How many letters are used in the French alphabet?
Braille
Under international consensus, most braille alphabets follow the French sorting order for the 26 letters of the basic Latin alphabet, and there have been attempts at unifying the letters beyond these 26 (see international braille), though differences remain, for example in German Braille and the contractions of English Braille. This unification avoids the chaos of each nation reordering the braille code to match the sorting order of its print alphabet, as happened in Algerian Braille, where braille codes were numerically reassigned to match the order of the Arabic alphabet and bear little relation to the values used in other countries (compare modern Arabic Braille, which uses the French sorting order), and as happened in an early American version of English Braille, where the letters "w, x, y, z" were reassigned to match English alphabetical order. A convention sometimes seen for letters beyond the basic 26 is to exploit the physical symmetry of braille patterns iconically, for example, by assigning a reversed "n" to "ñ" or an inverted "s" to "sh". (See Hungarian Braille and Bharati Braille, which do this to some extent.)
Braille
In addition, there are ten patterns that are based on the first two letters () shifted to the right; these were assigned to non-French letters ("ì ä ò" ), or serve non-letter functions: (superscript; in English the accent mark), (currency prefix), (capital, in English the decimal point), (number sign), (emphasis mark), (symbol prefix).
Esperanto
The 28-letter alphabet is:
All unaccented letters are pronounced approximately as in the IPA, with the exception of "c". Esperanto "j" and "c" are used in a way familiar to speakers of many European languages, but which is largely unfamiliar to English speakers: "j" has a "y" sound [j~i̯], as in yellow" and "boy," and "c" has a "ts" sound [t͡s], as in "hits or the "zz" in "pizza". The accented letters are a bit like "h"-digraphs in English: "Ĉ" is pronounced like English "ch", and "ŝ" like "sh". "Ĝ" is the "g" in gem", "ĵ" a "zh" sound, as in "fusion" or French Jacques", and the rare "ĥ" is like the German , Scottish Gaelic, Scots and Scottish Standard English "loch, or how Scouse people sometimes pronounce the 'k' in "book and 'ck' in "chicken".
Sampi
In the alphabetic numeral system, which was probably invented in Miletus and is therefore sometimes called the "Milesian" system, there are 27 numeral signs: the first nine letters of the alphabet, from alpha (A) to theta (Θ) stand for the digits 1–9; the next nine, beginning with iota (Ι), stand for the multiples of ten (10, 20, etc. up to 90); and the last nine, beginning with rho (Ρ), stand for the hundreds (100 – 900). For this purpose, the 24 letters of the standard classical Greek alphabet were used with the addition of three archaic or local letters: digamma/"wau" (Ϝ, , originally denoting the sound ) for "6", koppa (Ϙ, originally denoting the sound ) for "90", and sampi for "900". While digamma and koppa were retained in their original alphabetic positions inherited from Phoenician, the third archaic Phoenician character, san/tsade (Ϻ, denoting an sound), was not used in this way. Instead, sampi was chosen, and added at the end of the system, after omega (800).
French orthography
French digraphs and trigraphs have both historical and phonological origins. In the first case, it is a vestige of the spelling in the word's original language (usually Latin or Greek) maintained in modern French, for example, the use of in words like "téléphone", in words like "théorème", or in "chaotique". In the second case, a digraph is due to an archaic pronunciation, such as , , , , and , or is merely a convenient way to expand the twenty-six-letter alphabet to cover all relevant phonemes, as in , , , , , and . Some cases are a mixture of these or are used for purely pragmatic reasons, such as for in "il mangeait" ('he ate'), where the serves to indicate a "soft" inherent in the verb's root.
UTF-8
The first 128 characters (US-ASCII) need one byte. The next 1,920 characters need two bytes to encode, which covers the remainder of almost all Latin-script alphabets, and also Greek, Cyrillic, Coptic, Armenian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Thaana and N'Ko alphabets, as well as Combining Diacritical Marks. Three bytes are needed for characters in the rest of the Basic Multilingual Plane, which contains virtually all characters in common use including most Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters. Four bytes are needed for characters in the other planes of Unicode, which include less common CJK characters, various historic scripts, mathematical symbols, and emoji (pictographic symbols).
International uniformity of braille alphabets
Braille is in its origin a numeric code. Louis Braille applied the characters in numerical order to the French alphabet in alphabetical order. As braille spread to other languages, the numeric order was retained and applied to the local script. Therefore, where the alphabetical order differed from that of French, the new braille alphabet would be incompatible with French Braille. For example, French was based on a 25-letter alphabet without a "w". When braille was adopted for English in the United States, the letters were applied directly to the English alphabet, so that braille letter of French "x" became English "w", French "y" became English "x", French "z" English "y", and French "ç" English "z". In the United Kingdom, however, French Braille was adopted without such reordering. Therefore, any English book published in braille needed to be typeset separately for the United States and the United Kingdom. Similarly, the letters Egyptian Arabic Braille were assigned their forms based on their nearest French equivalents, so that for example Arabic "d" had the same braille letters as French "d". For Algerian Arabic Braille, however, the braille characters were assigned to the Arabic alphabet according to the Arabic alphabetical order, so that Algerian "d" was the same character as Egyptian "h". Thus an Arabic book published in Algeria was utterly unintelligible to blind Egyptians and vice versa.
Mising language
Sound and orthography of a language remains always the academic concern, which is invariably taught in regular classes in progression right from the scratch. Students should be given a most careful training in the rules of spelling and in writing under dictation.
Thus, twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet with their names and orders are adopted as the scripts of the Standard Mising Language, to transcript 40 sounds of the language – eight vowel with seven of their long variety and twenty-five consonants. The alphabet ‘h’ preceded by a vowel gives rise to long-sound of the vowels such as ah, eh, ih etc., and while succeeded by a consonant corresponds to its aspirate value, such as bh, dh, gh etc.; so also fricative or affricative in case of ‘s’ or ‘c’, such as sh or ch respectively. The ‘h’ otherwise represents its conventional phoneme.
Name & Order of Alphabets
Name-letter effect
Cross-lingual studies were performed at 13 European universities, using 12 different languages, viz. Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek (the only one with a non-Roman alphabet), Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish. Because the original yoked design did not lend itself well to long-distance research and standardization, it was replaced by a simpler, easier to replicate experimental design. Subjects were asked to mark the six capital letters they liked most in a randomized list containing all letters of the local alphabet, again without giving it much thought. They had to mark their first preference with 1, their second with 2, etc. The new method was first applied in Belgium. When results showed the name-letter effect at work again, it was copied in the other countries. A total of 2,047 subjects participated, all students.
