Alphabet: Latin, Greek, Arabic alphabet - for kids

The 26-letter alphabet is not large enough for some of these languages, and accent marks are added to the letters to show differences in pronunciation. In French, accented letters include è, é, á and ç; and in German ü and ö. Additional letters may be used, such as the German ß (which stands for ss) and the Danish Ø. Some languages use a Roman alphabet of less than 26 letters. Serbo-Croat dispenses with q, w, x and y; the Hawaiian language uses only 12 letters.

There are several other alphabets in common use. The Greek alphabet has 24 letters. It is used only in Greece, although scientists use the letters as symbols in their work. The word 'alphabet' comes from its first two letters: A (alpha) and  (beta). Russians and other Slavs use the Cyrillic alphabet, which was developed from Greek about 1,100 years ago. Gaelic is written with an alphabet of 18 letters derived from the Roman alphabet. All these alphabets contain symbols for vowels and consonants. But the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets have symbols for consonants only. Vowels are indicated only by accent marks, and often never used at all.

Some languages can be written in two alphabets. Serbo-Croat is written in the Roman alphabet in one part of Yugoslavia and in the Cyrillic alphabet in another. And alphabets have been changed. In 1928, the Turks changed from using the Arabic alphabet to a Roman alphabet. New phonetic alphabets have now been designed to help children learn to read. There are other types of alphabets, for example Morse code is a Marine alphabet.

Alphabet: Latin, Greek, Arabic alphabet - for kids

A comparison of the characters in the Latin, Hebrew, Greek, Cyrillic and Arabic alphabets