Writing systems · Lesson 1
Six ways to write a language.
Every script answers one question: what does a single sign stand for? There are six main answers, and once you can tell them apart, a new script stops looking like a wall.
Video lesson in preparation. The notes below cover everything it will.
Writing records speech
Writing is a way of recording a spoken language. People spoke for tens of thousands of years before anyone wrote, and most languages in history were never written down at all. So a script is a set of choices about which pieces of speech to put on the page.
The six kinds
Logographic
水
shuǐ, “water”
One sign stands for: A meaningful unit, often a whole syllable-word
Used for: Chinese; kanji in Japanese
Syllabary
か き く
ka, ki, ku
One sign stands for: A syllable
Used for: Japanese hiragana and katakana; Cherokee
Abjad
كتب
k-t-b: kataba “he wrote,” kutub “books”
One sign stands for: A consonant; most vowels are left for the reader
Used for: Arabic, Hebrew
Abugida
ለ ሉ ሊ
lä, lu, li
One sign stands for: A consonant with a vowel built in, changed by marks
Used for: Amharic (Ge’ez script), Hindi (Devanagari)
Alphabet
α β γ
a, b, g
One sign stands for: A consonant or a vowel, each its own letter
Used for: Greek; Latin (English, French, Igbo, Yoruba…); Cyrillic (Russian)
Featural
ㅎ + ㅏ + ㄴ = 한
h + a + n = han
One sign stands for: A sound, with a shape that shows how it is made; letters stack into syllables
Used for: Korean Hangul
Most languages mix
Few languages use only one kind. A single Japanese sentence usually holds all three of its scripts:
私はコーヒーを飲みます。
Watashi wa kōhī o nomimasu, “I drink coffee.” 私 (I) and 飲 (drink) are kanji, the characters that carry meaning. は, を and みます are hiragana, which carry grammar and endings. コーヒー is katakana, used for words borrowed from other languages.
Igbo and Yoruba use the Latin alphabet with extra marks: dots under some letters (Igbo ị, ọ, ụ; Yoruba ẹ, ọ, ṣ) and accents for tone. Vietnamese does the same for its tones. Hausa has long been written in Arabic script too, called Ajami, alongside Latin.
Where the alphabet came from
People invented writing from scratch only a few times: in Mesopotamia and Egypt over five thousand years ago, in China by about 1200 BCE, and in Mesoamerica. Almost every alphabet in use today descends from one line:
The letter A started as a picture of an ox’s head. Phoenician called that letter ʾālep, “ox”; Greek made it alpha, and Latin made it A. Phoenician also passed through Aramaic to Hebrew and to Arabic, which is why Arabic and Hebrew are abjads to this day. Chinese characters grew separately and share nothing with this line.
Recordings in preparation: each example above read by a native speaker.
Check yourself
Pick an answer to see why. Nothing is graded but your own sense of it.
1. In an abjad, which sounds does the writing usually show?
2. Why is Korean Hangul called a featural script?
3. Which of these is an abugida?
4. A typical Japanese sentence uses…
5. On the alphabet’s road, who first gave vowels their own letters?
6. Igbo and Yoruba are usually written in…
Keep it
Add the six kinds to your review cards. They come back on the Learn page after a day, then at longer gaps as you keep knowing them.
Next in this unit: Alphabets, and where they came from (in preparation).