German orthography
The modern German alphabet consists of the twenty-six letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet plus four special letters.German uses three letter-diacritic combinations (Ä/ä, Ö/ö, Ü/ü) using the umlaut and one ligature (ß (called "Eszett" (sz) or "scharfes S", sharp s)) which are officially considered distinct letters of the alphabet.While the Council for German Orthography considers Ä/ä, Ö/ö, Ü/ü, and ẞ/ß distinct letters, disagreement on how to categorize and count them has led to a dispute over the exact number of letters the German alphabet has, the number ranging between 26 (special letters are considered variants of A, O, U, and S) and 30 (all special letters are counted separately).
Braille
The first ten letters of the alphabet, "a–j," use the upper four dot positions: (black dots in the table below). These stand for the ten digits "1–9" and "0" in a system parallel to Hebrew gematria and Greek isopsephy. (Though the dots are assigned in no obvious order, the cells with the fewest dots are assigned to the first three letters (and lowest digits), "abc = 123" (), and to the three vowels in this part of the alphabet, "aei" (), whereas the even digits, "4, 6, 8, 0" (), are corners/right angles.)
French Braille
In numerical order by decade, the letters are:
For the purposes of accommodating a foreign alphabet, the letters "ì, ä, ò" may be added:
Abkhaz language
Abkhaz has used the Cyrillic script since 1862. The first alphabet was a 37-character Cyrillic alphabet invented by Baron Peter von Uslar. In 1909 a 55-letter Cyrillic alphabet was used. A 75-letter Latin script devised by a Russian/Georgian linguist Nikolai Marr lasted for 2 years 1926–1928 (during the Latinization campaign). The Georgian script was adopted and used in 1938–54 years after was restored the initial Cyrillic alphabet designed in 1892 by Dmitry Gulia together with Konstantin Machavariani and modified in 1909 by Aleksey Chochua.
Alphabet
The Georgian alphabet ( "") is alphabetical writing system. It is the largest true alphabet where each letter is graphically independent with 33 letters. Original Georgian alphabet had 38 letters but 5 letters were removed in 19th century by Ilia Chavchavadze. The Georgian alphabet is much closer to Greek than the other Caucasian alphabets. The numeric value runs parallel to the Greek one, the consonants without a Greek equivalent are organized at the end of the alphabet. Origins of the alphabet are still unknown, some Armenian and Western scholars believe it was created by Mesrop Mashtots (Armenian: Մեսրոպ Մաշտոց Mesrop Maštoc') also known as Mesrob the Vartabed, who was an early medieval Armenian linguist, theologian, statesman and hymnologist, best known for inventing the Armenian alphabet c. 405 AD, other Georgian and Western, scholars are against this theory.
German Braille
German Braille is one of the older braille alphabets. The French-based order of the letter assignments was largely settled on with the 1878 convention that decided the standard for international braille. However, the assignments for German letters beyond the 26 of the basic Latin alphabet are mostly unrelated to French values.
Russian alphabet
The Russian alphabet () uses letters from the Cyrillic script. The modern Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters.
ISO basic Latin alphabet
These are double-digit "letters" for table columns, in the same way that 10 through 99 are double-digit numbers. The Greek alphabet has a similar extended form that uses such double-digit letters if necessary, but it is used for chapters of a fraternity as opposed to columns of a table.
French manual alphabet
These are largely similar to the letters of the American manual alphabet. A few letters (upward G, sideward M and N) are oriented differently, with the result that D and G depend on a difference in hand shape that has been lost from informal ASL, and N looks like an ASL H. Several letters (hitchhiker-thumb A, clawed E, splayed F, nodding P, etc.) have minor differences that suggest a different "accent"; the thumb on A makes it more distinct from S than is American A. Four letters are radically different: H (the ASL '8'/'horns' handshape), J (a swiveling Y rather than I), X (uses two fingers, like a flexed ASL V), and T (just like the French F, but with the thumb on the inside of the index finger instead of on the outside).
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet, using as few non-Latin forms as possible. The Association created the IPA so that the sound values of most consonant letters taken from the Latin alphabet would correspond to "international usage". Hence, the letters , , , (hard) , (non-silent) , (unaspirated) , , , , (unaspirated) , (voiceless) , (unaspirated) , , , and have the values used in English; and the vowel letters from the Latin alphabet (, , , , ) correspond to the (long) sound values of Latin: is like the vowel in "machne", is as in "rle", etc. Other letters may differ from English, but are used with these values in other European languages, such as , , and .
Bambara language
It uses seven vowels a, e, ɛ, i, o, ɔ and u, each of which can be nasalized, pharyngealized and murmured, giving a total number of 21 vowels (the letters approximate their equivalents). 
Writing with the latin alphabet began during the French occupation, and the first orthography was introduced in 1967. Literacy is limited, especially in rural areas. Although written literature is only slowly evolving (due to the predominance of French as the "language of the educated"), there exists a wealth of oral literature, which is often tales of kings and heroes. This oral literature is mainly tradited by the griots ("Jeliw" in Bambara) who are a mixture of storytellers, praise singers, and human history books who have studied the trade of singing and reciting for many years. Many of their songs are very old and are said to date back to the old empire of Mali.
Greek language
The Greek alphabet consists of 24 letters, each with an uppercase (majuscule) and lowercase (minuscule) form. The letter sigma has an additional lowercase form (ς) used in the final position:
In addition to the letters, the Greek alphabet features a number of diacritical signs: three different accent marks (acute, grave, and circumflex), originally denoting different shapes of pitch accent on the stressed vowel; the so-called breathing marks (rough and smooth breathing), originally used to signal presence or absence of word-initial /h/; and the diaeresis, used to mark full syllabic value of a vowel that would otherwise be read as part of a diphthong. These marks were introduced during the course of the Hellenistic period. Actual usage of the grave in handwriting saw a rapid decline in favor of uniform usage of the acute during the late 20th century, and it has only been retained in typography.
French letters
French letters may refer to:
Algerian Braille
In Algerian Braille, the braille letters are assigned in numeric order to the Arabic alphabet; standard Arabic Braille on the other hand uses a completely different assignment, following international norms based on the order of the French alphabet. For example, the fifth braille letter, , is used in Algerian Braille for ج "j", the fifth letter of the Algerian/Arabic alphabet. In most braille alphabets today, is used for "e", the fifth letter of the French/Latin alphabet, or for a letter that sounds like "e", no matter where it occurs in those alphabets.
