Syllabary
Encyclopedia
A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate) syllable
s, which make up word
s. In a syllabary, there is no systematic similarity between the symbols which represent syllables with the same consonant or vowel. That is, the symbol for ka does not resemble in any predictable way the symbol for ki, nor the symbol for a.
A symbol in a syllabary, called syllabogram, typically represents an (optional) consonant
sound (simple onset) followed by a vowel
sound (nucleus)—that is, a CV or V syllable—but other phonographic
mappings such as CVC and CV-tone are also found in syllabaries.
using a syllabary is complete when it covers all syllables in the corresponding spoken language without requiring complex orthographic / graphemic
rules, like implicit codas (⟨C1V⟩ ⇒ /C1VC2/) silent vowels (⟨C1V1+C2V2⟩ ⇒ /C1V1C2/) or echo vowel
s (⟨C1V1+C2V1⟩ ⇒ /C1V1C2/). This loosely corresponds to shallow orthographies in alphabetic writing systems.
True syllabograms are those that encompass all parts of a syllable, i.e. initial onset, medial nucleus and final coda, but since onset and coda are optional in at least some languages, there are middle (nucleus), start (onset-nucleus), end (nucleus-coda) and full (onset-nucleus-coda) true syllabograms. Most syllabaries only feature one or two kinds of syllabograms and form other syllables by graphemic rules.
Syllabograms are pure, analytic or arbitrary if they do not share graphic similarities that correspond to phonic similarities, otherwise they are synthetic, if they vary by onset, rime, nucleus or coda, or systematic, if they vary by all of them.
Languages that use syllabic writing include Mycenae
an Greek
(Linear B
), the North American languages Cherokee and Cree
, the African language Vai, the English-based creole
Ndyuka written with the Afaka script
, Yi
language and formerly Nü Shu
for the language of the Yao people
in China
. In addition, the undecoded Cretan Linear A
is also believed by some to be a syllabic script, though this is not proven.
The Chinese, Cuneiform, and Maya script
s are largely syllabic in nature, although based on logogram
s. They are therefore sometimes referred to as logosyllabic.
The contemporary Japanese language
uses two syllabaries together called kana
, namely hiragana
and katakana
(developed around AD 700). 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). Because Japanese uses many 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.
Languages that use syllabaries today tend to have simple phonotactics
, with a predominance of monomoraic (CV) syllables.
For example, the modern Yi script
is used to write a language that has no diphthongs or syllable codas; unusually among syllabaries, there is a separate glyph for every consonant-vowel-tone combination in the language (apart from one tone which is indicated with a diacritic).
Few 'syllabaries' have glyphs for syllables that aren't monomoraic, and those that once did have simplified over time to eliminate that complexity.
For example, the Vai syllabary originally had separate glyphs for syllables ending in a coda (doŋ), a long vowel (soo), or a diphthong (bai), though not enough glyphs to distinguish all CV combinations (some distinctions were ignored). The modern script has been expanded to cover all moras, but at the same time reduced to exclude all other syllables. Bimoraic syllables are now written with two letters, as in Japanese: diphthongs are written with the help of V or hV glyphs, and the nasal coda is written with the glyph for ŋ, which can form a syllable of its own in Vai.
In Linear B
, which was used to transcribe Greek, a language with complex syllables, complex consonant onsets were either written with two glyphs or simplified to one, while codas were generally ignored, e.g. "ko-no-so" for Knōsos, "pe-ma" for sperma.
The Cherokee syllabary
generally uses dummy vowels for coda consonants, but also has a segmental grapheme for /s/, which can be used both as a coda and in an initial /sC/ consonant cluster.
and Southeast Asia
, as well as the Ethiopian languages, have a type of alphabet
called an abugida
or alphasyllabary. In these scripts, unlike in true syllabaries, syllables starting with the same consonant are expressed with characters that are based on the same sign, and generally each character representing a syllable consists of several elements which designate the individual sounds of that 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). In a true syllabary there is no systematic graphic similarity between characters that share a common consonant or vowel sound. That is, the characters for 'ke', 'ka', and 'ko' have no similarity to indicate their common "k" sound (e.g. hiragana け, か, こ). 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). For example, in Devanagari
, an abugida, the same characters for 'ke', 'ka' and 'ko' are के, का and को respectively, with क indicating their common "k" sound.
allows 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-gu 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).
A separate solution would be that used by the Mayan script, that of a subtractive nature. For example, Bag would be written ba-ga, where the second vowel is ignored if it's the same as the first. To write the word "baga", one would either still write ba-ga as the Mayans did, leaving it unclear as to whether "bag" or "baga" is meant, or write ba-ga-a, so that the second a is subtracted but the third left over.
Other types of writing systems
Syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins .Syllables are often considered the phonological "building...
s, which make up word
Word
In language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...
s. In a syllabary, there is no systematic similarity between the symbols which represent syllables with the same consonant or vowel. That is, the symbol for ka does not resemble in any predictable way the symbol for ki, nor the symbol for a.
