Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that can help answer the question.
Query: How many letters are used in the French alphabet?
The French alphabet is based on the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, uppercase and lowercase, with five diacritics and two orthographic ligatures.
In Algerian Braille, the braille letters are assigned in numeric order to the Arabic alphabet; standard Arabic Braille on the other hand uses a completely different assignment, following international norms based on the order of the French alphabet. For example, the fifth braille letter, , is used in Algerian Braille for ج "j", the fifth letter of the Algerian/Arabic alphabet. In most braille alphabets today, is used for "e", the fifth letter of the French/Latin alphabet, or for a letter that sounds like "e", no matter where it occurs in those alphabets.
Under international consensus, most braille alphabets follow the French sorting order for the 26 letters of the basic Latin alphabet, and there have been attempts at unifying the letters beyond these 26 (see international braille), though differences remain, for example in German Braille and the contractions of English Braille. This unification avoids the chaos of each nation reordering the braille code to match the sorting order of its print alphabet, as happened in Algerian Braille, where braille codes were numerically reassigned to match the order of the Arabic alphabet and bear little relation to the values used in other countries (compare modern Arabic Braille, which uses the French sorting order), and as happened in an early American version of English Braille, where the letters "w, x, y, z" were reassigned to match English alphabetical order. A convention sometimes seen for letters beyond the basic 26 is to exploit the physical symmetry of braille patterns iconically, for example, by assigning a reversed "n" to "ñ" or an inverted "s" to "sh". (See Hungarian Braille and Bharati Braille, which do this to some extent.)
When Braille was first adapted to languages other than French, many schemes were adopted, including mapping the native alphabet to the alphabetical order of French – e.g. in English W, which was not in the French alphabet at the time, is mapped to braille X, X to Y, Y to Z, and Z to the first French-accented letter – or completely rearranging the alphabet such that common letters are represented by the simplest braille patterns. Consequently, mutual intelligibility was greatly hindered by this state of affairs. In 1878, the International Congress on Work for the Blind, held in Paris, proposed an international braille standard, where braille codes for different languages and scripts would be based, not on the order of a particular alphabet, but on phonetic correspondence and transliteration to Latin.
Later, in some adaptations of the Arabic alphabet (such those sometimes used for Kurdish and Uyghur) and of the Hebrew alphabet (such as those used for the Yiddish and Judaeo-Spanish), "matres lectionis" were generally used for all or most vowels, thus in effect becoming vowel letters: see Yiddish orthography. This tendency was taken to its logical conclusion in fully alphabetic scripts such as Greek, Latin, and Cyrillic. Many of the vowel letters in such languages historically go back to "matres lectionis" in the Phoenician script. For example, the letter was originally derived from the consonant letter "yod". Similarly the vowel letters in the Avestan alphabet were adapted from "matres lectionis" in the version of the Aramaic alphabet adapted as the Pahlavi scripts.
After sound changes eliminated from spoken Greek, "digamma" was used only as a numeral. However, the Greek alphabet also gave rise to other alphabets, and some of these retained letters descended from digamma. In the Etruscan alphabet, 'F' probably represented , as in Greek, and the Etruscans formed the digraph 'FH' to represent . (At the time these letters were borrowed, there was no Greek letter that represented /f/: the Greek letter phi 'Φ' then represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive , although in Modern Greek it has come to represent .) When the Romans adopted the alphabet, they used 'V' (from Greek "upsilon") not only for the vowel , but also for the corresponding semivowel , leaving 'F' available for . And so out of the various "vav" variants in the Mediterranean world, the letter F entered the Roman alphabet attached to a sound which its antecedents in Greek and Etruscan did not have. The Roman alphabet forms the basis of the alphabet used today for English and many other languages.
French Braille is the original braille alphabet, and the basis of all others. The alphabetic order of French has become the basis of the international braille convention, used by most braille alphabets around the world. However, only the 25 basic letters of the French alphabet plus "w" have become internationalized; the additional letters are largely restricted to French Braille and the alphabets of some neighboring European countries.
Unlike many other letters that use diacritic marks (such as "Ü" in Spanish and German and "Ç" in French, Catalan and Portuguese), "Ñ" in Spanish, Galician, Basque, Asturian, Leonese, Guarani and Filipino is considered a letter in its own right, has its own name (in Spanish: ""), and its own place in the alphabet (after "N"). Its alphabetical independence is similar to the English "W", which historically came from a doubled "V".