Karelian alphabet
The modern unified Karelian alphabet is a used to write all variants of the Karelian language except Tver Karelian. It consists of a total of twenty-eight characters: twenty-two are from the ISO basic Latin alphabet, five are derived from basic Latin letters by the addition of diacritical marks, and the final character is the apostrophe, which signifies palatalization of the preceding sound. The entire range of sounds of native Karelian words is intended to be represented by this set of characters.
Atlas linguistique de la France
The Atlas linguistique de la France (ALF, Linguistic Atlas of France) is an influential dialect atlas of Romance varieties in France published in 13 volumes between 1902 and 1910 by Jules Gilliéron and Edmond Edmont.
Whereas Georg Wenker had used postal questionnaires to compile his pioneering "Sprachatlas des deutschen Reichs" in 1888, Gilliéron employed a fieldworker, Edmond Edmont.
Between 1896 and 1900, Edmont conducted 700 interviews at 639 locations throughout the countryside of France, southern Belgium and western Switzerland, using a questionnaire of over 1,500 items devised and continually revised by Gilliéron.
The results were collated and analysed by Gilliéron and his assistants.
International uniformity of braille alphabets
Braille arranged his characters in decades (groups of ten), and assigned the 25 letters of the French alphabet to them in order. The characters beyond the first 25 are the principal source of variation today.
Vehicle registration plates of France
The numbering system goes as follows:
The SIV format provides formula_1, or 277,977,744, different combinations. This figure excludes three letters that are not used: I, O and U, as they can be confused with 1, 0 and V, respectively. It also excludes the SS combination because it is reminiscent of the Nazi organisation and WW in the first group of letters as it indicates a temporary plate. Other combinations of letters were avoided in the previous system because they sounded vulgar to French speakers, such as KK, PD, PQ, QQ, and WC, but they were kept for the SIV.
French manual alphabet
The French manual alphabet is an alphabet used for French Sign Language (LSF), both to distinguish LSF words and to sign French words in LSF.
International Phonetic Alphabet
In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, formed what would come to be known from 1897 onwards as the International Phonetic Association (in French, ""). Their original alphabet was based on a spelling reform for English known as the Romic alphabet, but in order to make it usable for other languages, the values of the symbols were allowed to vary from language to language. For example, the sound (the "sh" in "shoe") was originally represented with the letter in English, but with the digraph in French. However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, thus providing the base for all future revisions. The idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Paul Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, and Passy.
French language
French, like most European languages, uses a space to separate thousands. The comma is used in French numbers as a decimal point, i.e. "2,5" instead of "2.5".
Swedish alphabet
The Swedish alphabet is the writing system used for the Swedish language. The 29 letters of this alphabet are the modern 26-letter basic Latin alphabet ('A' through 'Z') plus 'Å', 'Ä', and 'Ö', in that order. It contains 20 consonants and 9 vowels (a e i o u y å ä ö).
Romanian alphabet
Romanian orthography does not use accents or diacritics – these are secondary symbols added to letters (i.e. basic glyphs) to alter their pronunciation or to distinguish between words. There are, however, five special letters in the Romanian alphabet (associated with four different sounds) which are formed by modifying other Latin letters; strictly speaking these letters function as basic glyphs in their own right rather than letters with diacritical marks, but they are often referred to as the latter.The letter "â" is used exclusively in the middle of words; its majuscule version appears only in all-capitals inscriptions.
Diacritic
Different languages use different rules to put diacritic characters in alphabetical order. French treats letters with diacritical marks the same as the underlying letter for purposes of ordering and dictionaries.
French poetry
The modern French language does not have a significant stress accent (like English) or long and short syllables (like Latin). This means that the French metric line is generally not determined by the number of beats, but by the number of syllables (see syllabic verse; in the Renaissance, there was a brief attempt to develop a French poetics based on long and short syllables [see "musique mesurée"]). The most common metric lengths are the ten-syllable line (decasyllable), the eight-syllable line (octosyllable) and the twelve-syllable line (the so-called "alexandrin").
Ethnomathematics
In the French language as used in France, one sees some differences. "Soixante-dix" (literally, "sixty-ten") is used for "seventy". The words "quatre-vingt" (literally, "four-twenty", or 80) and "quatre-vingt-dix" (literally, "four-twenty ten" 90) are based on 20 ("vingt") instead of 10. Swiss French and Belgian French do not use these forms, preferring more standard Latinate forms: "septante" for 70, "octante" for 80 and "nonante" for 90; In Swiss, they even replaced 80 with "huitante" (See the article ), which can date back to 12th century
Arabic letter frequency
The Arabic alphabet consists of 28 primary letters, these are letters 1 to 28 in Table 1. The eight modified letters listed in positions 29 to 36 in the same table are used just the same. If these 8 modified forms are folded into the primary list based on shape or phonetic similarity, the outcome then is as shown in Table 2. For accurate frequency analysis, each of the 36 letters of Table 1 gets its frequency counted independently.
International uniformity of braille alphabets
This decision covered the basic letters of the French alphabet at the time; "w" had been appended with the extra letters, so the 26 letters of the Basic Latin alphabet are slightly out of numeric order:
French language
French is written with the 26 letters of the basic Latin script, with four diacritics appearing on vowels (circumflex accent, acute accent, grave accent, diaeresis) and the cedilla appearing in "ç".
Duplicate characters in Unicode
Note that merely having different "meanings" is not sufficient grounds to split a grapheme into several characters: Thus, the acute accent may represent word accent in Welsh or Swedish, it may express vowel quality in French, and it may express vowel length in Hungarian, Icelandic or Irish. Since all these languages are written in the same script, namely Latin script, the acute accent in its various meanings is considered one and the same combining diacritic character (U+0301), as well as the accented letter é is the same character in French and Hungarian. There is a separate "combining diacritic acute tone mark" at U+0341 for the romanization of tone languages, one important difference between the two being that in a language like French, the acute accent can replace the dot over the lowercase i, whereas in a language like Vietnamese, the acute tone mark is added above the dot. Diacritic signs for alphabets considered independent may be encoded separately, such as the acute ("tonos") for the Greek alphabet at U+0384, and for the Armenian alphabet at U+055B. Some Cyrillic-based alphabets (such as Russian) also use the acute accent, but there is no "Cyrillic acute" encoded separately and U+301 should be used for Cyrillic as well as Latin (see Cyrillic characters in Unicode). The point that the same grapheme can have many "meanings" is even more obvious considering e.g. the letter U, which has entirely different phonemic referents in the various languages that use it in their orthographies (English etc., French , German , etc., not to mention various uses of U as a symbol).
