syllabary

[prettygoodword]

Apologies for the unplanned break in last week's theme -- I've been out sick. So far we've done alphabet, abugida, and abjad, and we continue with:


syllabary (SIL-uh-ber-ee) - n., a writing system in which syllables are represented by graphemes.


Abugidas are closely related, but in that case, there's a fixed relationship between how vowels sounds are indicated in rhyming syllables, whereas in a syllabary each syllable has a completely separate symbol. The classic examples are the two separate syllabaries used for Japanese, katakana and hiragana, but other languages written in syllabaries include Cherokee and Mycenaean Greek (Linear B is a syllabary, and it's speculated that Linear A is as well). Hangul, used to write Korean is technically an alphabet dressed up in a syllabary coat by writing all the letters used in a syllable in a single block. This has been a word in English since the 1590s, in the sense of a list of syllables for dictionary purposes, from Medieval Latin syllabārium, from Latin syllaba, syllable.

---L.

Comments

[calzephyr]

Hope you're feeling better!

[prettygoodword]

Mostly -- still taking it easy this week, but am better enough to return to (slow) work.

[dhampyresa]

Korean is technically an alphabet dressed up in a syllabary coat

I love this description :')

[prettygoodword]

I wanted to say "Korean is really three alphabets in a trenchcoat pretending to be a syllabary," but while the onset consonants, vowels, and coda consonants are three disjoint sets of graphemes, they technically are all just one alphabet.