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A writing system, also called a script, is used to visually record a language with symbols. The oldest kind of writing was pictographic or ideographical. Most writing systems can be broadly
divided into three categories: logographic, syllabic and alphabetic. The
generic word for symbols in a writing system is a character. A glyph is a graphical representation of a character.
History of writing systems
The first writing system was cuneiform, which
emerged among the Sumerians towards the end of the 4th millennium BC; however it
was followed closely by the appearance of writing in Egypt and the Indus valley, and since then writing has appeared
independently a number of times, associated with various civilizations.
Logographic writing systems
Main article: Logogram
A logogram is a single written character which represents a complete grammatical word. Most Chinese characters are classified as logograms.
As each character represents a single word (more precisely: a morpheme), many
logograms are required to write all the words of language. The vast array of logograms and the memorization of what they mean are
the major disadvantage of the logographic systems over alphabetic systems. However, since the meaning is inherent to the symbol,
the same logographic system can theoretically be used to represent different languages. In practice, this is only true for
closely related languages, like the dialects of Chinese, as
syntactical constraints reduce the portability of a given logographic system. Both Korean and Japanese use Chinese logograms
in their writing systems, and many of the symbols carry the same meaning in the different languages. However, they are different
enough from Chinese that a Chinese text is not easily understood by a Japanese or Korean reader.
While most languages don't use wholly logographic writing systems, many languages use some logograms. A good example of modern
western logograms are the Arabic numerals -- everyone who uses those
symbols understands what 1 means, whether they call it one, eins, uno or
ichi. Other western logograms include the ampersand
&, used for and, and the @ used in
many contexts for at.
Logograms are sometimes called ideograms, a word that refers to symbols which
graphically represent abstract ideas, but linguists avoid this use, as Chinese characters are often semantic-phonetic compounds,
symbols which include an element that represents the meaning and element that represents the pronunciation. Some nonlinguists
distinguish between lexigraphy and
ideography, where symbols in lexigraphies represents words, and symbols in
ideographies represent words or morphemes.
The most important (and, to a degree, the only surviving) modern logographic writing system is the Chinese one, whose
characters are used, with varying degrees of modification, in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and other east Asian
languages. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Mayan writing system are also logographic systems, although they have since
faded from use.
See List of writing systems for the complete list
of logographic writing systems.
Syllabic writing systems
Main article: Syllabary
As logographic writing systems use a single symbol for an entire word, a syllabary is a set of written
symbols that represent (or approximate) syllables, which make up words. A symbol in a syllabary typically represents a consonant sound followed by a vowel sound, or just a vowel alone. In a
true syllabary there is no systematic graphic similarity between phonetically related characters (though some do have graphic
similarity for the vowels). That is, the characters for "ke", "ka", and "ko" have no similarity to indicate their common
"k"-ness. Compare abugida, where each grapheme
typically represents a syllable but where characters representing related sounds are similar graphically (typically, a common
consonantal base is annotated in a more or less consistent manner to represent the vowel in the syllable).
Syllabaries are best suited to languages with relatively simple syllable structure, such as Japanese. The English language, on the other hand, allows complex syllable structures,
with a relative large inventory of vowels and complex consonant clusters, making it cumbersome to write English words with a syllabary. To write English
using a syllabary, every possible syllable in English would have to have a separate symbol, and whereas the number of possible
syllables in Japanese is no more than 100 or so, in English there are many thousands.
Other languages that use syllabic writing include Mycenaean Greek (Linear B) and Native American languages such as Cherokee. Several languages of the Ancient Near East used forms of cuneiform, which is a syllabary with some non-syllabic elements.
See List of writing systems for a complete list of
syllabaries.
Alphabetic writing systems
Main article: Alphabet
An alphabet is a small set of letters--basic written symbols--each
of which roughly represents or represented historically a phoneme of a spoken
language. The word alphabet is derived from alpha and beta,
the first two symbols of the Greek alphabet.
In a perfectly phonological alphabet, the phonemes and letters would
correspond perfectly in two directions: a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a speaker
could predict the pronunciation of a word given its spelling. Each language has general rules that govern the association between
letters and phonemes, but, depending on the language, these rules may or may not be consistently followed.
