Note that the scripts mentioned above are not considered proper alphabets, as they all lack characters representing vowels.

Of the seven basic vowels, four could be preceded by a y sound, and these four were written as a dot next to a line.Beside the letters, the Korean alphabet originally employed diacritic marks to indicate pitch accent. h] Korean letters are written in syllabic blocks with the alphabetic letters arranged in two dimensions. The modern monophthongal vowels come first, with the derived forms interspersed according to their form: i is added first, then iotized, then iotized with added i. h/ is very weak and is usually deleted in Korean words, as seen in words like 괜찮아요 /kwɛnt͡ɕʰan hajo/ [kwɛnt͡ɕʰanajo].

Beginning in the 9th century BC, adaptations of the Phoenician alphabet thrived, including Greek, Old Italic and Anatolian scripts. Its development was under significant influence of Romance languages, particularly French and Spanish. But in contrast to the traditional account, the non-plosives ( ㆁ ㄴ ㅁ ㅅ) were derived by removing the top of the basic letters. Of the 29 consonant phonemes commonly reconstructed for Proto-Semitic, seven are missing: the interdental fricatives ḏ, ṯ, ṱ, the voiceless lateral fricatives ś, ṣ́, the voiced uvular fricative ġ, and the distinction between uvular and pharyngeal voiceless fricatives ḫ, ḥ, in Canaanite merged in ḥet.

Many Greek letters are similar to Phoenician, except the letter direction is reversed or changed, which can be the result of historical changes from right-to-left writing to boustrophedon to left-to-right writing.

It is certain that the Aramaic-derived Kharosthi script was present in northern India by the 4th century BC, so that the Aramaic model of alphabetic writing would have been known in the region, but the link from Kharosthi to the slightly younger Brahmi is tenuous. Learning a language without understanding other languages’ influences is incomplete and prevents one from reaching the level of native speaker’s knowledge.e. /ø/ and /y/); and, secondly, whether Korean has three levels of front vowels in terms of vowel height (i. Consonants [ edit ] The shape of tongue when pronouncing ㄱ (g) The shape of tongue when pronouncing ㄴ (n) The shape of teeth and tongue when pronouncing ㅅ (s) ㅇ (ng) is similar to the throat hole.