Image courtesy of Wikipedia
Consonant-based systems (abjads) typically encode around 20 consonants. Examples of consonant-based systems are Phoenician, Hebrew and Arabic. Some have optional diacritics for vowels (mostly used for educational texts). They are prevalent in the Middle-East, and apparently are derived from the phonetic part of Egyptian hieroglyphs (also a consonant-based system) through Phoenician. The hieroglyphs were written left-to-right and right-to-left, the characters looking towards the start of the line. And for one reason or another, the derived writing system stuck to right-to-left.
Consonant-vowel systems (alphabets) have around 20 consonants and 5-10 vowels, each having a separate character. The Greeks took the Phoenician system, added vowels, and flipped it around to left-to-right, mirroring the letters in the process. From that you get the Greek-derived alphabets like Etruscan (RTL) -> Latin (LTR), Cyrillic and Coptic. A strange feature in these Greek-derived systems is the existence of lowercase letters. The Mongolian script is also a consonant-vowel system, but it derives from the Uyghur consonant-based system.
The Korean Hangeul is sort of a consonant-vowel system, but it's written in a syllabic fashion: take the letters in a syllable, cram them inside a box, write it down. But a syllable has at least two letters and the second letter is always a vowel. There's a no-sound first letter for doing stand-alone vowels, but no way to do a stand-alone consonant.
Alphasyllabic systems (abugidas) encode consonant-vowel-pairs. Devanagari and Ethiopian Ge'ez are examples of this. They both have a base character for each consonant and a set of diacritics (more like ligatures) to signify the vowel or the lack of one. Devanagari also has separate characters for stand-alone vowels, and some diacritics to change the pronunciation of consonants.
The syllabic Japanese kana system encodes consonant-vowel-pairs, stand-alone vowels and a stand-alone 'n'. The main difference between it and the alphasyllabics is that it uses a separate character for each consonant-vowel-pair instead of the base+modifier-system. The kana system has diacritics for modifying the voicing of the consonants but there's no diacritic for dropping vowels. There are two kana systems, hiragana and katakana. Katakana is an angular script used for transliterating foreign words (by pronunciation) whereas hiragana is a more rounded script used for everything else. They have a slight visual similarity, think of Cyrillic uppercase vs. cursive.
Speaking of cursive, the cursive scripts (e.g. Arabic and Mongolian) have three or four different letter forms, depending on whether it's the initial letter of a word, a middle letter, the last letter, or a stand-alone letter. If you know cursive handwriting with the latin alphabet, you pretty much know how that works. Think of the lowercase 'e': on its own it looks like the typed 'e', in the beginning of the word it's an 'e' with a low tail, in the middle of the word it's a low loop, and at the end of a word it's a low loop with an upcurved tail.
2 comments:
What a great project. Your artistic ability really adds to it.
Do you know if any alphabets exist where the glyphs encode the phonetics in a factored way?Thus we would expect f and v to look similar since they only differ in voicing
same for s and z
same for p and b, etc
and in each of these cases, we would expect the difference in the glyphs, indicating voicing, to be similar. I guess one would want the core glyph to reflect the mouth shape and tongue position.
Anyway, curious if you have encountered this at all.
[I like to engage kids in thinking about phonetics with "cats and dogs - why does one of the s's sound like a z but the other one doesn't"?]
Thanks! The image is from Wikipedia though, so I can't take credit for it. Added a label now to reduce confusion.
On modifying the phonetics, the Japanese kana uses diacritics for that. With kana when you add two small strokes to a glyph you go k->g, s->z, t->d, h->b.
A lot of alphabets have consonant-modifying diacritics as well (at least Arabic, Latin and Devanagari), but there the actual effect of the diacritic seems to depend a lot on the language written. Heck, the pronunciation of a word written in the unmodified Latin alphabet tends to vary wildly between different languages.
The Korean Hangeul consonant glyphs kinda look like the mouth-tongue shapes for pronouncing them. The vowel system has some logic to it too: a vowel is composed of one or two long strokes, and zero to two short strokes. The long stroke and short stroke directions encode the base vowel. One short stroke means the vowel by itself, two short strokes y+vowel. E.g. |- is a, |= is ya; -| is eo, =| is yeo.
The Devanagari long vowels are very similar to the short vowels too. And some Latin systems do long vowels logically as well with either duplicating the vowel (a-aa) or by putting a dash above the letter (a-ā).
Oh, apparently alphabets with phonetics-based glyphs are called featural alphabets, and include Tolkien's Tengwar. The things you learn...
But yeah, from systems in use today, I guess Hangeul is pretty close to what you're thinking of.
Cats and dogs, many languages speak a language different from the one they write... Renault and Reno sound alike in French, Renault and Raynolt sound alike in English.
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