Michael Everson wrote:

>
> Daniels:
>
> alphabet a type of writing system that denotes consonants and vowels
>
> The Unicode Standard:
>
> Alphabet. A writing system that consists of letters for the writing
> of both consonants and vowels. Consonants and vowels have equal
> status as letters in an alphabet. The Latin alphabet is the most
> widespread and well-known example of an alphabet. The correspondence
> between letters and sounds may be either more or less exact; most
> alphabets do not exhibit a one-to-one correspondence between distinct
> sounds (phonemes) and distinct letters (graphemes).
>
> Daniels commented:
>
> >(I didn't complain about this one, of course, though the first
> >sentence is otiose and the last sentence applies to any writing
> >system at all, and of course "grapheme" is here, as so often, used
> >pretheoretically and serves no purpose.)
>
> So, given this, one might propose the following revision:
>
> Alphabet. A writing system in which both both consonants and vowels
> are indicated. The most widespread and well-known example is the
> Latin writing system. The correspondence between letters and sounds
> may be either more or less exact. Many alphabets do not exhibit a
> one-to-one correspondence between distinct sounds and letters or
> groups of letters used to represent them; often this is an indication
> of original spellings which were not changed as the language changed.
>
> I believe that this is accurate. Comment is invited.

Good. (Do all your readers realize that language is constantly changing
even though the spelling doesn't?)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...