Information AboutSyllabary |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT SYLLABARY | |
| syllabary writing systems | |
| syllabary | |
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A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate) Syllable s, which make up Word s. A symbol in a syllabary typically represents an optional Consonant sound followed by a Vowel sound. LANGUAGES USING SYLLABARIES Languages that use syllabic writing include Mycenae an Greek ( Linear B ), the Native American language Cherokee , the African language Vai , the English-based Creole Language Ndyuka (the Afaka Script ), Yi language in China , and the Nü Shu syllabary for Yao People , China . 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 ic'' writing system. Difference between an abugida and a syllabary Indian Language s 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). 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 (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). COMPARISON TO ENGLISH ALPHABET The English Language 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''). SEE ALSO Other types of writing systems EXTERNAL LINKS
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