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
Letter (alphabet) Letter (alphabet) A letter is a grapheme (written character) in an alphabetic system of writing. It is a visual representation of the smallest unit of spoken sound. Letters broadly correspond to phonemes in the spoken form of the language, although there is rarely a consistent, exact correspondence between letters and phonemes. Written signs in other writing systems are called syllabograms (which denote a syllable) or logograms (which indicate a word or phrase). The contemporary English-language alphabet, known as Roman style, consists of twenty-six letters. Each letter corresponds to one or more sounds, and the letters are combined in the order