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In the book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick there is a bold claim:

In all the languages of earth there is only one word for alphabet (alfabet, alfabeto, алфавит, αλφάβητο).

How (in)accurate is this statement? As someone else has asked about here in reference to the same book, the word comes from the combination of alpha and beta. From what I understand the Arabic الأبجدية is based on four letters instead of two, but that's close enough. The Icelandic stafróf or various East Asian languages like the Chinese 字母 (zìmǔ) seem likely to be unrelated? Or do these words also have a direct relationship to "alphabet" as Gleick's statement would seem to imply?

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    One of the names of the Javanese script is Hanacaraka after the reading of the first five symbols, the whole set of which makes up a full meaningful sentence in the Javanese language. Commented Jan 31, 2024 at 4:47
  • There are alphabets and writing systems or scripts. Chinese and Japanese use characters, which constitute writing systems. Commented Feb 1, 2024 at 16:59
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    This claim reads like a rather typical Westerner refusing to acknowledge the many thousands of languages they don’t have good (if any) knowledge of. I had thought of a dozen counterexamples off the top of my head before reading any of the answers (and then found all of them covered already, hence my not contributing an answer), though it’s worth noting that a number of cases arise because of their point of contact with the concept of writing, usually from Europe and almost invariably via a language that does use the term ‘alphabet’ (see for example isiZulu), though this is not always the case. Commented Feb 1, 2024 at 23:40
  • Whatever a language's writing system is, that language has a name for the signs they use to write it. Ergo, this question is somewhat naive. Commented Sep 12, 2024 at 13:04
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    @Lambie I'm not a linguist so sure, call me naive. But the four examples Gleico gives obviously share a common etymology, and the counterexamples in the accepted answer don't, so I think the answer was useful. Commented Sep 12, 2024 at 17:47

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This is rather a bizarre claim to make in a widely published book, since it’s so easily disproven. There are lots of words for ‘alphabet’ that are different from the English term.

 

Alphabet, abjad, abugida et al.: based on first elements in the system

The word alphabet comes from Ancient Greek ἀλφάβητος alfábētos, which is based on ἄλφα álfa and βῆτα bḗta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. It’s perfectly true that this word has spread far and wide. The Romans borrowed it into Latin, and the Romance languages have inherited it (or re-borrowed it) from there; English borrowed it in Middle English, and the combined influence of Greek, Latin, English, French, Spanish and Portuguese (the latter as colonising languages) has meant that the word for ‘alphabet’ is now ultimately based on the Greek word in hundreds, if not thousands, of languages around the world.

It’s also true that similar naming principles, based on the first few elements in the system, apply in other scripts and many languages. From the Latin alphabet, we have forms like German Abece (and English ABC), Czech abeceda, Malagasy abidy (Malagasy doesn’t use c) – and then there’s a whole group based on Latin abecedārium: Catalan abecedari, Spanish abecedario, Irish abítir, Welsh gwyddor (yes, abecedārium becomes gwyddor in Welsh!), etc.

Examples from other writing systems include the following, plus of course the many words across many languages that are based on each of them:

Language Form Origin
Arabic ألفباء ʾalifbāʾ first two letters: ʾalif and bāʾ; ultimately the same names as alpha and beta, but seemingly independently formed in Arabic
Arabic أبجد ʾabjad first four letters: ʾalif, bāʾ, jīm, dāl
Georgian ანბანი anbani first two letters: an, ban
Ge’ez አቡጊዳ ’äbugida same as abjad, just with the Ge’ez names of the letters
Armenian այբուբեն ayb‑u‑ben first two letters: ayb and ben (u = ‘and’)
Old Church Slavonic (now Pan-Slavic) азъбоукꙑ azŭbuky first two letters in the Glagolithic alphabet: azŭ and buky
Amharic ሀሁ hahu two of the fidäl in the first row: ሀ ha and ሁ hu

(Aside: I’m sure I’ve seen a reference to the traditional Amharic sorting order ሀለሐመ haläħamä being used as a word for the script itself, but I can’t find it now)

Those are not technically the same word, but they’re based on the same principle, so reading Gleick’s statement generously and broadly, with “one word” meaning ‘one way of forming the word’, so we can just about allow that.

 

Names based on other things

But there’s a whole host of words that we definitely cannot allow as being the same word, or even the same principle as all those. You’ve identified two of them yourself in the question, but there are many more. The most common principle is a simple explanatory word meaning something along the lines of ‘list of letters’, or indeed just reusing the word for ‘letter’ for the whole alphabet.

