alphabetindian-englishword-usage
I came across this sentence,
"Modi understands only one alphabet, and that is the capital I"
in the Indian writer Dr. Shashi Tharoor's recently published book "The Paradoxical Prime Minister".
When I looked the word 'alphabet' up in dictionaries, I get the definition as 'a set of letters or symbols in a fixed order used to represent the basic set of speech sounds of a language, especially the set of letters from A to Z'. (Oxford Living Dictionaries)
Why was 'alphabet' used here?
There have been plenty of proposals to extend or replace the English alphabet, including:
But plans? As Robusto pointed out, plans by whom? There's no Academy of the English Language.
According to the Wikipedia page on the Ampersand, this is true.
The ampersand often appeared as a letter at the end of the Latin alphabet, as for example in Byrhtferð's list of letters from 1011. Similarly, & was regarded as the 27th letter of the English alphabet, as used by children (in the US). An example may be seen in M. B. Moore's 1863 book The Dixie Primer, for the Little Folks.
Here is the page from The Dixie Primer, for the Little Folks:
Traditionally, when reciting the alphabet in English-speaking schools, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself ("A", "I", and, at one point, "O") was repeated with the Latin expression per se ("by itself").
This habit was useful in spelling where a word or syllable was repeated after spelling; e.g. "d, o, g—dog" would be clear but simply saying "a—a" would be confusing without the clarifying "per se" added.
It was also common practice to add the "&" sign at the end of the alphabet as if it were the 27th letter, pronounced as the Latin et or later in English as and. As a result, the recitation of the alphabet would end in "X, Y, Z, and per se and". This last phrase was routinely slurred to "ampersand" and the term had entered common English usage by 1837.
However, in contrast to the 26 letters, the ampersand does not represent a speech sound—although other characters that were dropped from the English alphabet did, such as the Old English thorn, wynn, and eth.
Best Answer
In standard US and UK usage, an alphabet is a system or collection of letters, a letter being
In Indian English, however, the word alphabet is sometimes used synonymously with letter, which is all that has happened here. A web search turns up innumerable examples, including sources one might expect to have a good level of English proficiency:
India of course has many languages and several different alphabets, so the use of alphabet to mean letter may have arisen out of a lexical gap for distinguishing corresponding characters of different case: