Letter (alphabet)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"O most ingenious Theuth ... you who are the father of letters ... this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth."--Phaedrus by Plato |
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A letter is a segmental symbol of a phonemic writing system. The inventory of all letters forms the alphabet. Letters broadly correspond to phonemes in the spoken form of the language, although there is rarely a consistent, exact correspondence between letters and phonemes.
The word letter, borrowed from Old French letre, entered Middle English around 1200 AD, eventually displacing the native English term bōcstaf (bookstaff). Letter is descended from the Latin littera, which may have descended from the Greek "διφθέρα" (writing tablet), via Etruscan.
See also
- Abecedarium
- Artificial script
- Character (computing)
- Collation
- Diacritic
- Digraph (orthography)
- Glyph
- Grapheme
- Greek letters used in mathematics
- History of the alphabet
- Letterform
- Letter frequency
- Ligature
- Orthography
- Roman letters used in mathematics
- Typeface
- Typography
- Unicode
