Latin · A B C …

The 26 letters our Latin-script languages share — and the least honest alphabet on this site: the same letter can mean utterly different sounds per language (j = English /d͡ʒ/, French /ʒ/, Spanish /x/, German /j/; c, g, r, u all shift). Each language patches the gaps its own way: French with accents that change sound (é è ç), German with umlauts that change the vowel entirely (ä ö ü) plus ß, Spanish with ñ and the one-sound-per-letter discipline, Italian by simply not using j k w x y in native words, Malay by being younger than the others' bad habits, Vietnamese by piling diacritics on — two per vowel when it has to, one for the vowel quality (â ê ô ơ ư ă) and one for the tone (à á ả ã ạ), so that quốc ngữ, designed by missionaries in the 1600s, records every sound and every tone. Portuguese does the most damage of all to the idea that a letter has a sound: it reduces unstressed vowels almost out of existence (gato is 'gatu', and European Portuguese can delete an e altogether), nasalises with ~ and m and n, and turns a final l into /w/. Turkish went the other way: in 1928 it took the alphabet and made it obey — c is always /d͡ʒ/, j only /ʒ/, q w x thrown out, and six letters added for the sounds Latin had no room for: ç ş ğ ı ö ü, with i and ı as two different letters whose capitals are İ and I. The per-language Sounds pages trace the real letter→sound rules; this table shows the spread.

Latin (from Greek via Etruscan) · written left to right · used here by English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, Malay, Vietnamese, Turkish

26 signs

Groups: Say one thing (f k m q — the only letters you can read aloud in any of the seven without checking first) · Bend a little (two or three values, usually a softening between vowels or a devoicing at the end of a word) · Four or more (fifteen of twenty-six. This is why /sounds exists: the letter tells you almost nothing until you know which language you are in)