Phonemic orthography
An example of a nearly-ideal phonemic orthography is the Ukrainian language. Its alphabet comprises thirty-three letters, representing thirty-eight phonemes and an additional sign: the apostrophe. Twenty letters represent consonants, ten vowels, and two semivowels. The soft sign has no meaning when written by itself, but when written after a consonant, it indicates that the consonant is soft (palatalized). The apostrophe negates palatalization in places that it would be applied by normal orthographic rules. It also appears after labial consonants in some words, such as "name". And it is retained in transliterations from the Latin alphabet: (Côte d'Ivoire) and (O'Toole).
Spanish Braille
The French Braille letters for vowels with a grave accent, "à è ì ò ù," are used in Spanish Braille for vowels with an acute accent, "á é í ó ú". In addition, French "ï" is reassigned to Spanish "ñ". Thus, in numerical order, the letters are:
Alphabetical order
Languages which use an extended Latin alphabet generally have their own conventions for treatment of the extra letters. Also in some languages certain digraphs are treated as single letters for collation purposes. For example, the 29-letter alphabet of Spanish treats "ñ" as a basic letter following "n", and formerly treated the digraphs "ch" and "ll" as basic letters following "c" and "l", respectively. "Ch" and "ll" are still considered letters, but are now alphabetized as two-letter combinations. (The new alphabetization rule was issued by the Royal Spanish Academy in 1994.) On the other hand, the digraph "rr" follows "rqu" as expected, and did so even before the 1994 alphabetization rule.
Esperanto
The Esperanto alphabet is based on the Latin script, using a one-sound-one-letter principle, except for [d͡z]. It includes six letters with diacritics: ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ (with circumflex), and ŭ (with breve). The alphabet does not include the letters "q, w, x," or "y", which are only used when writing unassimilated foreign terms or proper names.
Letter (alphabet)
The contemporary English-language alphabet, known as Roman style, consists of twenty-six letters. Each letter corresponds to one or more sounds, and the letters are combined in the order of sounds to make words. A letter is classed as either a consonant or a vowel, depending on how its sound is produced (vowels are "a", "e", "i", "o", "u", and sometimes "y" and "w").
Filipino alphabet
The modern Filipino alphabet (), otherwise known as the Filipino alphabet (), is the alphabet of the Filipino language, the official national language and one of the two official languages of the Philippines. The modern Filipino alphabet is made up of 28 letters, which includes the entire 26-letter set of the ISO basic Latin alphabet, the Spanish "Ñ" and the "Ng" digraph of Tagalog. It replaced the Pilipino alphabet of the Fourth Republic. Today, the modern Filipino alphabet may also be used to write all autochthonous languages of the Philippines and Chavacano, a Spanish-derived creole.
French language
The French counting system is partially vigesimal: twenty (') is used as a base number in the names of numbers from 70 to 99. The French word for "80" is ', literally "four twenties", and the word for "75" is "", literally "sixty-fifteen". This reform arose after the French Revolution to unify the different counting systems (mostly vigesimal near the coast, because of Celtic (via Breton) and Viking influences). This system is comparable to the archaic English use of "score", as in "fourscore and seven" (87), or "threescore and ten" (70).
Charles Barbier
Barbier's system was related to the Polybius square, in which a two-digit code represents a letter. In Barbier's variant, a 6×6 square includes most of the letters of the French alphabet, as well as several digraphs and trigraphs:
Latin-script alphabet
The 21-letter archaic Latin alphabet and the 23-letter classical Latin alphabet belong to the oldest of this group. The 26-letter ISO basic Latin alphabet, adopted the earlier ASCII alphabet (developed by standard organisations in the United States) and contains the 26 letters of the English alphabet, it in turn has been incorporated into more recent international standards that include additions to handle the other alphabets derived from the classical Latin alphabet.
Classical cipher
Another example of a polyalphabetic substitution cipher that is much more difficult to decode is the Vigenère square, an innovative encoding method. With the square, there are 26 different cipher alphabets that are used to encrypt text. Each cipher alphabet is just another rightward Caesar shift of the original alphabet. This is what a Vigenère square looks like:
List of Latin-script digraphs
The French and German languages (and the international auxiliary languages Interlingua and Occidental) also use for Greek loanwords. In German it can be replaced by ; the replacement is allowed in certain cases according to the German spelling reform of 1996. In most Romance (such as Spanish) and Germanic (such as Dutch and Swedish) languages, is used rather than . Languages written in a Cyrillic script, such as Russian, Ukrainian, and Bulgarian, regularly use , similar to the Greek . In Vietnamese, is used exclusively for /f/; there is no letter in the Vietnamese alphabet. In Old High German, stands for the affricate . In romanizations of Indo-Aryan languages, Thai and Khmer, represents the aspirated sound . In the Ossete Latin alphabet, it was used for . In some non-standard spellings of English, like leet, may be used as a replacement of all occurrences of .
Luxembourgish Braille
The Luxembourgish Braille alphabet started off as a reduced set of the letters of the French Braille alphabet, the basic 26 plus three letters for print vowels with diacritics: "é," "ë," "ä." With the shift to eight-point script, these three acquired an extra dot at point 8. The letters are thus:
Old English Latin alphabet
The Old English Latin alphabet—though it had no standard orthography—generally consisted of 24 letters, and was used for writing Old English from the 9th to the 12th centuries. Of these letters, 20 were directly adopted from the Latin alphabet, two were modified Latin letters (Æ, Ð), and two developed from the runic alphabet (Ƿ, Þ). The letters K, Q and Z were not in the spelling of native English words.
Faggin-Nazzi alphabet
The Faggin-Nazzi alphabet is an orthographic system proposed to write the Friulian language, named after its creators, Giorgio Faggin and Gianni Nazzi. It was created before the orthography which is today standard for Friulian, that was developed by Catalan linguist Xavier Lamuela. Today Faggin-Nazzi is rarely used, also because it uses letters typical of Slavic languages, such as č, which are unfamiliar for most Furlans due to dissimilarity from the Italian alphabet. The alphabet consists of the following letters: A, B, C, Č, D, E, F, G, Ğ, H, I, J, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, Š, T, U, V, Z.
