alphabets and syllabaries

I think there's a lot to say about this business of writing systems and I'll post what occurs to me in chunks rather than all at once. The first thing is that, I *think* the majority of today's writing systems are either alphabets or syllabaries.

Both types of script work by creating a written equivalent for the pronunciation of a word. Alphabets analyse words into their component speech sounds and record those, whereas syllabaries have a separate sign for each of the syllables that can occur in the language and the signs for syllables that begin with, say, the same consonant don't necesarily look alike at all. For example, these are the signs for the syllables na, ni, and no in the Japanese katakana syllabary and there is obviously no constant element in all three that represents the sound /n/:





Some scripts occupy a sort of middle ground between the two: the devanagari script, which is used to write Hindi and Sanskrit, is probably best understood as a syllabary but the signs for each syllable are much, much more predictable than they are in, for example, the Japanese syllabaries.

I think that, to us, alphabets and syllabaries look less intriguing than ideographic writing, but actually there's quite a lot going on in them and I'll post a few thoughts on that later today.