Perfectly phonological alphabets are very easy to use and learn, and languages that have them have much lower barriers to
literacy than languages like English that have very complex and irregular spelling systems. As languages often evolve
independently of their writing systems, and writing systems have been borrowed for languages they were not designed for, the
degree to which letters of an alphabet correspond to phonemes of a language varies greatly from one language to another and even
within a single language. In modern times, when linguists invent a writing system
for a language that didn't previously have one, the goal is usually to make perfectly phonological alphabet.
See alphabet for more information about alphabets. See List of writing systems for a list of all alphabets.
The first type of alphabet that was developed was the abjad. An abjad is an alphabetic writing system where
there is one symbol per consonant. Abjads differ from regular alphabets in that they only have characters for consonantal sounds. Vowels are not usually marked in abjad.
All known abjads belong to the Semitic family of scripts, and derive from the original Northern Linear Abjad. The reason for
this is that Semitic languages have a morphemic structure which makes the denotation of vowels redundant
in most cases.
Some abjads (like Arabic and Hebrew) have markings for vowels as well, but only use them in special contexts, such as for
teaching. Many scripts derived from abjads have been extended with vowel symbols to become full alphabets, the most famous case
being the derivation of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician abjad.
This has mostly happened when the script was adapted to a non-Semitic language.
The term abjad takes its name from the old order of the Arabic alphabet's consonants Alif, Bá, Jim, Dál, though the
word may have earlier roots in Phoenician or Ugaritic.
See List of writing systems for a list of all
abjads.
An abugida is a alphabetic writing system whose basic signs denote consonants with an inherent vowel and
where consistent modifications of the basic sign indicate other following vowels than the inherent one.
Thus, in an abugida there is no sign for "k", but instead one for "ka" (if "a" is the inherent vowel), and "ke" is written by
modifying the "ka" sign in a way that is consistent with how one would modify "la" to get "le". In many abugidas the modification
is the addition of a vowel sign, but other possibilities are imaginable (and used), such as rotation of the basic sign, addition
of diacritical marks, and so on.
The obvious contrast is with syllabaries, which have one distinct symbol per
possible syllable, and the signs for each syllable have no systematic graphic similarity. The graphic similarity comes from the
fact that most abugidas are derived from abjads, and the consonants make up the symbols with the inherent vowel, and the new
vowel symbols are markings added on to the base symbol.
The Ethiopic script is an abugida, although the vowel modifications in Ethiopic are not entirely systematic. Many North American Indian scripts, such as Cree syllabary, are abugidas as
well. The largest single group of abugidas is the Brahmic family of
scripts, however, which includes nearly all the scripts used in India and Southeast Asia.
The name abugida is derived from the first four characters of an order of the Ethiopic script used in some religious contexts. The term was coined by Peter T. Daniels.
See List of writing systems for a list of all
abugidas.
Featural writing systems
In a featural writing system, each part of each symbol corresponds to a phonetic feature. That is, sounds
that are phonetically related have symbols that are related, and different phonetic features, like place of articulation or
voicing, will be represented the same way for different sounds. The most important featural writing system is Korean Hangul, which also
incorporates aspects of logographic writing systems and alphabets in addition to features.
There are also systems for recording sign languages, such as SignWriting, where symbols stand for particular features of signs, the symbols often
resembling those sign features they stand for.
See List of writing systems for a list of all
featural writing systems.
Writing system taxonomy
| Type of writing system |
What each symbol represents |
Example |
| Logographic |
morpheme |
Chinese Hanzi |
| Syllabic |
syllable |
Katakana |
| Alphabetic |
phoneme |
Latin |
| Abugida |
consonant+vowel, vowel |
Devanagari |
| Abjad |
consonant |
Arabic |
| Featural |
phonetic feature |
Korean |
See also
- For technical aspects of computer support for multiple writing systems, see the articles CJK and BiDi.
External links
- About African writing systems by the John Henrik Clarke Africana Library at Cornell University:
- General about writing systems
References
- Daniels, Peter T., and William Bright, eds. 1996. The
world’s writing systems. ISBN
0-19-507-993-0.
- DeFrancis, John. 1990. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0824810686
- Hannas, William. C. 1997. Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 082481892X (paperback); ISBN 0824818423 (hardcover)
- Sampson, Geoffrey. 1985. Writing Systems. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-1756-7 (paper), ISBN 0-8047-1254-9 (cloth).
- Smalley, W.A. (ed.) 1964. Orthography studies: articles on new writing systems, United Bible Society, London.
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