French orthography
French orthography encompasses the spelling and punctuation of the French language. It is based on a combination of phonemic and historical principles. The spelling of words is largely based on the pronunciation of Old French c. 1100–1200 CE and has stayed more or less the same since then, despite enormous changes to the pronunciation of the language in the intervening years. This has resulted in a complicated relationship between spelling and sound, especially for vowels, a multitude of silent letters, and a large number of homophones (e.g., "/////" (all pronounced ), "//" (all pronounced )). Later attempts to respell some words in accordance with their Latin etymologies further increased the number of silent letters (e.g., ' vs. older ' – compare English "tense", which reflects the original spelling – and ' vs. older '). Nevertheless, there are rules governing French orthography which allow for a reasonable degree of accuracy when pronouncing French words from their written forms. The reverse operation, producing written forms from a pronunciation, is much more ambiguous.
Alphabet
The names were abandoned in Latin, which instead referred to the letters by adding a vowel (usually e) before or after the consonant; the two exceptions were Y and Z, which were borrowed from the Greek alphabet rather than Etruscan, and were known as "Y Graeca" "Greek Y" (pronounced "I Graeca" "Greek I") and "zeta" (from Greek)—this discrepancy was inherited by many European languages, as in the term "zed" for Z in all forms of English other than American English. Over time names sometimes shifted or were added, as in "double U" for W ("double V" in French), the English name for Y, and American "zee" for Z. Comparing names in English and French gives a clear reflection of the Great Vowel Shift: A, B, C and D are pronounced /eɪ, biː, siː, diː/ in today's English, but in contemporary French they are /a, be, se, de/. The French names (from which the English names are derived) preserve the qualities of the English vowels from before the Great Vowel Shift. By contrast, the names of F, L, M, N and S (/ɛf, ɛl, ɛm, ɛn, ɛs/) remain the same in both languages, because "short" vowels were largely unaffected by the Shift.
Letter (alphabet)
The Consistori del Gay Saber was the first literary academy in the world and held the Floral Games to award the best troubadour with the "violeta d'aur" top prize. Guilhem Molinier, a member of the academy, gave a definition of the letter in his "Leys d'Amors" (1328–1337), a book aimed at regulating then-flourishing Occitan poetry:
Before there were alphabets, there were pictographs, or symbols. Ancient Egyptian examples date to about 3500 BCE. Pictographs could communicate basic ideas, but were general and ambiguous if they were comprehensible at all. Tense, for example, could not be specified, and symbols do not necessarily carry meaning across cultures. Memorization of tens of thousands of symbols is a daunting task; children from cultures that use logograms–word symbols–to represent words take years longer to learn to read and write than children learning an alphabet. The relative ease of memorizing twenty-six letters contributed to the spread of literacy throughout the world.
History of French
The Vulgar Latin underlying French and most other Romance languages had seven vowels in stressed syllables (, similar to the vowels of American English "khat pet pate peat caught coat coot" respectively), and five in unstressed syllables (). Portuguese and Italian largely preserve this system, while Spanish has innovated only in converting to and to , resulting in a simple five-vowel system . In French, however, numerous sound changes resulted in a system with 12-14 oral vowels and 3-4 nasal vowels (see French phonology).
Braille
When Braille was first adapted to languages other than French, many schemes were adopted, including mapping the native alphabet to the alphabetical order of French – e.g. in English W, which was not in the French alphabet at the time, is mapped to braille X, X to Y, Y to Z, and Z to the first French-accented letter – or completely rearranging the alphabet such that common letters are represented by the simplest braille patterns. Consequently, mutual intelligibility was greatly hindered by this state of affairs. In 1878, the International Congress on Work for the Blind, held in Paris, proposed an international braille standard, where braille codes for different languages and scripts would be based, not on the order of a particular alphabet, but on phonetic correspondence and transliteration to Latin.
Communicationssprache
Communicationssprache is based on (or a simplification of) French (See French orthography), making heavy (even exclusive) use of respelled French vocabulary, which Schipfer considered to be nearly universal among the educated classes of the world of his time. Silent letters were removed, one sound for one letter, circumflexes and diaereses were removed, graves to distinguish homographs were removed, the letter w was added (as in English), vowels "e" instead of "é", "ä" instead of French "è", "ö" instead of French "œ", "u" instead of French "ou", "ü" instead of French "u", "oa" instead of French "oi", the inclusion of macrons for long vowels, and one sound per letter. Although the final orthography can be read and spelled easily due to this one-sound-per-letter principle, the actual conversion of French words is inconsistent, being based sometimes on pronunciation and sometimes on orthography, for example word-final silent  is deleted, as in Estoma "stomach" < éstomac, but silent  is kept, as in Homa "man" < homme.
Old English
The Latin alphabet of the time still lacked the letters and , and there was no as distinct from ; moreover native Old English spellings did not use , or . The remaining 20 Latin letters were supplemented by four more: (, modern "ash") and (, now called eth or edh), which were modified Latin letters, and thorn and wynn , which are borrowings from the futhorc. A few letter pairs were used as digraphs, representing a single sound. Also used was the Tironian note (a character similar to the digit 7) for the conjunction "and", and a thorn with a crossbar through the ascender for the pronoun . Macrons over vowels were originally used not to mark long vowels (as in modern editions), but to indicate stress, or as abbreviations for a following "m" or "n".
French Braille
The traditional system of digits is to add the number sign in front of the letters of the first decade (a–j), with being and being . This is the internationally recognized number system. However, in French Braille a new system, the "Antoine" braille digits, is used for mathematics and is recommended for all academic publications. This uses combined with the first nine letters of the fourth decade, from for to for , with the preceding for . The period/decimal and fraction bar also change. The Antoine numbers are being promoted in France and Luxembourg, but are not much used in with French Braille in Quebec.
Lycian alphabet
The Lycian alphabet contains letters for 29 sounds. Some sounds are represented by more than one symbol, which is considered one "letter". There are six vowel letters, one for each of the four oral vowels of Lycian, and separate letters for two of the four nasal vowels. Nine of the Lycian letters do not appear to derive from the Greek alphabet.
Swedish language
The Swedish alphabet is a 29-letter alphabet, using the 26-letter ISO basic Latin alphabet plus the three additional letters "Å"/"å", "Ä"/"ä", and "Ö"/"ö" constructed in the 16th century by writing "o" and "e" on top of an "a", and an "e" on top of an "o". Though these combinations are historically modified versions of A and O according to the English range of usage for the term diacritic, these three characters are not considered to be diacritics within the Swedish application, but rather separate letters, and are independent letters following "z". Before the release of the 13th edition of "Svenska Akademiens ordlista" in April 2006, "w" was treated as merely a variant of "v" used only in names (such as "Wallenberg") and foreign words ("bowling"), and so was both sorted and pronounced as a "v". Other diacritics (to use the broader English term usage referenced here) are unusual in Swedish; é is sometimes used to indicate that the stress falls on a terminal syllable containing "e", especially when the stress changes the meaning ("ide" vs. "idé", "winter lair" vs. "idea") as well as in some names, like "Kastrén"; occasionally other acute accents and, less often, grave accents can be seen in names and some foreign words. The letter à is used to refer to unit cost (a loan from the French), equivalent to the at sign (@) in English.