Here are a few examples, most of which I just got from the Translations section of the Wiktionary article for alphabet (many are in languages I don’t speak, so I’m relying on the etymologies given in Wiktionary):

Language Form Meaning Comment
Icelandic stafróf ‘row of letters’ (bók)stafur = ‘staff, letter’; -róf = ‘row’, likely borrowed from Old English (cf. Old English stæfrōf)
Faroese (bók)stav(a)rað ‘row of letters’ as Icelandic (bók)stafróf
Sanskrit वर्णमाला varṇamālā ‘series of shapes’
Sanskrit अक्षर akṣara ‘letter’ literally ‘unbreakable [unit]’, referring to a word, letter, sound, vowel, etc.; not a common word for the whole system in Sanskrit, but very common as a borrowing in later languages (sometimes with a suffix equivalent to Skt. माला mālā ‘row, string’)
Finnish aakkoset, aakkosto ‘(collection of) letters’ from aakko ‘letter’ (itself from aa ‘the letter a’ + -kko [collective suffix]) + -nen (adjectival suffix) or -sto (collective suffix)
Estonian tähestik ‘series of letters’ from tähti ‘star, letter’ + -stik (collective suffix)
Tamil அகரவரிசை akaravaricai ‘row/series of akaram’ akaram = a name for the first vowel in the script, ‘a’
Thai ตัวอักษร dtuua-àk-sɔ̌ɔn ‘letter-letter’ apparently from dtuua ‘letter’ + àk-sɔ̌ɔn ‘letter’ (< Sanskrit akṣara)
Vietnamese bảng chữ cái ‘letter table’ bảng = table, cái = base, chữ = character (< Chinese 字, see below)
Ge’ez ፊደል fidäl ‘letter(s)’
Arabic حروف ḥurūf ‘letters’ pl. of حرف ḥarf (borrowed into Malaysian and Indonesian, among others)
Circassian тхыпкъылъэ txəpqəlˢɛ,
хьэрыфылъэ ḥɛrəfəlˢɛ		 ‘collection(?) of letters’ from тхыпкъэ txəpqɛ / хьарыф ḥarəf ‘letter’ (the latter borrowed from Arabic) + something that I’m guessing is a collective suffix or similar

And then there are sundry other formations:

Language Form Meaning Origin
Greenlandic oqaasiliuutissat ‘things that will be used to turn into words’(?) I think it’s oqaaseq ‘word’ + -lior ‘make into’ + -uti ‘instrument, means’ + -ssaq ‘future’ + -t ‘plural’
Korean,
Japanese		 문자 munja,
文字 moji		 ‘script characters’ borrowed from Chinese where it’s broader and just means ‘language, writing, script, text’
Breton,
Cornish		 lizherenneg,
lytherennek		 ‘letterese’ from lizher/lyther ‘letter (missive)’ (borrowed from French/Latin) + -enn (singulative suffix) + -eg/-ek (suffix normally used for languages)
Chinese (Mandarin) 字母 zìmǔ ‘mother of a character’ referring originally to the initial in a syllable in Chinese phonology, or to the character used to illustrate this initial in fǎnqiè
Udi тӏетӏир ṭeṭir ‘primer, ABC book, alphabet’ borrowed from Armenian տետր tetr referring to a primer, from Greek τέτρας tétras ‘quaternion, quire (four-leaf book)’
Mongolian цагаан толгой cagaan tolgoj ‘white head’ “apparently a popular name for primer books, supposed to mean ‘clear (= simple, easy) initials’” — @Quassnoi (in comments)

 

Miscellaneous unknown formations

Just for the sake of Wiktionary completeness, here are some that don’t look like they belong to the first two groups, but since they’re in languages I don’t know and don’t have adequate entries or etymologies on Wiktionary, I don’t know how they’re actually formed (if anyone knows more, please feel free to add details and move to other categories if appropriate):

  • Yup’ik igat
  • Winnebago woowagax (if that’s even a real word)
  • Navajo saad bee álʼíní – saad is ‘word’, don’t know the rest
  • Māori tātai reta
  • Lao ໂຕຫນັງສື tō nang sư̄ and ແມ່ກໍກາ mǣ kǭ kā
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    (I’ve copy-pasted from Wiktionary in cases where I don’t actually know/read the language in question or script – please feel free to correct any errors I or Wiktionary may have introduced.) Commented Jan 31, 2024 at 20:19
  • You forgot Hebrew "Alef Bet" Commented Feb 1, 2024 at 20:46
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    @JanusBahsJacquet "white heads", apparently, was a popular name for primer books, supposed to mean "clear (= simple, easy) initials" Commented Feb 2, 2024 at 6:39
  • @Quassnoi Ah, that would make sense! Commented Feb 2, 2024 at 10:03
  • хьэрыфылъэ obviously from Arabic harf "letter" Commented Feb 2, 2024 at 14:27
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Plenty of languages have other words for it. Most Slavic languages, for example, use a word along the lines of azbuky, named after the first two letters of the Glagolitic alphabet instead of the Greek one. Other languages use a word originally meaning "letter", like Amharic fidäl.