A symbol in a syllabary, called syllabogram, typically represents an (optional) consonant
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
sound (simple onset) followed by a vowel
Vowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
sound (nucleus)—that is, a CV or V syllable—but other phonographic
Phonogram (linguistics)
A phonogram is a grapheme which represents a phoneme or combination of phonemes, such as the letters of the Latin alphabet or the Japanese kana...
mappings such as CVC and CV-tone are also found in syllabaries.
Types
A writing systemWriting system
A writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...
using a syllabary is complete when it covers all syllables in the corresponding spoken language without requiring complex orthographic / graphemic
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
rules, like implicit codas (⟨C1V⟩ ⇒ /C1VC2/) silent vowels (⟨C1V1+C2V2⟩ ⇒ /C1V1C2/) or echo vowel
Echo vowel
In speech, an echo vowel is a vowel that repeats the final vowel in a word. For example, in Chumash, when a word ends with a glottal stop and comes at the end of an intonation unit, the final vowel is repeated after the glottal stop, but is whispered and faint, as in for "arrow" . In Rukai , echo...
s (⟨C1V1+C2V1⟩ ⇒ /C1V1C2/). This loosely corresponds to shallow orthographies in alphabetic writing systems.
True syllabograms are those that encompass all parts of a syllable, i.e. initial onset, medial nucleus and final coda, but since onset and coda are optional in at least some languages, there are middle (nucleus), start (onset-nucleus), end (nucleus-coda) and full (onset-nucleus-coda) true syllabograms. Most syllabaries only feature one or two kinds of syllabograms and form other syllables by graphemic rules.
Syllabograms are pure, analytic or arbitrary if they do not share graphic similarities that correspond to phonic similarities, otherwise they are synthetic, if they vary by onset, rime, nucleus or coda, or systematic, if they vary by all of them.
Languages using syllabaries
Mycenae
Mycenae is an archaeological site in Greece, located about 90 km south-west of Athens, in the north-eastern Peloponnese. Argos is 11 km to the south; Corinth, 48 km to the north...
an Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
(Linear B
Linear B
Linear B is a syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek, an early form of Greek. It pre-dated the Greek alphabet by several centuries and seems to have died out with the fall of Mycenaean civilization...
), the North American languages Cherokee and Cree
Cree syllabics
Cree syllabics, found in two primary variants, are the versions of Canadian Aboriginal syllabics used to write Cree dialects, including the original syllabics system created for Cree and Ojibwe. Syllabics were later adapted to several other languages...
, the African language Vai, the English-based creole
Creole language
A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
Ndyuka written with the Afaka script
Afaka script
The Afaka script is a syllabary of 56 letters devised in 1910 for the Ndyuka language, an English-based creole of Surinam. The script is named after its inventor, Afáka Atumisi...
, Yi
Yi script
The Yi script, also historically known as Cuan Wen or Wei Shu , is used to write the Yi languages.-Classical Yi:Classical Yi is a syllabic logographic system that was reputedly devised during the Tang dynasty by someone called Aki...
language and formerly Nü Shu
Nü Shu
Nüshu , is a syllabic script, a simplification of Chinese characters that was used exclusively among women in Jiangyong County in Hunan province of southern China.-Language:...
for the language of the Yao people
Yao people
The Yao nationality is a government classification for various minorities in China. They form one of the 55 ethnic minority groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China, where they reside in the mountainous terrain of the southwest and south...
in China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
. In addition, the undecoded Cretan Linear A
Linear A
Linear A is one of two scripts used in ancient Crete before Mycenaean Greek Linear B; Cretan hieroglyphs is the second script. In Minoan times, before the Mycenaean Greek dominion, Linear A was the official script for the palaces and religious activities, and hieroglyphs were mainly used on seals....
is also believed by some to be a syllabic script, though this is not proven.
The Chinese, Cuneiform, and Maya script
Maya script
The Maya script, also known as Maya glyphs or Maya hieroglyphs, is the writing system of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica, presently the only Mesoamerican writing system that has been substantially deciphered...
s are largely syllabic in nature, although based on logogram
Logogram
A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme . This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories.Logograms are often commonly known also as "ideograms"...
s. They are therefore sometimes referred to as logosyllabic.
The contemporary Japanese language
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
uses two syllabaries together called kana
Kana
Kana are the syllabic Japanese scripts, as opposed to the logographic Chinese characters known in Japan as kanji and the Roman alphabet known as rōmaji...
, namely hiragana
Hiragana
is a Japanese syllabary, one basic component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji, and the Latin alphabet . Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems, in which each character represents one mora...
and katakana
Katakana
is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji, and in some cases the Latin alphabet . The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana scripts are derived from components of more complex kanji. Each kana represents one mora...
(developed around AD 700). 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). Because Japanese uses many 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
Mora (linguistics)
Mora is a unit in phonology that determines syllable weight, which in some languages determines stress or timing. As with many technical linguistic terms, the definition of a mora varies. Perhaps the most succinct working definition was provided by the American linguist James D...
writing system.
