alphabets

[Robert Davison]

You should both come to Hong Kong where an alphabet means a single letter of
the same (at least in the eyes/ears of all too many HK students). "Sorry, I
misspelt the alphabets in that word"!!!

 "English letters" is dangerous because it suggests that the English, or at
least anglophones, have some kind of monopoly over their usage, which is not
true. They are also used in Malay, Hawaiian, pinyin Chinese (albeit with
diacritics) and a few dozen more languages I suspect. So I'll go with
alphabet. The fact that the word comes from the first two letters of the
Greek "alphabet" is irrelevant - we have to call it something. If you want
to argue about Cyrillic, you'd better go back to St. Cyril and ask his
opinion. As I see it, variations of the Cyrillic alphabet (not a logical
inconsistency) are used in a variety of languages (an oxymoron, perhaps, but
we'd better not get personal), though no one language has a monopoly on the
entire set. Not all of those languages are slavic - Mongolian and
Azerbaijani also use Cyrillic, so calling it a Russian alphabet does not
help much except to indicate that it is a sub-set of a larger Cyrillic
letter set (in the sense of character sets). Does that help?

Which do you prefer? Mongolian uses the Russian alphabet or the Cyrillic
alphabet?

Robert
isrobert at msmail.is.cphk.hk
City Univ of Hong Kong - Information Systems Dept