Writing Systems

Sometimes when referring to another language, English speakers will say something like "oh their alphabet is different." As most English speakers know, English uses an alphabet; however, not all languages use alphabets.

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Languages such as Japanese and Cherokee use syllabaries. A syllabary is a collection of symbols that represent syllables (or morae), usually consonant-vowel pairs. The Japanese syllabary is based on morae, this means that instead of just syllables they represent parts of syllables. Here is an example: こ (ko) is a single mora while こう (kou) is composed of two morae, however both are still a single syllable.

Alphabets, abjads, and abugidas are segmental scripts; the symbols in these types of writing represent the phonemes (basic unit of sound) for their language. A "true alphabet" contains separate symbols for all consonants and vowels. In this sense, the Greek alphabet was the first true alphabet, because all deciphered alphabets before the Greek alphabet were abjads (or consonantaries) or abugidas, which usually consist of consonants with marks denoting vowels. the main difference between abjads and abugidas is that abugidas require consonants be marked with denoting vowels while abjads usually do not. As a side note, the alphabet was named for the first two letters of the Greek alphabet (alpha and beta); abjab was named for the first four letters of the old Arabic alphabet; and abugida was named using four letters from the Ge'ez script (a language from Ethiopia).

Another type of scripts are logographic writing systems. Logographic writing systems are composed of symbols that represent ideas and words as well as sound morphemes. This groups consists of languages like Chinese and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. These are different from pictographs in the way that their symbols do not only represent ideas and things, but also grammatical structures and sounds.

When talking about languages it can be extremely helpful to be able to use the correct terms for their writing systems. Not all languages use alphabets, and it can be extremely interesting to understand the types of writing systems that other languages use. Understanding these writing systems helps to be able to understand all parts of a language, from phonemes to paragraphs.