8 Different Alphabets From Around the World.

@des-langues

51 posts

My Personal Goal

My personal goal for this project is to find the similarities and differences between the English alphabet and the written alphabets of 8 other languages from different regions all across the world. For a more specific example, I will look at one word in each language, “hello”, and compare and contrast it with the english hello.

I chose alphabets to compare and contrast for a few different reasons. Alphabets are the first thing someone studies when they take on a new language. Language scripts are codes used to communicate, and they grow and change though time and movement; I find this fascinating. Languages are what I am passionate about. I think that being able to communicate with people in their native language is important and isn’t valued enough in my own local culture. One easy word to learn in most languages is “hello”, and it is a good start to taking notice of another language and it’s alphabet.

What I know about the local equivalent is quite a lot actually! The english alphabet has a long messy history where it has been influenced and tampered with by many people throughout its own time and movement. English is originally from the Germanic branch of languages, much like Dutch, Norwegian, and German. Today however, it bares a closer resemblance to the romance languages due to their influence on English over time, especially French. Being native speakers of english makes international communication easy for Americans. However, there are other languages out there and having an awareness and basic understanding of the differences and similarities of these languages to English is, in my opinion, very important.

Hello in Russian

“Privet!”

Cyrillic Alphabet

This alphabet, invented by St. Cyrillic, dates back to the tenth century. It once consisted of 43 letters. Today however, there are 33 used in modern Russian, which is one of the most widely spoken slavic languages today. Cyrillic is not only used in Russian but is also used in a few other languages that are used in countries formerly part of the USSR such as Ukrainian and Belorussian. Cyrillic is based off of latin so it is similar to english in the way that some of the letters look the same, though many of the letters that look similar to those in the english alphabet have a different sound. By contrast, this alphabet has many different letters that aren’t seen at all in the english alphabet like ф, ц, ч, ш, щ, б, г, д, ж, and з, just to show a few.

In my opinion, Russian is not so different from English. The Russian alphabet is easy for an english speaker to learn and the letters are not as hard to pronounce as other languages can be. To me, Russian sounds like people speaking english backwards, it is my favorite language to try to speak because of how easy and fun it is to pronounce the sounds of this script.

Hello in Korean!

Korean Alphabet!

Also known as Hangeul in South Korea

Hangeul is made up of 24 letters, or symbols. As you can see in the graph above, this alphabet is unique in the way the consonants and vowels combine to make block letters, which makes this alphabet easy to learn. There are nearly 63 million Korean speakers, there are speakers in other countries outside of Korea as well, including China, Japan, and even Russia.

Hangeul is incredibly interesting to me because of the way that the vowels and consonants combine into blocks. This alphabet is the simplest asian alphabet that there is, and it only takes a short time to begin to understand it. This alphabet is very different from the ABCs, in fact none of the symbols are the same, however some of the sounds are. One major similarity between the english alphabet and Hangeul is the direction that it is read today, from left to right. Many years ago however, much like other east asian scripts, Korean was read vertically from right to left. So these two languages don’t have a whole lot in common.

Marhaba! (Hello in Arabic)

Abjad, the arabic script, is also used in other languages including Farsi, urdu, and many other languages as well.

This alphabet is written from right to left which is the opposite of the way that english is written. Some other differences include there being no distinction between upper and lower case letters in Abjad, and the letters change depending on where they are located in a word. In this script, dots are used to show short vowels, but not in everyday Abjad, only in places where pronunciation is important like the Qur’an.

This is my favorite written script. It is beautiful and is often used in islamic art and amazing calligraphy. Arabic is also one of my favorite languages by sound as well, though I particularly love the written alphabet. The letters combine with each other much like the cursive version of the english alphabet. Arabic is a complex language with a much larger vocabulary than most languages which makes communication in this language more clear and the language itself harder to translate.

Shalom! (Hello in Hebrew)

Alefbet, or the hebrew alphabet, is read from right to left like arabic. In fact, these two languages are very similar phonetically. In addition to this, another aspect of alefbet that is different from english is that this languages originally has no vowels. This alphabet has 22 letters and is used for other Jewish languages including Ladino, Yiddish, and more. Modern alefbet used for Hebrew is used mostly in Israel, but also in other middle eastern countries and in Europe and the United States as well by Jewish populations.

Alefbet comes from the Canaanite group of Semitic languages. This alphabet has had many versions throughout time which makes in particularly interesting. It is also a hard alphabet to learn, much like arabic. The pronunciation is difficult with many difficult sounds that are not in english including the same harsh and throaty sounds that are found in the arabic alphabet.

Namaste!

(Hello in Devanagari)

Devanagari is an ancient script that is used today in many languages throughout Asia. In fact, with its use in Hindi alone, a language which has almost 500 million speakers, it is one of the most widely used alphabets in the world. Besides hindi, Devanagari, or Nagari, is used in sanskrit, Nepali, and several other local hindi languages. In fact, the name Devanagari is made of two sanskrit words, Deva, which means “God” and Nagari, which means “of urban origin”.

This language is different from english in almost every way and it is very hard for english speakers to learn because the sounds are so different. There are many symbols in this script that have tiny phonetic differences which is difficult for english speakers to notice or pronounce. For example there are four different ways to pronounce the english “T” sound in hindi and they all sound very similar to the four different ways to pronounce the different “D” sounds. For hindi speakers though, these distinctions are clear and important for communication.

Chaírete! (hello in Greek)

Greek is one of the oldest languages spoken today and has been in use since the 9th century. Like hebrew, this language comes from the Phoenician alphabet, and eventually gave rise to both Latin and Cyrillic. Like Cyrillic, many letters in the Greek alphabet look like those in the Latin alphabet but actually have different sounds. Many english words have come from the Greek language making these languages more similar than others. In fact, about 30% of english words are of greek origin. Therefore Greek is not very difficult for english speakers to learn, especially considering how almost all of the sounds in Greek are also found in English so there are no new difficult pronunciations to learn.

Greek is a much older language that has a huge influence on many modern languages that are seen around the world today. This is one reason that I chose to look at this alphabet. Listening to spoken Greek is much like what I would imagine English sounds like to people who don’t understand it. This alphabet is more closely related to English, English speakers even use the names of some of the letters!

Sawaadee! (hello in thai)

Formerly known as Siamese, Thai is mostly used in Thailand though it is also found in other countries in minority thai populations. It is spoken by about 20 million people in total. It is a tonal language which makes it very different from English. The meaning of sounds can change based on the tone that they are pronounced in. Also, there are different sounds not in english, especially the vowels. However, this language is read from left to right and the letters and not connected to each other, so the alphabet is similar to english in this way.

In my opinion, thai is a funny language. The letters in the thai alphabet are strange and goofy, but the spoken language also sounds strange to English speakers because it is a tonal language but it is noticeably different from more common tonal languages like Chinese.

Tifinagh is an old language used almost exclusively in North Africa today. This script is used in the language Berber. Today, this script is read from left to right, but throughout it’s existences it has been read in every direction including right to left, up to down and down to up. These symbols have changed greatly over time and this is the modern alphabet for Tifinagh, though it still varies from dialect to dialect in different parts of Northern Africa. Countries where this language is used include mostly Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Nigeria, Niger, North Burkina Faso, and even in some parts of Western Egypt.

I chose this uncommon language because the name Tifinagh is said to mean Phoenician. which is the language that so many other languages have come from, including Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabets which are ones I reflected on here. This language was once spoken more widely than it is today, but it has survived to today and I find that amazing.

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(hello in Tifinagh)

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