E (named "e" , plural "ees") is the fifth letter and the second vowel in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used letter in many languages, including Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin, Latvian, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.
The Albanian language has been written using many different alphabets since the earliest records from the 14th century. The history of Albanian language orthography is closely related to the cultural orientation and knowledge of certain foreign languages among Albanian writers. The earliest written Albanian records come from the Gheg area in makeshift spellings based on Italian or Greek. Originally, the Tosk dialect was written in the Greek alphabet and the Gheg dialect was written in the Latin script. Both dialects had also been written in the Ottoman Turkish version of the Arabic script, Cyrillic, and some local alphabets (Elbasan, Vithkuqi, Todhri, Veso Bey, Jan Vellara and others, see original Albanian alphabets). More specifically, the writers from northern Albania and under the influence of the Catholic Church used Latin letters, those in southern Albania and under the influence of the Greek Orthodox church used Greek letters, while others throughout Albania and under the influence of Islam used Arabic letters. There were initial attempts to create an original Albanian alphabet during the 1750–1850 period. These attempts intensified after the League of Prizren and culminated with the Congress of Manastir held by Albanian intellectuals from 14 to 22 November 1908, in Manastir (present day Bitola), which decided on which alphabet to use, and what the standardized spelling would be for standard Albanian. This is how the literary language remains. The alphabet is the Latin alphabet with the addition of the letters «a href="%C3%AB">ëçdigraphs: "dh", "th", "xh", "gj", "nj", "ng", "ll", "rr", "zh" and "sh".
Braille is in its origin a numeric code. Louis Braille applied the characters in numerical order to the French alphabet in alphabetical order. As braille spread to other languages, the numeric order was retained and applied to the local script. Therefore, where the alphabetical order differed from that of French, the new braille alphabet would be incompatible with French Braille. For example, French was based on a 25-letter alphabet without a "w". When braille was adopted for English in the United States, the letters were applied directly to the English alphabet, so that braille letter of French "x" became English "w", French "y" became English "x", French "z" English "y", and French "ç" English "z". In the United Kingdom, however, French Braille was adopted without such reordering. Therefore, any English book published in braille needed to be typeset separately for the United States and the United Kingdom. Similarly, the letters Egyptian Arabic Braille were assigned their forms based on their nearest French equivalents, so that for example Arabic "d" had the same braille letters as French "d". For Algerian Arabic Braille, however, the braille characters were assigned to the Arabic alphabet according to the Arabic alphabetical order, so that Algerian "d" was the same character as Egyptian "h". Thus an Arabic book published in Algeria was utterly unintelligible to blind Egyptians and vice versa.
During the French Indochina, they introduced a Jarai alphabet using the Vietnamese alphabet at the beginning of the 20th century. With the introduction of the Bible in Jarai language, using that alphabet by Christian missionaries in Vietnam after the Vietnamese War, the Jarai increased their literacy and there are today many publications for the Vietnamese Jarai. There are 40 letters - 21 consonants + 19 vowels / 34 phonemes - 9 vowel phonemes + 25 consonant phonemes.
The braille letters for the French print vowels "â, œ, ä" are used for the print vowels "å, ö/ø, ä/æ" of the Scandinavian alphabets. Each language uses the letters that exists in its inkprint alphabet. Thus, in numerical order, the letters are:
Like many other manual alphabets, the Russian Manual Alphabet bears similarities to the French Manual Alphabet. However, it was adapted to account for the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet found in the Russian written language. It is a one-handed alphabet. RMA includes 33 hand gestures, each of which corresponds to one letter in the Russian alphabet. There are no signs denoting punctuation or capitalization.
The letter "o" with umlaut ("ö") appears in some Germanic languages alphabets, namely the German alphabet, Swedish alphabet and Icelandic alphabet. It represents the umlauted form of "o", resulting in or . The letter is often collated together with "o" in the German alphabet, but there are exceptions which collate it like "oe" or "OE". The letter also occurs in some languages that have adopted German names or spellings, but it is not normally a part of those alphabets. In Danish and Norwegian, "ö" was previously used in place of "ø" in older texts to distinguish between open and closed ö-sounds. It is also used when confusion with other symbols could occur, on maps for instance. The Dano-Norwegian "ø" is, like the German "ö", a development of "oe" and can be compared with the French "œ".
