Glossary for Geospatial Science

alphabetic:  A written language that uses a fixed, ordered set of phonetically-related characters is said to be alphabetic.  Most Western European languages are alphabetic (Latin-based), as are Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Turkish, and Indian.  Modern Korean (Hangul) is an alphabetic replacement for Chinese-based character writing which was used until the 1500’s.

Modern non-alphabetic languages include Chinese and Japanese, in which characters may be syllabic constructs historically derived from pictographic archetypes.  While they use a basic set of characters (a few thousand) for most writing, the character set is not strictly limited to a fixed number of characters.