Ishwar Chandra Rahi. World Alphabets, Their Origin and
Development. Allahabad: Bhargava Printing Press, 1977.
Current alphabets vary in number of letters from 12 letters of the Hawaiian alphabet (transliterated to the Roman alphabet by an American missionary) to 45 letters in modern Indian (Devnagari). Most modern alphabets vary from 24 to 33 letters: modern Greek, 24; Italian, 26; Spanish, 27; modern Cambodian, 32; modern Russian Cyrillic, 33. Modern Ethiopian has 26 letters representing consonants, each letter modified for the six vowels in the language, making a total of 182 letters.
Walter J. Ong. Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the
World. London and New York: Methuen, 1982.
The comparison between orality and writing has had a very long history. It is clear that Plato's remarks are made in a different pragmatic framework than that of the present. Ong noticed that: "…language is so overwhelmingly oral that of all the many thousands of languages-possibly tens of thousands-spoken in the course of human history, only around 106 have even been committed to writing to a degree sufficient to have produced literature, and most have never been written at all" (p.7). Ong also refers to pictographic systems, noticing that "Chinese is the largest, most complex, and richest: the K'anglisi dictionary of Chinese in 1716 AD lists 40,545 characters" (p. 8).
Recently, the assumption that Chinese writing is pictographic came under scrutiny. John DeFrancis (Visible Speech. The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989, p. 115) categorizes the Chinese system as morphosyllabic.
Harald Haarman. Universalgeschichte der Schrift. Frankfurt:
Campus Verlag, 1990.
David Diringer. The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind. 2nd ed. New York: Philosophical Library, 1953.
-. The Story of Aleph Beth. New York/London: Yoseloff, 1960.
-. Writing. Ancient Peoples and Places. London: Thames of Hudson, 1962.
Ignace J. Gelb. A Study of Writing. Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1963.