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ALPHABETS
Bill Rankin, 2013
A relatively simple exercise, but I like how cleanly this map shows Greece as the hinge between eastern and western Europe, at least alphabetically, especially before the conversion of Romanian and Turkish to a Latin script.
The phonetic and historical diagrams also show how the Greco-Roman alphabets aren't necessarily a good match with the sound systems of other European languages. The monks who made Cyrillic had to add five letters for sibilants (like SH and CH) and nearly a dozen vowel and vowel-related sounds; another set of symbols covers the palatalized "soft" consonants. And despite learning in grade school that English has five vowels — A, E, I, O, U — this is really only true of Greek and Latin. Most varieties of English have at least ten; some even have a few more.
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