Romanian alphabet
The Romanian alphabet is a variant of the Latin alphabet used by the Romanian language. It is a modification of the classical Latin alphabet and consists of 31 letters, five of which (Ă, Â, Î, Ș, and Ț) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language:
AZERTY
AZERTY is a specific layout for the characters of the Latin alphabet on typewriter keys and computer keyboards. The layout takes its name from the first six letters to appear on the first row of alphabetical keys; that is, ( ). Similar to the German QWERTZ layout, it is modelled on the English QWERTY layout. It is used by most French speakers based in Europe, although France and Belgium each have their own national variations on the layout. Luxembourg and Switzerland use the Swiss QWERTZ keyboard. Most of the residents of Quebec, the mainly French-speaking province of Canada, use a QWERTY keyboard that has been adapted to the French language such as the Multilingual Standard keyboard CAN/CSA Z243.200-92 which is stipulated by the government of Quebec and the Government of Canada.
Corsican alphabet
The modern Corsican alphabet (Corsican u santacroce or u salteriu) uses 22 basic letters taken from the Latin alphabet with some changes, plus some multigraphs. The pronunciations of the English, French, Italian or Latin forms of these letters are not a guide to their pronunciation in "Corsu", which has its own pronunciation, often the same, but frequently not. As can be seen from the table below, two of the phonemic letters are represented as trigraphs, plus some other digraphs. Nearly all the letters are allophonic; that is, a phoneme of the language might have more than one pronunciation and be represented by more than one letter. The exact pronunciation depends mainly on word order and usage and is governed by a complex set of rules, variable to some degree by dialect. These have to be learned by the speaker of the language.
Muqattaʿat
There are 14 unique combinations; the most frequent are "ʾAlif Lām Mīm" and "Ḥāʾ Mīm", occurring six times each.
Of the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet, exactly one half appear as muqatta'at, either singly or in combinations of two, three, four or five letters. The fourteen letters are:
"ʾalif" أ,
"hā" هـ,
"ḥā" ح,
"ṭā" ط,
"yā" ي,
"kāf" ك,
"lām" ل,
"mīm" م,
"nūn" ن,
"sīn" س,
"ʿain" ع,
"ṣād" ص,
"qāf" ق,
"rā" ر.
The six final letters of the Abjadi order ("thakhadh ḍaẓagh") are unused. 
The letters represented correspond to those letters written without Arabic diacritics plus "yāʿ" ي.
It is possible that the restricted set of letters was supposed to invoke an archaic variant of the Arabic alphabet modeled on the Aramaic alphabet.
Code page 863
Code page 863 (also known as CP 863, IBM 00863, OEM 863, MS-DOS French Canada) is a code page used under DOS to write French language (mainly in Quebec) although it lacks the letters Æ, æ, Œ, œ, Ÿ and ÿ.
Phoenicia
The Phoenician alphabet consists of 22 letters, all consonants. Starting around 1050 BC, this script was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language. It is believed to be one of the ancestors of modern alphabets. By their maritime trade, the Phoenicians spread the use of the alphabet to Anatolia, North Africa, and Europe, where it was adopted by the Greeks who developed it into an alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants.
List of Latin-script alphabets
The tables below summarize and compare the letter inventory of some of the Latin-script alphabets. In this article, the scope of the word "alphabet" is broadened to include letters with tone marks, and other diacritics used to represent a wide range of orthographic traditions, without regard to whether or how they are sequenced in their alphabet or the table.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) includes all 26 letters in their lowercase forms, although "g" is always single-storey ("ɡ") in the IPA and never double-storey ().
NATO phonetic alphabet
In the official version of the alphabet, the non-English spellings Alfa and Juliett are used. "Alfa" is spelled with an "f" as it is in most European languages because the English and French spelling "alpha" would not be pronounced properly by native speakers of some other languages – who may not know that "ph" should be pronounced as "f".  "Juliett" is spelled with a "tt" for French speakers, because they may otherwise treat a single final "t" as silent. In some English versions of the alphabet, one or both of these may have their standard English spelling.
Modern Greek
Modern Greek is written in the Greek alphabet, which has 24 letters, each with a capital and lowercase (small) form. The letter sigma additionally has a special final form. There are two diacritical symbols, the acute accent which indicates stress and the diaeresis marking a vowel letter as not being part of a digraph. Greek has a mixed historical and phonemic orthography, where historical spellings are used if their pronunciation matches modern usage. The correspondence between consonant phonemes and graphemes is largely unique, but several of the vowels can be spelt in multiple ways. Thus reading is easy but spelling is difficult.
Swedish Dialect Alphabet
The Swedish Dialect Alphabet () is a phonetic alphabet created in 1878 by Johan August Lundell and used for the narrow transcription of Swedish dialects. The initial version of the alphabet consisted of 89 letters, 42 of which came from the phonetic alphabet proposed by Carl Jakob Sundevall. It has since grown to over 200 letters. The alphabet supplemented Latin letters with symbols adapted from a range of alphabets, including modified forms of þ and ð from Germanic alphabets, γ and φ from the Greek alphabet and ы from the Cyrillic alphabet, and extended with systematic decorations. There are also a number of diacritics representing prosodic features.
Ukrainian alphabet
The alphabet comprises thirty-three letters, representing thirty-eight phonemes (meaningful units of sound) and an additional sign: the apostrophe. Ukrainian orthography (the rules of writing) is based on the phonemic principle, with one letter generally corresponding to one phoneme. The orthography also has cases in which semantic, historical, and morphological principles are applied. In the Ukrainian alphabet the "Ь" could also be the last letter in the alphabet.
Yo (Cyrillic)
The advent of the computer has had a great influence on the process of substitution with for a counterintuitive reason: currently, the Russian alphabet contains 33 letters including , and codepage designers usually prefer to omit so that all Russian letters can be placed into sections of 16 letters (16, like other powers of 2, is often preferred in computing over other numbers). Some examples are pre-Unicode character pages 866 for Microsoft DOS and 1251 for Microsoft Windows. Since in both cases, was placed outside its alphabetically correct position, it made text sorting more complex. Software developers would then choose to substitute all letters with at an early stage of text processing to simplify later stages.
