Alphabet

An alphabet is a way of writing in which individual letters represent sounds. Most languages use alphabets, but not all: Chinese is famous for its ideograms, and Japanese uses a mixture of Chinese characters, two syllabaries, with a smattering of the Roman alphabet for foreign words. But an alphabet is the most convenient way of representing verbal sounds. The Korean alphabet is arranged to look rather like Chinese characters, but it is completely phonetic. This is however not the case with most alphabets, and the International Phonetic Alphabet, based on the Roman alphabet that most languages use, is the one used to represent the sounds of any language. Other famous alphabets are the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets, related to the Roman, and the completely unrelated Arabic alphabet, used among others for that language and Persian.