There are so many ways that different languages write.
Languages like English, Greek, Russian, and Chinese all have different ways of writing,
but did you know that not all written languages use an alphabet? In this video,
we'll explore the different types of writing systems found around the world.
We can categorize writing systems into 6 main categories.
Our first is one that English speakers are most familiar with: alphabets. In an alphabet system,
each grapheme or letter represents either a vowel or a consonant.
When talking about writing systems, we use the word "grapheme" to talk about the smallest
functional unit of writing in a language. In English, a grapheme is a letter, but in Chinese,
a grapheme is a character. Common alphabet systems include the Latin alphabet, used by English,
French, German, and most European languages, the Cyrillic alphabet, used by Bulgarian,
Russian, Ukrainian, and Bosnian, the Greek alphabet, and the Armenian Alphabet.
Next, we have abjads. In an abjad system, graphemes are only used to write consonants.
Vowels are not normally marked, and when vowels are written,
accents called diacritic markers are used to describe the vowels.
Languages that are known for using abjads include Arabic and Hebrew. Arabic and Hebrew
do write long vowel sounds with a grapheme, but short vowel sounds are usually excluded.
The next category is an abugida system. In an abugida system,
each grapheme represents a consonant and vowel cluster. Some common abugidas include Bengali,
Devanagari , Ge'ez, Telugu, Tamil, Khmer, Thai, and Javanese. A recent abugida that has been
adopted by some indigenous languages spoken in Canada is called Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics.
In a syllabary, each character represents a syllable. This is really similar to an abugida
system, but the main difference is that, in an abugida system, not all letters will
end up being a syllable. But in a syllabary, all characters are usually whole syllables.
Cherokee, spoken in the United States, and the Yi languages spoken in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces
of China. Japanese also uses a syllabary, but it requires a bit of an explanation.
Japanese is unique in the sense that they use three different scripts to
write Japanese. Two of the scripts, hiragana and katagana, are syllabaries
where each character represents a syllable. The third script is called kanji and based
on the writing of Chinese characters – although the pronunciation of the word is not the same.
Chinese characters and Japanese kanji are called logosyllabic scripts.
These are similar to syllabaries in the sense that usually, but not always,
a character will represent a single syllable. The main difference between logosyllabaries and
syllabaries is, in a logosyllabary, each grapheme is not only just a syllable but also a morpheme.
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in a language.
In English, whole words like cat, dog, mouse are morphemes as well as prefixes like re-,
un-, pre- and suffixes like -ing, -able, -est. In logosyllabaries each character holds meanings,
unlike in an alphabet, abjad, abugida, or syllabary where each grapheme represents
only a unit of sound – and occasionally can be it's own standalone morpheme.
Logosyllabaries always will be both a syllable and a morpheme. Mayan glyphs and the first known
written languages that used Cuneiform some 5000 years ago also used logosyllabaries.
Finally, we have a featural alphabet. The featural alphabet is used in the Korean alphabet, known as
Hangul. The thing that makes featural alphabets distinct from a typical alphabet is that each
letter gives specific information about how the sound is actually produced. In the case
of Hangul, consonants and vowels are written with different graphemes, like in a typical alphabet.
But they are grouped into syllable clusters that look like characters.
In a sense, multiple letters make up a super letter which is a syllable.
It's important to note that the writing systems of most languages don't perfectly fit
into one category. Think about English and French and how we don't actually pronounce
every single letter written down. There are also lots of
different ways that scholars classify the writing systems of the world's languages.
This video relies on the classification proposed by linguist Peter T. Daniels.
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