Writing systems in the languages of the world differ in what basic linguistic units are represented by the basic symbols of the systems. For instance, Chinese characters typically represent words and Japanese characters syllables. In alphabetical writing systems, sounds are the basic linguistic units represented by the letters of the various alphabets (e.g. the Latin alphabet in English and French, the Greek alphabet in Greek, the Cyrillic alphabet in Russian), and in each case a specific code can be said to determine the correspondences between sounds and letters. In the simplest type of code, sounds and letters would stand in one-to-one correspondences, as they do in the International Phonetic Association's system, where, for instance, the symbol i exclusively represents the sound [i] and only the sound [i], and the symbol y the sound [y] and only the sound [y]. Languages rarely use such a simple code, but their deviations from it can vary widely. French (with English) is one of the languages where the deviation is most extraordinary, and where in fact knowledge of the code is in itself insufficient to allow one to spell according to the norm.