alfabeto

The word is a list of its own first two items. Alfabeto names the set by reciting the beginning of it, the way English speakers say the ABC and Russians say azbuka (az plus buki, the old names of А and Б). Greek got alpha and bēta from Phoenician ʾaleph and bēt, an ox and a house, and those were once pictures of an ox and a house. Three thousand years later the ox is still in there, upside down, in the letter A.

Esperanto's own alphabet is the reason the word matters here. It has 28 letters, each with exactly one sound and each sound with exactly one letter, which is a promise no national language keeps. Six of them wear a hat: ĉ ĝ ĥ ĵ ŝ ŭ. Four Latin letters are absent entirely - there is no q, w, x or y. The full run of the 28, with what each one sounds like and how to type the hats on a keyboard that has none, is set out in the Esperanto alphabet; the conventions for writing it down - the x-system, the abbreviations - are in orthography and punctuation, and capitalisation in capital letters.

Derivations are regular and worth knowing. Alfabeta is alphabetical, alfabete means in alphabetical order, and alfabeti is to arrange something that way. Analfabeto is an illiterate person, built with the Greek negative an- rather than the Esperanto mal-, which is one of the few places the language lets a borrowed prefix stand.