviyani, the 16th consonant of the present-day Maldivian alphabet, after which an administrative atoll was named.

Old English alphabet

Anglo-Saxon runes (futhorc), a runic alphabet used to write Old English from the 5th century

Old Permic alphabet

The alphabet derived from Cyrillic and Greek, and Komi tribal signs, the latter being similar in the appearance to runes or siglas poveiras, because they were created by incisions, rather than by usual writing.

Ostroh Castle

A building used to stand in the same location, in which the "Azbuka" (alphabet) and the Ostrog Bible were printed by Ivan Fedorov.

Rate–distortion theory

The Blahut–Arimoto algorithm, co-invented by Richard Blahut, is an elegant iterative technique for numerically obtaining rate–distortion functions of arbitrary finite input/output alphabet sources and much work has been done to extend it to more general problem instances.

Sabaeans

They left behind many inscriptions in the monumental Musnad (Old South Arabian) alphabet, as well as numerous documents in the cursive Zabūr script.

Saucony

Sue Grafton's Alphabet Series' lead character, Kinsey Millhone, is a dedicated wearer of Saucony athletic shoes.

Schwa

Ellis, in his palæotype alphabet, used it for the similar English sound in but.

Sinhala alphabet

Today, the alphabet is used by approximately 16,000,000 people to write the Sinhalese language in very diverse contexts, such as newspapers, TV commercials, government announcements, graffiti, and schoolbooks.

Slavica alphabet

The new alphabet was tested in 1988 and 1989 by students from the primary school Mate Balota in Buje, Croatia.

Slovene alphabet

This modern alphabet (abeceda) was standardised in mid-1840s from an arrangement of the Croatian national reviver and leader Ljudevit Gaj that would become the Croatian alphabet, and was in turn patterned on the Czech alphabet.

Solano Avenue

Various live bands, most local, have played sets at the Stroll, with notable past musicians including RatDog drummer/Primus co-founder Jay Lane (with jam side project Alphabet Soup) and Marc Biedermann (founder of Blind Illusion, and former bassist for thrash metal band Heathen).

Stitching awl

The accident spurred Braille to the invention of the famous Braille alphabet.

The Alphabet from A to Y with Bonus Letter Z

The Alphabet From A to Y with Bonus Letter Z! is a children's book aimed at infants and preschoolers containing couplets written by comedian, writer, and humorist Steve Martin, with illustrations by New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast.

The Comics We Loved, Selection of 20th Century Comics and Creators from the Region of Former Yugoslavia

"In this book, these intrepid, discriminating compilers have realised an exceptional achievement by combing diligently through thousands of pages of comics and comics reviews to distil a captivating alphabet of artists and writers who have shaped and enhanced not only the comics of their homeland but in several cases the comics of the world." — Paul Gravett, writer, curator, international comics historian, director of Comica Festival, London

The Lays of Beleriand

There is an inscription in the Fëanorian characters (Tengwar, an alphabet Tolkien has devised for High-Elves) in the first pages of every History of Middle-earth volume, written by Christopher Tolkien and describing the contents of the book.

The Plane Train

The 2006 recordings were the first to use the phonetic alphabet, and were provided by the voice of Susan Bennett (who is best known today for being the voice of Siri on Apple's iPhone, as well as the female voice of Delta Air Lines' gate boarding announcements at the airport).

Tifinagh

The independent rebel Libya TV, based in Qatar, has included the Berber language and the Tifinagh alphabet in some of its programming.

Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny

Ultima V used a modified form of the Elder Futhark runic alphabet for some game text, adding some letters to make a complete one-to-one correspondence with the English alphabet (plus a few runes to represent some common two-letter combinations).


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