Download Writing systems

Types of writing systems
• Writing systems of the world today.
– Alphabets (English, Russian, Greek)
– Abjads (Arabic, Hebrew)
– Abugidas (Devanagari, Thai)
– Featural alphabets (Hangul)
– Syllabaries (Japanese, Cherokee)
– Logographic systems (E.g., Chinese characters)
Languages of the World
Writing systems
Alphabets
• An alphabet is a standard set of basic symbols
(letters) that represent phonemes of a spoken
language.
• A true alphabet has letters for the vowels of a
language as well as the consonants.
• The first true alphabet in this sense is believed
to be the Greek alphabet, which is a modified
form of the Phoenician script.
The Greek alphabet
Αα
Ββ
Γγ
Δδ
Εε
Ζζ
Ηη
Θθ
Ιι
Κκ
Λλ
Μμ
Alpha
Beta
Gamma
Delta
Epsilon
Zeta
Eta
Theta
Iota
Kappa
Lambda
Mu
Νν
Ξξ
Οο
Ππ
Ρρ
Σσς
Ττ
Υυ
Φφ
Χχ
Ψψ
Ωω
Nu
Xi
Omicron
Pi
Rho
Sigma
Tau
Upsilon
Phi
Chi
Psi
Omega
The Greek alphabet is the script that
has been used to write the Greek
language since the 8th century BC. It
is the ancestor of numerous other
European and Middle Eastern scripts,
including the Cyrillic and Roman
alphabets.
a NoTe AbOuT ‘LeTtEr CaSe’
The Roman alphabet
• In orthography and typography, letter case (or just case) is
the distinction between the letters that are in larger upper
case (capital letters, caps, majuscule, upper-case, or
uppercase) and smaller lower case (minuscule, etc.) letters
in certain languages.
• The term originated with the shallow drawers called ‘type
cases’ still used to hold the movable type for letterpress
printing.
• Most Western languages (certainly those based on the Latin,
Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian alphabets, and Coptic alphabets)
use multiple letter-cases in their written form as an aid to
clarity. Scripts using two separate cases are also called
‘bicameral scripts’.
The classical Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet evolved from a western
variety of the Greek alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the
Etruscans who ruled early Rome. The Etruscan alphabet was in turn
adopted and further modified by the ancient Romans to write the Latin
language.
During the Middle Ages, the Latin alphabet was
adapted to Romance languages, direct descendants
of Latin, as well as to Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, and
some Slavic languages.
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The Roman alphabet
With the age of colonialism and Christian evangelism, the Latin
script was spread overseas, and applied to indigenous American,
Australian, Austronesian, Austroasiatic, and African languages.
The Cyrillic alphabet
The Cyrillic alphabet
• The Cyrillic script
(or azbuka) is an
alphabetic writing
system and one of
the most used writing
systems in the world.
• Around 252 million
people in Eurasia use
it as the official
alphabet for their
national languages.
About half of them
are in Russia.
Abjads
• An abjad is a type of writing system where
each symbol always or usually stands for a
consonant, leaving the reader to supply the
appropriate vowel.
• In popular usage, abjads often contain the
word ‘alphabet’ in their names, such as ‘Arabic
alphabet’ and ‘Phoenician alphabet’.
• The name ‘abjad’ is derived from the Arabic
word for alphabet.
Hebrew
Arabic
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Phoenician
Abugidas
• An abugida (from Ge’ez አቡጊዳ ’äbugida), also
called an alphasyllabary, is a segmental
writing system in which consonant–vowel
sequences are written as a unit.
• Each unit is based on a consonant letter, and
vowel notation is secondary.
Brahmic abugidas
• Brahmic scripts are a family of abugida
writing systems.
• They are used throughout South Asia
Southeast Asia, and parts of Central and East
Asia, and are descended from the Brāhmī
script ancient Indian.
Featural alphabets
• A featural alphabet is an alphabet wherein the
shapes of the letters are not arbitrary, but
encode phonological features of the phonemes
they represent.
• The term featural was introduced by Geoffrey
Sampson to describe Hangul and Pitman
Shorthand.
• Examples of featural alphabet include the
following:
Hangul (한글)
• The Korean alphabet, also known as Hangul (or Chosongul,
in N. Korea) is the native alphabet of the Korean language.
• Hangul is a true alphabet of 24 consonant and vowel letters.
• However, instead of being written sequentially like the
letters of the Latin alphabet, Hangul letters are grouped into
blocks.
• Each syllabic block consists of two to five letters, including
at least one consonant and one vowel. These blocks are then
arranged horizontally from left to right or vertically from
top to bottom.
– E.g., although the word 한글 may look like two characters, it is
actually composed of six basic letters.
The number of mathematically possible blocks is 11,172!
However Korean phonotactics do not allow all of these combinations, and
not all the phonotactically possible syllables occur in actual Korean words.
