A true alphabet contains separate letters (not diacritic marks) for both consonants and vowels.
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Vah is a true alphabet, with 23 consonant letters, 7 vowel letters, and 5 tone diacritics, which are placed inside the vowels. It also has its own marks for commas and periods.
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"The Early Diffusion of the Alphabet", The Biblical Archaeologist 37, No. 3 (Sep., 1974): 54–68. page 62. . . creating in the process the first "true" alphabet, in which vowels were accorded equal status with consonants.
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The classical or traditional Mongolian script, also known as the Hudum Mongol bichig, was the first writing system created specifically for the Mongolian language, and was the most widespread until the introduction of Cyrillic in 1946. It is traditionally written in vertical lines . Derived from the Old Uyghur alphabet, Mongolian is a true alphabet, with separate letters for consonants and vowels. The Mongolian script has been adapted to write languages such as Oirat and Manchu.
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The Yiddish alphabet, a modified version of the Hebrew alphabet used to write Yiddish, is a true alphabet, with all vowels rendered in the spelling, except in the case of inherited Hebrew words, which typically retain their Hebrew spellings. The Arabic and Hebrew alphabets have similarities because they are both derived from the Aramaic alphabet, and both derive from paleo-Hebrew or Phoenician alphabet. Phoenicia is the Greek term referring to Canaan or kn'n.
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Arebica was based on the Perso-Arabic script of the Ottoman Empire, with added letters for , and , which are not found in Arabic, Persian or Turkish. Full letters were eventually introduced for all vowels (as with Kurdish Arabic script), making Arebica a true alphabet, unlike its Perso-Arabic base. The final version of Arebica was devised by Mehmed Džemaludin Čaušević at the end of the 19th century. His version is called Matufovica, Matufovača or Mektebica.
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Several Dhivehi scripts have been used by Maldivians during their history. The early Dhivehi scripts fell into the abugida category, while the more recent Thaana has characteristics of both an abugida and a true alphabet. An ancient form of Nagari script, as well as the Arabic and Latin scripts, have also been extensively used in the Maldives, but with a more restricted function. Latin was official only during a very brief period of the Islands' history.
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Inuktitut Braille is a proposed braille alphabet of the Inuktitut language based on Inuktitut syllabics. Unlike syllabics, it is a true alphabet, with separate letters for consonants and vowels, though vowels are written before the consonants they follow in speech. It was published in 2012 by Tamara Kearney, Manager of Braille Research and Development at the Commonwealth Braille and Talking Book Cooperative. The book ᐃᓕᐊᕐᔪᒃ ᓇᓄᕐᓗ The Orphan and the Polar Bear was the first (and perhaps only) work transliterated into Inuktitut Braille.
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Thaana, Taana or Tāna ( ) is the present writing system of the Maldivian language spoken in the Maldives. Thaana has characteristics of both an abugida (diacritic, vowel-killer strokes) and a true alphabet (all vowels are written), with consonants derived from indigenous and Arabic numerals, and vowels derived from the vowel diacritics of the Arabic abjad. Maldivian orthography in Thaana is largely phonemic. The Thaana script first appeared in a Maldivian document towards the beginning of the 18th century in a crude initial form known as Gabulhi Thaana which was written scripta continua.
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A modified Arabic script is also used in Iran and Afghanistan, based on the alphabet used for Kazakh before 1929. The Kazakh Arabic alphabet contains 29 letters and one digit, the 'upper hamza' used at the beginnings of words to create front vowels throughout the word. The direction the alphabet is written in is right to left. Unlike the original Arabic script, which is an abjad, the Kazakh Arabic script functions more like a true alphabet, as each sound has its own letter and every sound in each word is spelt out in the written form of the language.
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Hieroglyphs at Amada, at temple founded by Tuthmosis III The Egyptian hieroglyphic script contained 24 uniliterals (symbols that stood for single consonants, much like letters in English). It would have been possible to write all Egyptian words in the manner of these signs, but the Egyptians never did so and never simplified their complex writing into a true alphabet. Each uniliteral glyph once had a unique reading, but several of these fell together as Old Egyptian developed into Middle Egyptian. For example, the folded-cloth glyph seems to have been originally an /s/ and the door-bolt glyph a /θ/ sound, but these both came to be pronounced , as the sound was lost.
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Some modern authors distinguish between consonantal scripts of the Semitic type, called "abjads" since 1996, and "true alphabets" in the narrow sense, the distinguishing criterion being that true alphabets consistently assign letters to both consonants and vowels on an equal basis, while the symbols in a pure abjad stand only for consonants. (So-called impure abjads may use diacritics or a few symbols to represent vowels.) In this sense, then the first true alphabet would be the Greek alphabet, which was adapted from the Phoenician alphabet, but not all scholars and linguists think this is enough to strip away the original meaning of an alphabet to one with both vowels and consonants. Latin, the most widely used alphabet today, in turn derives from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets, themselves derived from Phoenician.
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The Thai script (, ) is the abugida used to write Thai, Southern Thai and many other languages spoken in Thailand. The Thai alphabet itself (as used to write Thai) has 44 consonant symbols (, phayanchana), 16 vowel symbols (, sara) that combine into at least 32 vowel forms and four tone diacritics (, wannayuk or wannayut) to create characters mostly representing syllables. Although commonly referred to as the "Thai alphabet", the script is in fact not a true alphabet but an abugida, a writing system in which the full characters represent consonants with diacritical marks for vowels; the absence of a vowel diacritic gives an implied 'a' or 'o'. Consonants are written horizontally from left to right, with vowels arranged above, below, to the left or to the right of the corresponding consonant, or in a combination of positions.
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Peter T. Daniels, however, distinguishes an abugida or alphasyllabary, a set of graphemes that represent consonantal base letters which diacritics modify to represent vowels (as in Devanagari and other South Asian scripts), an abjad, in which letters predominantly or exclusively represent consonants (as in the original Phoenician, Hebrew or Arabic), and an "alphabet", a set of graphemes that represent both vowels and consonants. In this narrow sense of the word the first "true" alphabet was the Greek alphabet, which was developed on the basis of the earlier Phoenician alphabet. 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.
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