Syllabary
A
syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate)
syllables, which make up
words. A symbol in a syllabary typically represents an optional
consonant sound followed by a
vowel sound. 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).
The
Japanese language uses two syllabaries, namely
hiragana and
katakana (developed around 700 AD). They are mainly used to write some native words and grammatical elements, as well as foreign words, e.g. hotel is written with three kana, ホテル (
ho-te-ru), in Japanese. Because Japanese uses a lot of CV (consonant + vowel) syllables, a syllabary is well suited to write the language. As in many syllabaries, however, vowel sequences and final consonants are written with separate glyphs, so that both
atta and
kaita are written with three kana: あった (
a-t-ta) and かいた (
ka-i-ta). It is therefore sometimes called a
moraic writing system.
The
English language, on the other hand, allows more complex syllable structures, making it cumbersome to write English words with a syllabary. A "pure" syllabary would require a separate glyph for every syllable in English. Thus one would need separate symbols for "bag," "beg," "big," "bog," "bug" ; "bad," "bed," "bid," "bod," "bud," etc. However, such pure systems are rare. A work-around to this problem, common to several syllabaries around the world (including English loanwords in Japanese), is to write an echo vowel, as if the
syllable coda was a second syllable:
ba-ga or
ba-gi for "bag", etc. Another common approach is to simply ignore the coda, so that "bag" would be written
ba. This obviously would not work well for English, but was done in Mycenean Greek when the root word was two or three syllables long and the syllable coda was a weak consonant such as
n or
s (example:
chrysos written as
ku-ru-so).
Languages that use syllabic writing include
Mycenaean
Greek (
Linear B), the Native American language
Cherokee, the African language
Vai, the English-based
creole language Ndyuka (the
Afaka script), and the
Moso language of China (the
Nü Shu syllabary). The
Chinese,
Cuneiform, and
Maya scripts are largely syllabic in nature, although based on
logograms. They are therefore sometimes referred to as
logosyllabic.
Indian languages and
Ethiopian languages have a type of
alphabet called an
abugida or
alphasyllabary. These are sometimes mistaken for syllabaries, but unlike in syllabaries, all syllables starting with the same consonant are based on the same symbol, and generally more than one symbol is needed to represent a syllable. In the 19th century these systems were called
syllabics, a term which has survived in the name of
Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics (also an abugida).
*
Abugida*
Abjad*
Alphabet*
Logogram*
Writing system*
Syllabaries -
Omniglot's list of syllabaries and abugidas, including examples of various writing systems