In general, only the assignments of the basic 26 letters of the French alphabet are retained in other braille alphabets. For example, among the additional letters, in German Braille only "ü" and "ö" coincide with French Braille. However, there are several alphabets which are much more closely related. Italian Braille is identical to the French apart from doubling up French Braille "ò" to Italian "ó" and "ò", since French has no "ó". Indeed, a principal difference of these alphabets is the remapping of French vowels with a grave accent ("à è ì ò ù") to an acute accent ("á é í ó ú"), as the French alphabet does not support acute accents apart from "é". Spanish changes all five of these vowels, as well as taking "ü". Portuguese Braille is also very similar to the French, though the shift of grave to acute accents necessitated a chain of other changes, such as circumflex to grave, and the Portuguese tildes were taken from French diaereses (Portuguese "ã õ" for French "ä ö/œ"). The continental Scandinavian languages took the extended French letters "â" (for "å"), "ä/æ", and "ö/ø". Vietnamese Braille is also quite similar, though it has added tone letters, and according uses French "z" for "d", which is pronounced like "z". 
Of the dozens of alphabets in use today, the most popular is the Latin alphabet, which was derived from the Greek, and which many languages modify by adding letters formed using diacritical marks. While most alphabets have letters composed of lines (linear writing), there are also exceptions such as the alphabets used in Braille. The Khmer alphabet (for Cambodian) is the longest, with 74 letters.
Worldwide there are many alphabets used at present, with Arabic, Cyrillic, and Roman in widest use. The following alphabets, abjads, and individual letters are discussed in related articles. Each represents a different script:
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late ninth or early eighth century BC. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the first alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many different local variants, but, by the end of the fourth century BC, the Eucleidean alphabet, with twenty-four letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used to write Greek today. These twenty-four letters are: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , /ς, , , , , , and .
In Korea, the Hangul alphabet was created by Sejong the Great. Hangul is a unique alphabet: it is a featural alphabet, where many of the letters are designed from a sound's place of articulation (P to look like the widened mouth, L to look like the tongue pulled in, etc.); its design was planned by the government of the day; and it places individual letters in syllable clusters with equal dimensions, in the same way as Chinese characters, to allow for mixed-script writing (one syllable always takes up one type-space no matter how many letters get stacked into building that one sound-block).
The tables below summarize and compare the letter inventory of some of the Latin-script alphabets. In this article, the scope of the word "alphabet" is broadened to include letters with tone marks, and other diacritics used to represent a wide range of orthographic traditions, without regard to whether or how they are sequenced in their alphabet or the table.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) includes all 26 letters in their lowercase forms, although "g" is always single-storey ("ɡ") in the IPA and never double-storey ().
The Brahmic family of alphabets used in India use a unique order based on phonology: The letters are arranged according to how and where they are produced in the mouth. This organization is used in Southeast Asia, Tibet, Korean hangul, and even Japanese kana, which is not an alphabet.
It encodes every "abstract" single letter of the basic Arabic alphabet, not every concrete visual form of isolated, initial, medial, final or ligatured letter shape variants (i.e. it encodes characters, not glyphs). The Arabic letters in the C0-FF range are in Arabic alphabetic order, but some Latin characters are interspersed among them. These are some Windows-1252 Latin characters used for French, since this European language has some historic relevance in former French colonies in North Africa such as Morocco and Algeria. This allowed French and Arabic text to be intermixed when using Windows 1256 without any need for code-page switching (however, upper-case letters with diacritics were not included).
In the Olonets Karelian alphabet, the letter Ǯ was used instead of the digraph "Dž" to mark the voiced affricate. For example, the word "mandžoi" (strawberry) was written "manǯoi". For the computers used in those days, the letter ǯ was problematic, and in many cases it had to be inserted manually afterwards. The letter Ü represented the same vowel sound as the letter Y used in the modern alphabet.
Following a pattern found in many national alphabets, a few braille letters are reversed to represent a similar letter: thus reversed produces . The choice for may reflect the shape of that letter in print. Many of the vowels are used for modified vowels in national alphabets, such as French Braille.