History of the Arabic alphabet the same. After all this, there were only 17 letters that were different in shape. One letter-shape represented 5 phonemes ("b t th n" and sometimes "y"), one represented 3 phonemes ("j ħ kh"), and 5 each represented 2 phonemes. Compare the Hebrew alphabet, as in the table at . A similar ambiguity occurs in the German Fraktur font, in which the Roman alphabet uppercase letters I and J look the same but are officially different letters. The Arabic alphabet is first attested in its classical form in the 7th century. See PERF 558 for the first surviving Islamic Arabic
Naming conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet Naming conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) requires specific names for the symbols and diacritics used in the alphabet. It is often desirable to distinguish an IPA symbol from the sound it is intended to represent, since there is not a one-to-one correspondence between symbol and sound in broad transcription. The symbol's names and phonetic descriptions are described in the "Handbook of the International Phonetic Association". The symbols also have nonce names in the Unicode standard. In some cases, the Unicode names and the IPA names do not agree. For example, IPA calls "epsilon", but