#Spelling every word alphabetically code

The letter ن n also has the same form in initial and medial forms, with one dot added above, though it is somewhat different in its isolated and final forms.īoth printed and written Arabic are cursive, with most letters within a word directly joined to adjacent letters. For example, the Arabic letters ب b, ت t, and ث th have the same basic shape, but with one dot added below, two dots added above, and three dots added above respectively. These dots are an integral part of a letter, since they distinguish between letters that represent different sounds.

Many letters look similar but are distinguished from one another by dots ( ʾiʿjām) above or below their central part ( rasm). Unlike Greek-derived alphabets, Arabic has no distinct upper and lower case letterforms. Forms using the Arabic script to write other languages added and removed letters: for example Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Kurdish, Urdu, Sindhi, Azerbaijani, Malay, Acehnese, Banjarese, Javanese, Pashto, Punjabi, Uyghur, Arwi and Arabi Malayalam all have additional letters in their alphabets. The basic Arabic alphabet contains 28 letters. The Arabic alphabet is considered an abjad, with only consonants required to be written due to its optional use of diacritics to notate vowels, it is considered an impure abjad. It is written from right-to-left in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters, of which most have contextual letterforms. The Arabic alphabet ( Arabic: الْأَبْجَدِيَّة الْعَرَبِيَّة, al-ʾabjadiyyah l-ʿarabiyyah or الْحُرُوف الْعَرَبِيَّة, al-ḥurūf al-ʿarabiyyah), or Arabic abjad, is the Arabic script as specifically codified for writing the Arabic language. 18 CE (derived from Eastern Arabic numerals and Brahmi numerals) BCEĪdlam (slight influence from Arabic) 1989 CE

Caucasian Albanian (origin uncertain) c.Cherokee (syllabary letter forms only) c.The name NATO phonetic alphabet became widespread because it was NATO Allies who had spearheaded the final revision and because the signals used to facilitate the naval communications and tactics of the US and NATO have become global.Īpart from the traditional military usage, the NATO phonetic is often used in the retail industry, where customer or site details are spoken by telephone (to authorize a credit agreement or confirm stock codes), by IT professionals to communicate long codes or by airlines to communicate passenger name records internally.Ī spelling alphabet is also often called a ‘phonetic alphabet’, but this is not related to the usage of the same phrase in phonetics, which is used to indicate the sounds of human speech, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet. Telephone spelling alphabets were developed to improve communication since World War I, but the first non-military internationally recognized spelling alphabet was adopted by the CCIR (predecessor of the ITU) in 1927.ĭuring World War II, many nations used their own versions of a spelling alphabet, but the International Air Transport Association (IATA), recognizing the need for a single universal alphabet, presented a draft alphabet to the ICAO during 1947 that had sounds common to English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.ĭuring 1948-1949, Jean-Paul Vinay, a professor of linguistics at the Université de Montréal, collaborated with the ICAO on the development of a new spelling alphabet, with minimum requirements for the words to have a similar spelling in at least English, French, and Spanish, as well as be live words in each of these three languages.Įventually, the NATO alphabet became effective in 1956 and, a few years later, turned into the established universal phonetic alphabet for all military, civilian and amateur radio communications. Actually, as of 2002, the IMO’s GMDSS procedures permit the use of the ICAO numeral pronunciation. In practice, these are used rarely, as they frequently result in confusion between speakers of different languages. The IMO defines different pronunciation of numerals than does the ICAO:

#Spelling every word alphabetically code

However, each agency chooses one of two different sets of numeric code words. Note that “Alpha” is written as “Alfa” and “Juliet” is written as “Juliett”, which are the spellings still in use in the international version of the alphabet, to avoid possible critical mispronunciations by speakers of other languages.Īfter ICAO developed the phonetic, this was adopted by many other international and national organizations, including the IMO. The 26 code words in the spelling alphabet are assigned to the 26 letters of the English alphabet in alphabetical order as follows: Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu.