How many letters are used in the French alphabet?
36392718#0
French Braille is the original braille alphabet, and the basis of all others. The alphabetic order of French has become the basis of the international braille convention, used by most braille alphabets around the world. However, only the 25 basic letters of the French alphabet plus "w" have become internationalized; the additional letters are largely restricted to French Braille and the alphabets of some neighboring European countries.
French Braille
36392718#12
In general, only the assignments of the basic 26 letters of the French alphabet are retained in other braille alphabets. For example, among the additional letters, in German Braille only "ü" and "ö" coincide with French Braille. However, there are several alphabets which are much more closely related. Italian Braille is identical to the French apart from doubling up French Braille "ò" to Italian "ó" and "ò", since French has no "ó". Indeed, a principal difference of these alphabets is the remapping of French vowels with a grave accent ("à è ì ò ù") to an acute accent ("á é í ó ú"), as the French alphabet does not support acute accents apart from "é". Spanish changes all five of these vowels, as well as taking "ü". Portuguese Braille is also very similar to the French, though the shift of grave to acute accents necessitated a chain of other changes, such as circumflex to grave, and the Portuguese tildes were taken from French diaereses (Portuguese "ã õ" for French "ä ö/œ"). The continental Scandinavian languages took the extended French letters "â" (for "å"), "ä/æ", and "ö/ø". Vietnamese Braille is also quite similar, though it has added tone letters, and according uses French "z" for "d", which is pronounced like "z".
French Braille
2102415#1
The French alphabet is based on the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, uppercase and lowercase, with five diacritics and two orthographic ligatures.
The letters and are rarely used except in loanwords and regional words. The phoneme sound is usually written ; the sound is usually written anywhere but before , before , and sometimes at the ends of words. However, is common in the metric prefix kilo- (originally from Greek "khilia" "a thousand"): "kilogramme, kilomètre, kilowatt, kilohertz," etc.
French orthography
3933#15
Under international consensus, most braille alphabets follow the French sorting order for the 26 letters of the basic Latin alphabet, and there have been attempts at unifying the letters beyond these 26 (see international braille), though differences remain, for example in German Braille and the contractions of English Braille. This unification avoids the chaos of each nation reordering the braille code to match the sorting order of its print alphabet, as happened in Algerian Braille, where braille codes were numerically reassigned to match the order of the Arabic alphabet and bear little relation to the values used in other countries (compare modern Arabic Braille, which uses the French sorting order), and as happened in an early American version of English Braille, where the letters "w, x, y, z" were reassigned to match English alphabetical order. A convention sometimes seen for letters beyond the basic 26 is to exploit the physical symmetry of braille patterns iconically, for example, by assigning a reversed "n" to "ñ" or an inverted "s" to "sh". (See Hungarian Braille and Bharati Braille, which do this to some extent.)
Braille
28748235#0
Many local variants of the Greek alphabet were employed in ancient Greece during the archaic and early classical periods, until they were replaced by the classical 24-letter alphabet that is the standard today, around 400 BC. All forms of the Greek alphabet were originally based on the shared inventory of the 22 symbols of the Phoenician alphabet, with the exception of the letter Samekh, whose Greek counterpart Xi () was used only in a sub-group of Greek alphabets, and with the common addition of Upsilon () for the vowel . The local, so-called "epichoric", alphabets differed in many ways: in the use of the consonant symbols , and ; in the use of the innovative long vowel letters ( and ), in the absence or presence of Η in its original consonant function (); in the use or non-use of certain archaic letters ( = , = , = ); and in many details of the individual shapes of each letter. The system now familiar as the standard 24-letter Greek alphabet was originally the regional variant of the Ionian cities in Asia Minor. It was officially adopted in Athens in 403 BC and in most of the rest of the Greek world by the middle of the 4th century BC.
Archaic Greek alphabets
467946#2
The modern German alphabet consists of the twenty-six letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet plus four special letters.German uses three letter-diacritic combinations (Ä/ä, Ö/ö, Ü/ü) using the umlaut and one ligature (ß (called "Eszett" (sz) or "scharfes S", sharp s)) which are officially considered distinct letters of the alphabet.While the Council for German Orthography considers Ä/ä, Ö/ö, Ü/ü, and ẞ/ß distinct letters, disagreement on how to categorize and count them has led to a dispute over the exact number of letters the German alphabet has, the number ranging between 26 (special letters are considered variants of A, O, U, and S) and 30 (all special letters are counted separately).
German orthography
3675310#3
The basic Roman alphabet is used by about one hundred languages, with slight variations. Some versions contain as few as twenty-one characters, some as many as thirty. Letters have specific names associated with them, which may differ with language, dialect, and history. "Z", for example, is usually called "zed" in all English-speaking countries except the US, where it is named "zee". As elements of alphabets, letters have prescribed orders, although this too may vary by language. In Spanish, for instance, "ñ" is a separate letter, sorted after "n". In English, "n" and "ñ" are classified alike.
Letter (alphabet)
5641#5
The word consonant is also used to refer to a letter of an alphabet that denotes a consonant sound. The 21 consonant letters in the English alphabet are B, C, D, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, Z, and usually W and Y. The letter Y stands for the consonant in "yoke", the vowel in "myth", the vowel in "funny", and the diphthong in "my". W always represents a consonant except in combination with a vowel letter, as in "growth", "raw", and "how", and in a few loanwords from Welsh, like "crwth" or "cwm".
Consonant
1440834#1
It encodes every "abstract" single letter of the basic Arabic alphabet, not every concrete visual form of isolated, initial, medial, final or ligatured letter shape variants (i.e. it encodes characters, not glyphs). The Arabic letters in the C0-FF range are in Arabic alphabetic order, but some Latin characters are interspersed among them. These are some Windows-1252 Latin characters used for French, since this European language has some historic relevance in former French colonies in North Africa such as Morocco and Algeria. This allowed French and Arabic text to be intermixed when using Windows 1256 without any need for code-page switching (however, upper-case letters with diacritics were not included).
Windows-1256
5416212#6
During the French Indochina, they introduced a Jarai alphabet using the Vietnamese alphabet at the beginning of the 20th century. With the introduction of the Bible in Jarai language, using that alphabet by Christian missionaries in Vietnam after the Vietnamese War, the Jarai increased their literacy and there are today many publications for the Vietnamese Jarai. There are 40 letters - 21 consonants + 19 vowels / 34 phonemes - 9 vowel phonemes + 25 consonant phonemes.
Jarai language