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    I'd be willing to give the Slavic example to Gleick (that's still the first two letters of a presumably Greek-influenced alphabet) but the Amharic case seems like a strong counter-example. Thanks! Commented Jan 31, 2024 at 2:43
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There exists the word "das Abece" (often written as Abc) as a Germanisation of alphabet in German, and it has some currency in elementary school teaching.

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    Similar to “now you know your ABC” in English as well. But that’s still an example of using the first elements in the system to name the system. Commented Jan 31, 2024 at 9:29
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As a minor pet peeve I will argue with Micael P. Barnes (“Runes, a handbook”):

Although “alphabet” is sometimes used of a total set of runes, the synonyms “rune-row“ and futhark are more precise.

The fact of the matter is that futhark betrays the order of letters of the abc, the ΑΩ, and the difference has to date no thorough explanation.

In the narrows sense of alpha /a/, “alphabet” names scripts which have phonemic vowels like the Greek one, including futhark, distinct from abugidas, abjads, and cetera. More over, even more narrow, dedicated literature pays attention to the order and specific values of the letters, so as to distinguish '-b-g from a-b-c and more diverse cases, like a by communis opinio younger h-l-ḥ-m sequence of Ugaritic from Bet Shemesh, though common practice ignores this. E.g. Sanskrit devanagari with its deviant albeit logical order is still classified as abugida, that is semi-syllabary on a syllabary to alphabetic cline.

Which is to say in lexikographical terms, the word can have different inclusive and exclusive meanings. The inclusive meaning is a generalization from the most common meaning lacking contrast. This is largely irrelevant, since the bulk of speakers is ignorant of foreign scripts. This egality is made explicit in translations. (@Draconis' answer is throwing a wrench in my take on the question, so dun matter is all I can say).

The exclusive meaning on the other hand depends on context. E.g. devanagari may be parsed as a foreign word or a terminus technicus, either synonym or contrasting. Its relation to Greek, Aramaic or Phoenician is essentially obscure. Cf. HSK 10/1 „Schrift und Schriftlichkeit“ (1994) p. 323 for the genralizing point of view (translation mine, I don't fully agree):

It is very likely that selection of symbols was based on certain regionaly known symbols which served the basic purpose of lettering [„Buchstabenschrift“].

... The assumption of a perhaps non-acrophonic selection offers the only solution for the parallelism of the linear sign inventory of the oldest alphabets of Byblos and the Aegean scripts.

Indeed I feel tempted to translate „Buchstabenschrift“ as alpabetic + writing, inasmuch as the etymology of book-stave may be controversial.

Nevertheles, a clear distinction can be drawn at the very least in the case of undeciphered scripts, on a philosophical level, in those controversial cases where it is undecided if the marks decode language proper or something else.

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  • this doesn't appear to actually address the question. Additionally is there actually any evidence of "futhark" being used to refer to the runic alphabets (rather than just it being the start of abecedaries) in the Elder or Younger Futhark periods? Commented Feb 6, 2024 at 15:43
  • It works under the assumption that the OP is opinionated, and so, incidently, are you. Of course it addresses the OP. a) some call the futhark an alphabet, so it is in scope. b) this is wrong, and here is why. You cannot disagree with the first point, because it is a common fact, and you cannot disagree with the second point without addressing it, since it's sourced and rounded off by my own interpretation, but you haven't. You could agree with it, indicating that it renders the first point irrelevant, but that appears bikeshedding to the max, because you fail to notice the bigger implication. Commented Feb 6, 2024 at 17:00
  • [cont.] Your questioning appears to be irrelevant, as we have scarcely any running text in Elder Futhark, but definite evidence of the futhark sequence. Younger Futhark and Futhorc are not immediately relevant to my interest. My point was simply that the James Gleick and BrianZ alike are likely in the group of people who would call it alphabet. You, @Tristan, are in no position to disagree with that, obviously. Commented Feb 6, 2024 at 17:50

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