“[T]rue alphabetic writing consists in having a sign for each sound (technically each phoneme) of the language, rather than one for each word or one for each syllable. This is the most efficient writing system possible, since a language will be found to have some thousands of words and at least a couple of hundred different syllables, but the words and syllables are made up of individual speech sounds which seldom exceed sixty to seventy in number, and sometimes number as few as a dozen. Hence an alphabetic writing system can, with the fewest possible units . . . record every possible utterance in the language.”

—John P. Hughes, The Science of Language, 1962.