Languages that use syllabaries today tend to have simple phonotactics
Phonotactics
Phonotactics is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes...
, with a predominance of monomoraic (CV) syllables.
For example, the modern Yi script
Yi script
The Yi script, also historically known as Cuan Wen or Wei Shu , is used to write the Yi languages.-Classical Yi:Classical Yi is a syllabic logographic system that was reputedly devised during the Tang dynasty by someone called Aki...
is used to write a language that has no diphthongs or syllable codas; unusually among syllabaries, there is a separate glyph for every consonant-vowel-tone combination in the language (apart from one tone which is indicated with a diacritic).
Few 'syllabaries' have glyphs for syllables that aren't monomoraic, and those that once did have simplified over time to eliminate that complexity.
For example, the Vai syllabary originally had separate glyphs for syllables ending in a coda (doŋ), a long vowel (soo), or a diphthong (bai), though not enough glyphs to distinguish all CV combinations (some distinctions were ignored). The modern script has been expanded to cover all moras, but at the same time reduced to exclude all other syllables. Bimoraic syllables are now written with two letters, as in Japanese: diphthongs are written with the help of V or hV glyphs, and the nasal coda is written with the glyph for ŋ, which can form a syllable of its own in Vai.
In Linear B
Linear B
Linear B is a syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek, an early form of Greek. It pre-dated the Greek alphabet by several centuries and seems to have died out with the fall of Mycenaean civilization...
, which was used to transcribe Greek, a language with complex syllables, complex consonant onsets were either written with two glyphs or simplified to one, while codas were generally ignored, e.g. "ko-no-so" for Knōsos, "pe-ma" for sperma.
The Cherokee syllabary
Cherokee syllabary
The Cherokee syllabary is a syllabary invented by Sequoyah to write the Cherokee language in the late 1810s and early 1820s. His creation of the syllabary is particularly noteworthy in that he could not previously read any script. He first experimented with logograms, but his system later developed...
generally uses dummy vowels for coda consonants, but also has a segmental grapheme for /s/, which can be used both as a coda and in an initial /sC/ consonant cluster.
Difference from abugidas
The languages of South AsiaLanguages of South Asia
South Asia is home to several hundred languages. Most languages spoken in India belong either to the Indo-European , the Dravidian , the Austroasiatic , or the Tibeto-Burman South Asia is home to several hundred languages. Most languages spoken in India belong either to the Indo-European (ca....
and Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia, South-East Asia, South East Asia or Southeastern Asia is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the countries that are geographically south of China, east of India, west of New Guinea and north of Australia. The region lies on the intersection of geological plates, with heavy seismic...
, as well as the Ethiopian languages, have a type of alphabet
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
called an abugida
Abugida
An abugida , 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 obligatory but secondary...
or alphasyllabary. In these scripts, unlike in true syllabaries, syllables starting with the same consonant are expressed with characters that are based on the same sign, and generally each character representing a syllable consists of several elements which designate the individual sounds of that syllable. In the 19th century these systems were called syllabics, a term which has survived in the name of Canadian Aboriginal syllabics
Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics
Canadian Aboriginal syllabic writing, or simply syllabics, is a family of abugidas used to write a number of Aboriginal Canadian languages of the Algonquian, Inuit, and Athabaskan language families....
(also an abugida). In a true syllabary there is no systematic graphic similarity between characters that share a common consonant or vowel sound. That is, the characters for 'ke', 'ka', and 'ko' have no similarity to indicate their common "k" sound (e.g. hiragana け, か, こ). Compare abugida
Abugida
An abugida , 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 obligatory but secondary...
, 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). For example, in Devanagari
Devanagari
Devanagari |deva]]" and "nāgarī" ), also called Nagari , is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal...
, an abugida, the same characters for 'ke', 'ka' and 'ko' are के, का and को respectively, with क indicating their common "k" sound.
Comparison to English alphabet
The English languageEnglish language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
allows 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
Syllable coda
In phonology, a syllable coda comprises the consonant sounds of a syllable that follow the nucleus, which is usually a vowel. The combination of a nucleus and a coda is called a rime. Some syllables consist only of a nucleus with no coda...
was a second syllable: ba-gu 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).
A separate solution would be that used by the Mayan script, that of a subtractive nature. For example, Bag would be written ba-ga, where the second vowel is ignored if it's the same as the first. To write the word "baga", one would either still write ba-ga as the Mayans did, leaving it unclear as to whether "bag" or "baga" is meant, or write ba-ga-a, so that the second a is subtracted but the third left over.
See also
- List of syllabaries
Other types of writing systems
- AbugidaAbugidaAn abugida , 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 obligatory but secondary...
- AbjadAbjadAn abjad is a type of writing system in which each symbol always or usually stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel....
- AlphabetAlphabetAn alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
- LogogramLogogramA logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme . This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories.Logograms are often commonly known also as "ideograms"...
External links
- Syllabaries – Omniglot's list of syllabaries and abugidas, including examples of various writing systems.