Final answer:
English is an c) alphabetic orthography, utilizing a set of symbols or letters to represent speech sounds, and consists of 26 letters that can combine to form over 600,000 recognized words.
Step-by-step explanation:
English is an c) alphabetic orthography, which means it uses a set of written symbols or letters to represent the individual sounds or phonemes of spoken language.
The English alphabet includes 26 letters, which make up a vast number of recognized words.
A key characteristic of alphabetic writing systems is that they use characters to represent sounds rather than whole syllables or words, making them different from syllabic or logographic systems.
Alphabetic systems, like that of English, are based on the correspondence between these symbols and sounds, something that dates back to the phonetic alphabet created by the Phoenicians.