Greek alphabet
Greek letters were also used to write numbers. In the classical Ionian system, the first nine letters of the alphabet stood for the numbers from 1 to 9, the next nine letters stood for the multiples of 10, from 10 to 90, and the next nine letters stood for the multiples of 100, from 100 to 900. For this purpose, in addition to the 24 letters which by that time made up the standard alphabet, three otherwise obsolete letters were retained or revived: digamma for 6, koppa for 90, and a rare Ionian letter for [ss], today called sampi , for 900. This system has remained in use in Greek up to the present day, although today it is only employed for limited purposes such as enumerating chapters in a book, similar to the way Roman numerals are used in English. The three extra symbols are today written as , and respectively. To mark a letter as a numeral sign, a small stroke called "keraia" is added to the right of it.
Caractères
Caractères (French for "characters") is a name of a sans-serif typeface family for road signs in France. There are four variants: L1, L2, L4 and L5. Caracteres L1 is the bold variant, usually a black typeface on white background; used on road signs, which hint at nearer places, and uppercase only. L2 is the medium variant which is a white typeface on green background for Routes Nationales or blue backgrounds for Autoroutes; used on road signs which hint at distant places, and also uppercase only. L4 is the italic variant, which is like the L1 variant, is also a black typeface on white background, used on road signs inside cities to hint at near places and public facilities, both uppercase and lowercase. L5 is an upright companion to the L4 font, used for historical monuments and others places of interest.
Hebrew alphabet
The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters. It does not have case, but five letters have different forms when used at the end of a word. Hebrew is written from right to left. Originally, the alphabet was an abjad consisting only of consonants, but is now considered an "impure abjad". As with other abjads, such as the Arabic alphabet, during its centuries-long use scribes devised means of indicating vowel sounds by separate vowel points, known in Hebrew as "niqqud." In both biblical and rabbinic Hebrew, the letters     can also function as "matres lectionis", which is when certain consonants are used to indicate vowels. There is a trend in Modern Hebrew towards the use of "matres lectionis" to indicate vowels that have traditionally gone unwritten, a practice known as "full spelling".
Scrabble letter distributions
A variant called Alfapet (originally the name of Swedish Scrabble), contains 108 tiles:French-language editions of Scrabble contain these 102 tiles:
Diacritical marks are ignored.
Alphabet
Of the dozens of alphabets in use today, the most popular is the Latin alphabet, which was derived from the Greek, and which many languages modify by adding letters formed using diacritical marks. While most alphabets have letters composed of lines (linear writing), there are also exceptions such as the alphabets used in Braille. The Khmer alphabet (for Cambodian) is the longest, with 74 letters.
Greek alphabet
The classical twenty-four-letter alphabet that is now used to represent the Greek language was originally the local alphabet of Ionia. By the late fifth century BC, it was commonly used by many Athenians. In 403 BC, at the suggestion of the archon Eucleides, the Athenian Assembly formally abandoned the Old Attic alphabet and adopted the Ionian alphabet as part of the democratic reforms after the overthrow of the Thirty Tyrants. Because of Eucleides's role in suggesting the idea to adopt the Ionian alphabet, the standard twenty-four-letter Greek alphabet is sometimes known as the "Eucleidean alphabet". Roughly thirty years later, the Eucleidean alphabet was adopted in Boeotia and it may have been adopted a few years previously in Macedonia. By the end of the fourth century BC, it had displaced local alphabets across the Greek-speaking world to become the standard form of the Greek alphabet.
History of the Arabic alphabet
The Nabataean alphabet was designed to write 22 phonemes, but Arabic has 28 phonemes; thus, when used to write the Arabic language, 6 of its letters must each represent two phonemes:
"d" also represented "ð",
"ħ" also represented "kh" %,
"ṭ" also represented "ẓ",
"ayin" also represented "gh" %, 
"ṣ" also represented "ḍ",%,
"t" also represented "þ".
: In the cases marked %, the choice was influenced by etymology, as Common Semitic "kh" and "gh" became Hebrew "ħ" and "ayin" respectively.
Silent letter
Silent letters are common in French, including the last letter of most words. Ignoring auxiliary letters that create digraphs (such as , , , , , , and , and and as signals for nasalized vowels), they include almost every possible letter except , , , , , and .
Vehicle registration plates of France
Bearing in mind that only 23 letters were used by the format and that most of the départements used four numbers after reaching QA, the number of car plates that the FNI format provides can be estimated at: (999 × 22) + (999 × 14 × 23) + (9988 × 9 × 23) + (988 × 21 × 23 × 23) = 13,386,864. This figure does not take into account avoided letter and number combinations.
Universalglot
The Universalglot alphabet contains 27 letters. It uses 24 of the 26 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet, "w" and "y" are not used, and has three additional letters "œ", "σ" and "ü".
The non-Basic Latin letters are pronounced
Alphabet
The number of letters in an alphabet can be quite small. The Book Pahlavi script, an abjad, had only twelve letters at one point, and may have had even fewer later on. Today the Rotokas alphabet has only twelve letters. (The Hawaiian alphabet is sometimes claimed to be as small, but it actually consists of 18 letters, including the ʻokina and five long vowels. However, Hawaiian Braille has only 13 letters.) While Rotokas has a small alphabet because it has few phonemes to represent (just eleven), Book Pahlavi was small because many letters had been "conflated"—that is, the graphic distinctions had been lost over time, and diacritics were not developed to compensate for this as they were in Arabic, another script that lost many of its distinct letter shapes. For example, a comma-shaped letter represented "g", "d", "y", "k", or "j". However, such apparent simplifications can perversely make a script more complicated. In later Pahlavi papyri, up to half of the remaining graphic distinctions of these twelve letters were lost, and the script could no longer be read as a sequence of letters at all, but instead each word had to be learned as a whole—that is, they had become logograms as in Egyptian Demotic.
Catalan Braille
Catalan Braille is the braille alphabet of the Catalan language. It is very close to French Braille: it uses the 26 letters of the basic braille alphabet, plus several additional letters for "ç" and what are, in print, vowel letters with diacritics; these differ from their French values only in the need to accommodate the Catalan acute accent: "ú, ó, í" for what are in French Braille "ù, œ, ì" :
French language
French is a morphophonemic language. While it contains 130 graphemes that denote only 36 phonemes, many of its spelling rules are likely due to a consistency in morphemic patterns such as adding suffixes and prefixes. Many given spellings of common morphemes usually lead to a predictable sound. In particular, a given vowel combination or diacritic generally leads to one phoneme. However, there is not a one-to-one relation of a phoneme and a single related grapheme, which can be seen in how "tomber, tombai," and "tombé" all end with the /e/ phoneme. Additionally, there are many variations in the pronunciation of consonants at the end of words, demonstrated by how the "x" in "paix" is not pronounced though at the end of "Aix" it is"."
