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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. 1 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 2 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. 3 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 4 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. 5 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, 6