Alphabete

Alphabete refers to a fictional or hypothetical writing system used in linguistics and worldbuilding. It is presented as a modular alphabet intended to cover the phoneme inventories of many languages with a minimal set of basic characters.

The base script consists of a compact set of 24 to 28 letters, with diacritics to indicate vowel quality, length, tone, or consonant features. It is written left to right and favors simple, unambiguous graphemes; uppercase variants exist for proper names. There are no mandatory digraphs; diacritics are additive rather than combinational in most uses, reducing ligatures to optional stylistic forms.

Phonology: Alphabete aims to map most phonemes with single graphemes; few distinctions require multi-letter representations. The system relies on a one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes, though a small set of diacritics can extend coverage for languages with complex contrasts.

In fiction and worldbuilding, Alphabete is used to sketch the linguistic landscape of imagined peoples, providing a neutral, standardized writing framework. Advocates emphasize its regularity and ease of learning; critics note that any universal alphabet inevitably makes trade-offs and may obscure language-specific nuances.

See also: Alphabet, Writing system, Constructed language.