Latin alphabet
Latin included 21 different characters. The letter was the western form of the Greek gamma, but it was used for the sounds and alike, possibly under the influence of Etruscan, which might have lacked any voiced plosives. Later, probably during the 3rd century BC, the letter – unneeded to write Latin properly – was replaced with the new letter , a modified with a small vertical stroke, which took its place in the alphabet. From then on, represented the voiced plosive , while was generally reserved for the voiceless plosive . The letter was used only rarely, in a small number of words such as "Kalendae", often interchangeably with .
French alexandrine
The French alexandrine () is a syllabic poetic meter of (nominally and typically) 12 syllables with a medial caesura dividing the line into two hemistichs (half-lines) of six syllables each. It was the dominant long line of French poetry from the 17th through the 19th century, and influenced many other European literatures which developed alexandrines of their own.
Georgian scripts
Georgian scripts are unique in their appearance and their exact origin has never been established; however, in strictly structural terms, their alphabetical order largely corresponds to the Greek alphabet, with the exception of letters denoting uniquely Georgian sounds, which are grouped at the end. Originally consisting of 38 letters, Georgian is presently written in a 33-letter alphabet, as five letters are currently obsolete in that language. The number of Georgian letters used in other Kartvelian languages varies. Mingrelian uses 36: 33 that are current Georgian letters, one obsolete Georgian letter, and two additional letters specific to Mingrelian and Svan. Laz uses the same 33 current Georgian letters as Mingrelian plus that same obsolete letter and a letter borrowed from Greek for a total of 35. The fourth Kartvelian language, Svan, is not commonly written, but when it is, it uses Georgian letters as utilized in Mingrelian, with an additional obsolete Georgian letter and sometimes supplemented by diacritics for its many vowels.
African reference alphabet
In the French version, the letters were hand-printed in lower case only. Only 56 of the letters in the English version were listed – omitting the hooktop-z – and two further apostrophe-like letters (ʾ and ʿ) were included. Also, five of the letters were written with a subscript dot instead of an underscore as in the English version (ḍ ḥ ṣ ṭ and ẓ). (These represent Arabic-style emphatic consonants while the remaining underlined letters (c̱, q̱ and x̱) represent clicks.) Accents and punctuation do not appear. The French and English sets are otherwise identical.
Kazakh alphabets
In the nineteenth century, Ibrahim Altynsarin, a prominent Kazakh educator, first introduced a Cyrillic alphabet for transcribing Kazakh. Russian missionary activity, as well as Russian-sponsored schools, further encouraged the use of Cyrillic in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The alphabet was reworked by Sarsen Amanzholov and accepted in its current form in 1940. It contains 42 letters: 33 from the Russian alphabet with 9 additional letters for sounds of the Kazakh language: Ә, Ғ, Қ, Ң, Ө, Ұ, Ү, Һ, І (until 1957 "Ӯ" was used instead of "Ұ"). Initially, Kazakh letters came after letters from the Russian alphabet, but now they are placed after Russian letters similar in sound or shape.
Greek alphabet
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late ninth or early eighth century BC. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the first alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many different local variants, but, by the end of the fourth century BC, the Eucleidean alphabet, with twenty-four letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used to write Greek today. These twenty-four letters are: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , /ς, , , , , , and .
Ukrainian Sign Language
Ukrainian Sign Language uses a one-handed manual alphabet, or fingerspelling, based on the alphabet used in Old French Sign Language, but adapted to spell out words from the Ukrainian language. Known as the Ukrainian manual alphabet, it consists of 33 signs which make use of the 23 handshapes of USL. Some of these signs thus share handshapes; for example, the signs for "Г" & "Ґ" use the same handshape but in one the thumb is still, while in the other it moves up and down.
Standard 52-card deck
The deck of French playing cards is the most common deck of playing cards used today. It includes thirteen ranks in each of the four French suits: clubs (), diamonds (), hearts () and spades (), with reversible "court" or face cards. Each suit includes an ace, a king, queen and jack, each depicted with a symbol of its suit; and ranks two through ten, with each card depicting that many symbols ("pips") of its suit. Anywhere from one to six (most often two or three since the mid-20th century) jokers, often distinguishable with one being more colorful than the other, are added to commercial decks, as some card games require these extra cards. Modern playing cards carry index labels on opposite corners or in all four corners to facilitate identifying the cards when they overlap and so that they appear identical for players on opposite sides. The most popular standard pattern of the French deck is sometimes referred to as "English" or "Anglo-American" pattern.
National conventions for writing telephone numbers
French telephone numbers are 10 digits long written in groups of two separated by spaces, in the format 0A BB BB BB BB where 0 (the trunk prefix) was created in 1996 to be a carrier selection code, and A is the "territorial area code" included in the subscriber number A BB BB BB BB.
Romanian alphabet
For a few decades until a spelling reform in 1904, as many as four or five letters had been used for the same phoneme ("â", "ê", "î", "û", and occasionally "ô"), according to an etymological rule. All were used to represent the vowel /ɨ/, toward which the original Latin vowels written with circumflexes had converged (European Portuguese has something similar with the vowel /ɐ/ for "a", which closely resembles /ɨ/). The 1904 reform saw only two letters remaining, "â" and "î", the choice of which followed rules that changed several times during the 20th century.
French manual alphabet
The alphabet has the following letters:
Alphabet
The script was spread by the Phoenicians across the Mediterranean. In Greece, the script was modified to add vowels, giving rise to the ancestor of all alphabets in the West. The vowels have independent letter forms separate from those of consonants; therefore it was the first true alphabet. The Greeks chose letters representing sounds that did not exist in Greek to represent vowels. Vowels are significant in the Greek language, and the syllabical Linear B script that was used by the Mycenaean Greeks from the 16th century BC had 87 symbols, including 5 vowels. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, a situation that caused many different alphabets to evolve from it.
É
É, é (e-acute) is a letter of the Latin alphabet. It is found in Afrikaans, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Emilian-Romagnol, French, English, Galician, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Kashubian, Luxembourgish, Occitan, Norwegian, Portuguese, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Vietnamese, and Welsh languages, as a variant of the letter "e". In English, it may be observed as a pronunciation aid in loanwords (e.g., "résumé" from French) or romanizations (e.g., "Pokémon" from Japanese). This is also used in Dutch and Navajo.