Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics
alphabet [Grk álpha (α)+
(β), names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet]
1 Inventory of written signs of an alphabetic writing system in a standardized order. The inventory and order of Latin-based alphabetic signs (=letters) is roughly the same from language to language, though alphabets for individual languages may have additional characters.
Thus, the Spanish alphabet contains thirty characters and has the following additional letter (ñ); k occurs only in foreign loan words. Similarly, German shares a basic twenty-six character alphabet with English, though ä, ö, ü, and β (ligatures for ae, oe, ue, and sz respectively) are generally considered to be additional characters in the German alphabet.
References
alphabetic writing system, writing
2 (also vocabulary) Finite set of symbols or basic signs upon which the description of formal (artificial) languages is based. For example, the Morse alphabet consists of two elements, namely short and long tones (dots and dashes), whose various strings constitute the Morse code. In transformational grammar a distinction is drawn between non-terminal symbols (S, NP, VP, etc.) and terminal symbols taken from the lexicon.
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(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
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