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Syllabaries
[han.ɡɯl]
Yugtun syllabary (a.k.a. Alaska script)
• A syllabary is a set of written symbols that
represent the syllables or (more frequently)
moras which make up words.
• A symbol in a syllabary (called a syllabogram)
typically represents an (optional) consonant
sound (simple onset) followed by a vowel
sound (nucleus), though other syllable types,
such as CVC and CV-tone, are also found in
syllabaries.
Yupik
The Yupik languages are several distinct languages of the several Yupik
peoples of western and southcentral Alaska and northeastern Siberia.
The Yupik languages are Eskimo–Aleut
languages. The Aleut and Eskimo languages
diverged about 2000 BC. The Yupik
languages diverged from each other and
from the Inuit language about 1000 AD.
Cree syllabary
Cherokee syllabary
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Linear A
The Minoans
The Minoans were the first European civilization in history to
use writing. They inhabited the island of Crete, flourishing from
2700 to 1450 BC, before being displaced by Greeks. Their
civilization and their language is still quite a mystery.
Cuneiform
• Cuneiform script is one of the earliest known systems of writing,
distinguished by its wedge-shaped marks pressed into clay.
Evolution of Cuneiform
Inscription, c. 2500 BCE
– The name cuneiform means ‘wedge shaped’. (Latin cuneus ‘wedge’ + forma
‘shape’)
• Cuneiform writing is not classifiable as a particular type of ‘system’, since
it may be used to write syllabaries, abjads, or something else.
• Cuneiform was first used as a syllabary to write Sumerian, though this
fact was unknown for a long time.
• The convention spread through the Middle East, and was adopted as a
script for Akkadian (Semitic), Hittite and Luwian (Anatolian), Old Persian
(Indo-Iranian), and many other languages in the region.
• The first cuneiform tablets discovered in Mesopotamia were Akkadian
abjad. When clearly non-Semitic tablets were discovered, scholars were are
first baffled.
– Some were even convinced it was some kind of secret code!
– This was later concluded that these were a non-related language we now call
‘Sumerian’, which was eventually displaced by Akkadian.
Amarna tablets, c. 1350BCE
• Between 1 and 2 million cuneiform tablets have been discovered, many of
which remain undeciphered.
Akkadian is an the earliest attested Semitic language, which
flourished in Mesopotamia for nearly 3000 years.
The language was spoken in the Akkadian Empire alongside
Sumerian for many centuries, and gradually displaced it.
Eventually, dialects of the language – notably Assyrian and
Babylonian – developed, and Akkadian became the lingua
franca of the Ancient Near East.
Hundreds of thousands of Akkadian/Assyrian/Babylonian
texts have been discovered, some of which are hymns and
prayers, and tales that constitute (alongside Ancient Egyptian)
the world’s oldest literature.
Logographic systems
• The earliest writing systems were logographic
– (from Greek: λόγος ‘word’ + γράφειν ‘to draw’)
• Such systems rely on pictograms – visual representations of
the meaning they wish to convey.
– E.g., the Egyptian hieroglyph
vowels) meant ‘duck’.
[s_ʔ_] (we don’t know the
• No writing system of any natural language known to us is
‘purely’ logographic.
– Instead, the use of pictograms is extended using the rebus
principle, whereby symbols are used just for their sounds,
regardless of their meaning, to represent new words.
– E.g.,
– or
, which also meant ‘son’ in Egyptian, but was likely
pronounced with different vowels.
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Egyptian hieroglyphs
• The word hieroglyph comes from the Greek adjective
ἱερογλυφικός (hieroglyphikos) a compound of ἱερός
(hierós ‘sacred’) and γλύφω (glýphō ‘Ι carve, engrave’),
which is calque [=direct translation] of Egyptian
mdw·w-nṯr (medu-netjer) ‘god’s words’.
• Early Egyptian (3500 BCE) had some 200 glyphs, a
number which grew to over 5000.
– Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs evolved into Demotic
Egyptian (mostly an abjad, some logograms), which later
became the Coptic writing system (an alphabet), which was
heavily influenced by Greek.
• The script was largely undeciphered until 20 years after
the discovery of the Rosetta Stone (1799).
漢字 / 汉字
• The Chinese character system is the oldest continuously used
system of writing in the world.
• The Han Dynasty philologist Xǔ Shèn (許慎) wrote the first
Chinese dictionary and gave an analysis of the character
system which enumerates six methods of character formation.
– Pictograms (象形字 xiàngxíngzì ‘image-form characters’)
– Simple ideograms (指事字 zhǐshìzì ‘point-thing characters’)
– Compound ideograms (会意字 / 會意字 huìyìzì ‘assemblethought characters’)
– Rebus (假借字 jiǎjièzì ‘false-borrow characters’)
– Phono-semantic compounds (形声字 / 形聲字 xíngshēngzì ‘form–
sound characters’)
– ‘Transformed cognates’ 转注字 / 轉注字 zhuǎnzhùzì (‘movefocus characters’) [
See you next time,
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