Phonogramology (continued 1):

First, let’s talk about alphabetic orthographies.  There are several different alphabets used to create written language.  For example, English uses the Latin alphabet and 26 symbols or letters to represent spoken language.  Norwegian and Slovak also use the Latin alphabet or the same set of symbols, but Norwegian includes three vowels that are not used in English (å, æ, ø). While Slovak uses a series of accent marks to indicate how the letters are pronounced  (ó or š), resulting in the use of 46 symbols for spoken language.  Most European languages, including English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, German, Portuguese, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Polish, Danish, Welsh, Swedish, Icelandic, Finnish and Turkish, all use the Latin alphabet

There are other alphabets that use different sets of symbols to represent the spoken language, but still, code the language at the level of the phoneme. These alphabets include the Cyrillic alphabet, which is used for the Russian, Bulgarian, and Ukrainian languages; the Devanagari alphabet, which is used for Hindi, one of the official languages of India, the Greek alphabet, which is only used for the Greek language, and the Hangul alphabet, which is used for the Korean language (citations needed). Some languages, such as Serbo-Croat, use Latin and the Cyrillic alphabet. 

Another alphabetic orthography that contains only consonants and no vowels is called “abjad”.  Hebrew and Arabic are sometimes classified as abjads because they have traditionally been written without vowels.  Today, however, we often use accent marks to indicate the placement of vowels, leading many to classify both Hebrew and Arabic as letters, rather than abjads (citations needed).

(To be continued)