Writing Sytems: brief history and typological classification
‘spoken language’ vs ‘written language’ (note: writing is a fairly recent invention) 語言「也許」始於 300 -400 萬年前的直立人；文字則「相對確定」約在 1 萬年前萌芽於新石器時代的刻符與岩畫。
Pictograms and ideograms
- Pictograms: pictures or symbols that represent an object or idea and may communicate a message, but they are NOT direct representations of speech.
writing is a type of SYMBOLIC communication and not a type of ICONIC communication. (i.e., form-meaning pair conventionalized vs. resembling the thing they are meant to represent)
- Ideograms: symbols that communicate or represent an idea, though they are not necessarily pictures of actual objects or events. When a picture becomes conventionalized, it may be an ideogram, like the following sign.
- Pictographic/ideographic ‘writing systems’
- graphemes are
iconicpictures. - graphemes are
ideogramsrepresenting concepts or ideas, rather than a specific word.1 no one-to-one correspondence btw symbol and language, they are interpreted rather than read - (Aztec, Mixtec, Ersu Shābā, Igbo, etc) and other symbolic systems
- graphemes are
Phonograms: alphabets and syllabaries
Pictograms and ideograms are not complete writing systems for any (sound-based) language.
Phonogram is a symbol based on sound rather than meaning. Phonographic systems include: alphabets and syllabary.
Alphabetic
- True Alphabets: An alphabet is a standard set of basic symbols (letters) that represent phonemes of a spoken language. A true alphabet has letters for vowels as well as consonants.
- the Greek alphabet, which is used in Greece and Cyprus (modified form of the Phonecian script).
- the Roman alphabet, which is used in large parts of the world.
- the Cyrillic alphabet, which is used in many countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where Russia had a major influence.
- Miꞌkmaq orthographies【IOL.2008】
- the apostrophe indicates length if it follows a vowel, and is read as [ə] if it follows a consonant.
- the letter w stands for a rounding of the lips after a consonant and for the sound [w]
- Others
- N’Ko script【IOL.2009】
- Georgian scripts (Nuskhuri alphabet) 【IOL.2013】
Abjads
(子音文字)
Y cn stll rd wtht vwls
- Alphabets that do not show vowels but only consonants are called abjads.
- the Phoenician alphabet
- the Arabic alphabet, which is used in much of the Muslim world, and
- the Hebrew alphabet used for Jewish languages like Hebrew and Yiddish. Both of these abjads are written in lines that run from right to left.
Examples of abjads are the Arabic alphabet, written in lines that run from right to left.
Abugidas (= syllabic alphabets = alphasyllabaries)
(母音副標文字)
- Abugidas are alphabets where sequences of consonant+vowel are written as a unit.
- Each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary.The consonants each have an inherent vowel which can be changed to another vowel or muted by means of diacritics or other modifications. Vowels can also be written with separate letters when they occur at the beginning of a word or on their own. this contrast with alphabet, in which vowels have status equal to consonants, and with an abjad, in which vowel marking is absent or optional. - Examples of abugidas are writing systems of India and Southeast Asia like Devanagari used for Hindi and Sanskrit. Check this website ! https://www.omniglot.com/writing/syllabic.htm
- Brahmic abugidas：Brahmic scripts are a family of abugida writing systems, used throughout South/Southeast Asia, and parts of Central and East Asia.
婆羅米系文字或印度系文字，是印度孔雀王朝的婆羅米文衍生而來的一種書寫系統，屬於母音附標文字。其被廣泛使用於南亞、東南亞、部分中亞及東亞地區。是目前世界上第四多人使用的文字系統。
Case.1: Gujarātī
Note: In Gujarātī, vowels can be written as independent letters, or by using a variety of diacritical marks which are written above, below, before or after the consonant they belong to.
Case.2: Ilocano (see Manual)
Case.3: Canadian Aboriginal ‘Syllabics’
- consonants are modified in order to indicate an associated vowel—in this case through a change in orientation, which is unique to Canadian syllabics.2 they are not true syllabaries, in which every consonant–vowel sequence has a separate glyph, but abugidas.
Exercise:【KLO2019】](http://krlo.kr/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/klo-201819.pdf)
- Like Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Cree syllabics uses different glyphs to indicate consonants, and changes the orientation of these glyphs to indicate the vowel that follows it.
True Syllabaries
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. E.g.,
Yugtun syllabary (a.k.a. Alaska script), Yupik, Cree syllabary, Japanese, Cherokee syllabary;Linear A, Cuneiform.Difference from abugida
In a true syllabary there may be graphic similarity between characters that share a common consonant or vowel sound, but it is not systematic or at all regular. For example, the characters for ‘ke’, ‘ka’, and ‘ko’ in Japanese hiragana have no similarity to indicate their common “k” sound (these being: け, か and こ). Compare this with Devanagari, an abugida, where the characters for ‘ke’, ‘ka’ and ‘ko’ are के, का and को respectively, with क indicating their common “k” sound.
Logograms and logographic scripts
glyphs represent
wordormorphemesrather than phonetic elements.- There is NO pure logographic scripts (composed solely of logograms)
- some glyphs are phonetic, whereas others function as either logograms or phonetic elements, depending on context. The Rebus Principle (「假借」) : - When a graphic sign no longer has a visual connection to the word it represents, it becomes a phonographic symbol, standing for the sounds that represent the word. - A single sign can then be used to represent all words with the same sound (同音字). e.g, My 曰 is a teacher.
they are complex scripts in nature.
- Can thus be classified into
consonant-basedlogographiessyllable-basedlogographies (Chinese characters)
Egyptian hieroglyphs
- Early Egyptian had some 200 glyphs, a number which grew to over 5000.
- the script was undeciphered until 20 years after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone (1799).
Chinese characters
Typological classification of writing systems
Symbols represent:
- individual sounds alphabetic (as in most
European and Near Easternscripts) - syllables [syllabic] (as in the
Japanese hiraganaandkatakana;Cherokeescripts)3 1 and 2 may be combined, as in the semi-syllabic scripts used for mainly Asian languages and Amharic. - morphemes [logographic] (as do the
Chinese logograms) - feature [featural] (Korean
Hangul)
Featural scripts (Korean Hangul)
- it is a true alphabet of 24 consonants and vowels letters.
- the only known script to be used on phonetic features (subphonemic characteristics of pronunciation).e.g., /n/, the shape is similar to a raised tongue-tip
- thus partly iconic, and highly compositional
- Each syllabic block consists of 2-5 letters, including at least 1 consonant and 1 vowel. These blocks are then arranged horizontally from left to right, or vertically from top to bottom.
