A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its name in English is a (pronounced / ˈ eɪ /), plural aes. It is similar in shape to the Ancient Greek letter alpha, from which it derives. The uppercase version consists of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by a horizontal bar.

The Old Italic scripts are a family of similar ancient writing systems used in the Italian Peninsula between about 700 and 100 BC, for various languages spoken in that time and place. [citation needed] The most notable member is the Etruscan alphabet, which was the immediate ancestor of the Latin alphabet currently used by English and many other languages of the world.

The Italic languages form a branch of the Indo-European language family, whose earliest known members were spoken on the Italian Peninsula in the first millennium BC. The most important of the ancient languages was Latin, the official language of ancient Rome, which conquered the other Italic peoples before the common era.The other Italic languages became extinct in the …

According to Ethnologue, there are a total of 68 languages spoken in Kenya. This variety is a reflection of the country's diverse population that includes most major ethnoracial and linguistic groups found in Africa (see Languages of Africa).. Languages spoken locally belong to three broad language families: Niger-Congo (Bantu branch) and Nilo-Saharan (Nilotic branch), …

In typography, italic type is a cursive font based on a stylised form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, italics normally slant slightly to the right.Italics are a way to emphasise key points in a printed text, to identify many types of creative works, to cite foreign words or phrases, or, when quoting a speaker, a way to show which words they stressed.

Insular Celtic hypothesis. The "Insular Celtic hypothesis" is a theory that they evolved together in those places, having a later common ancestor than any of the Continental Celtic languages such as Celtiberian, Gaulish, Galatian and Lepontic, among others, all of which are long extinct.. The proponents of the hypothesis (such as Cowgill 1975; McCone 1991, 1992; and Schrijver 1995) …

Judaeo-Spanish or Judeo-Spanish (autonym djudeoespanyol, Hebrew script: גﬞודﬞיאו־איספאנייול ‎, Cyrillic: жудеоеспањол), also known as Ladino, is a Romance language derived from Old Spanish.Originally spoken in Spain, and then after the Edict of Expulsion spreading through the Ottoman Empire (the Balkans, Turkey, Western Asia, and North Africa) as well as ...

Latin was the official language of the Roman Empire, but other languages were regionally important, such as Greek. Latin was the original language of the Romans and remained the language of imperial administration, legislation, and the military throughout the classical period. In the West, it became the lingua franca and came to be used for even local administration of the …

Most languages spoken in India belong either to the Indo-Aryan (c. 74%), the Dravidian (c. 24%), the Austroasiatic (c. 1.2%), or the Tibeto-Burman (c. 0.6%) families, with some languages of the Himalayas still unclassified. The SIL Ethnologue lists 461 living languages for India.. Hindustani is the most widespread language of India. The Indian census takes the widest possible definition …

In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph.Examples are the characters æ and œ used in English and French, in which the letters 'a' and 'e' are joined for the first ligature and the letters 'o' and 'e' are joined for the second ligature. For stylistic and legibility reasons, 'f' and 'i' are often merged to create 'fi ...

The Latin script is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. It is the standard script of the English language and is often referred to simply as "the alphabet" in English. It is a true alphabet which originated in the 7th century BC in Italy and has changed continually over the last 2,500 years. It has roots in the Semitic alphabet and its offshoot alphabets, the ...

The Celtic languages (usually / ˈ k ɛ l t ɪ k /, but sometimes / ˈ s ɛ l t ɪ k / in the United States) are a group of related languages descended from Proto-Celtic.They form a branch of the Indo-European language family. The term "Celtic" was first used to describe this language group by Edward Lhuyd in 1707, following Paul-Yves Pezron, who made the explicit link between the Celts ...

An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek ἰδέα idéa "idea" and γράφω gráphō "to write") is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may ...