Names of Letters
The Phoenician letter names, in which each letter was associated with a word that begins with that sound, continue to be used to varying degrees in Samaritan, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew, Greek and Arabic. The names were abandoned in Latin, which instead referred to the letters by adding a vowel (usually e) before or after the consonant (the exception is zeta, which was retained from Greek). In Cyrillic originally the letters were given names based on Slavic words; this was later abandoned as well in favor of a system similar to that used in Latin.
Read more about this topic: Alfabet
Famous quotes containing the words names and/or letters:
“Ideas about life organize perception; names of emotions organize sensations; rules of syntax organize thought. But pain comes on its own.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Letters are like wine; if they are sound they ripen with keeping. A man should lay down letters as he does a cellar of wine.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)