Several other unrelated languages use the Arabic script including Persian, Pashto, and Urdu which use an adapted version of the Arabic script, called Perso-Arabic. Some languages use a combination of writing systems. Ancient scripts That said, let us look at a few writing systems that stand out and the reasons people like them. Terms of Use For instance, ㄱ is “K” and represents the root of the tongue blocking the throat, ㄴis “N” and represents the shape of the tongue touching the upper gums, whileㅅ is S and represents the shape of the teeth. The modern alphabet, called Mkhedruli (მხედრული, “secular” or “military writing”), first appeared in the 11th century. Georgian letter representing the vowel [a]. The Arabs added dots above and below the consonants to represent vowels. Other featural writing systems are the Tengwar, invented by J. R. R. Tolkien as a script included in his novels, and Pitman shorthand, a system of shorthand for English created by Sir Isaac Pitman (1813–1897) who debuted it in 1837. By the 26th century BC, the cuneiform script had been adapted to write Akkadian, and from there to other languages such as Hittite (Turkey), Ugaritic (Syria) and Old Persian (Iran). Armenian letter representing the vowel [a]. Vowels can also be written with separate letters when they occur at the beginning words or on their own. Compounding is the standard method for creating new characters today. Let’s begin with myth, and then chip away at it in order to sculpt a more accurate truth. Evidence of such dates to pre-historic time and can be found in various regions of the continent. The orthography is phonemic, i.e., one symbol represents one sound. Each consonant has an inherent vowel which can be changed to another vowel or suppressed by means of diacritics. Syllabic alphabets, also known as alphasyllabaries or abugidas, consist of symbols for consonants and vowels. In this case, 女 (nǚ), or “female” in Chinese, indicates that we are talking about a woman. It is thought to have originated as pictures around 2,000 BC. (It does create ambiguity though: when scholars don’t know what the vowels are, they tend to use E to fill the gaps; hence “nfr” becomes “nefer” as in Nefertiti! Omniglot guide to writing systems of the world, Bibliography on alphabets and writing systems, Foreign language learning is real world education, Akkadian syllable consisting of consonant + vowel [a]. Thus, it is better known today as the Hebrew alphabet. Plato recounts the Egyptian-origin myth of writing in Phaedrus, one of his famous Dialogues. As a result, the first true alphabet was developed by the Semitic people of the Sinai Peninsula some time between 1,500 and 1,000 BC. The use of Aramaic as a lingua franca throughout the Middle East starting in the 8th century BC resulted in the adoption of the Aramaic alphabet for writing Hebrew. He discovered two different systems, which he called Linear A and Linear B. Ethnologue (23rd edition) has data to indicate that of the currently listed 7,117 living languages, 3,982 have a developed writing system. Such scripts usually contain a large number of symbols. The Tiberiadic system consists of dots, combinations of dots, and small dashes. Von Ciara Nugent in Blog. Latin is a language that has an alphabetic writing system, although it derived its alphabet from earlier alphabetic systems like Greek and Phoenician. It is a syllable-based writing system in which each syllable consists of a consonant plus an inherent vowel. So they chose some Semitic consonants to represent Greek consonants and then used the extra Semitic consonant symbols for Greek vowels. The Greeks felt that they needed symbols for representing vowels. But Chinese characters are also used in various forms in Japanese (where they are known as kanji) and Korean (hanja). historical script ——— English Wikipedia. Nowadays they’re mostly used as training wheels for learners. A writing system, also referred to as script or orthography, is a convention for representing the units of a spoken language by making marks on rocks, leaves, clay, bark, metal, or paper. "The Languages of the World" was obviously a labor of love on the part of its author, the late Kenneth Katzner. In this way, the Chinese writing system is a unifying factor for all speakers of this largest language community in the world. This is a very complete reference book that looks at writing systems throughout the world and through history. Alphabets spread widely and are now the writing system used by almost all of the world’s languages. An index … He enjoys daydreaming, biking in Berlin and opera. Devanagari script is considered an alphasyllabary system of writing. The Brahmi script is the ancestor of many scripts found in South, Southeast, and East Asia. Well, consider how the different letters in the Latin alphabet say nothing about their phonology: the letter X does not represent the sound made with the mouth and tongue to say “X”; the phonetic similarities between B, P and V, are ignored in their symbolic representation. There are several basic types of writing systems. Symbols were scratched on flat clay tablets with a squared-off stick which left wedge-shaped marks in the clay. Written language is a way of recording language using any of various instruments and material, such as pen and paper, chisel and stone, or computers.The language itself is either spoken or signed, so written language develops as a way of representing what has been said.In many cultures, community languages are unwritten (such as Pirahã in Brazil).. Examples of writing systems that employ a featural approach at least in part are the Korean Hangul script, created, according to tradition, by King Sejong in the 15th century, and Pitman shorthand, a system for rapid writing invented in Britain in the 19th century. Estimates suggest that around 608 million people around the world utilize Devanagari on a regular basis, making it the fourth most widely used script in the world. Contact Us. These additional letters were used for Old Church Slavonic sounds not represented in the Greek script. For this reason, many consider it to be one of the best. Plato recounts the Egyptian-origin myth of writing in Phaedrus, one of his famous Dialogues. Writing systems of the world today. One random sampling of New Yorkers, for instance, resulted in answers like “probably several hundred.” However we choose to count them, though, this is not close.When we look at reference works, we find estimates that have escalated over time. A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication, based on a script and a set of rules regulating its use. The Korean writing system is not as hard to learn as many others. Wikipedia article “Writing systems” The illustration shows a selection of symbols from Japanese Hiragana and Cherokee. The origin of writing is the story of religious myth, archaeological fact and academic dispute. The Cyrillic alphabet is derived from the Greek script with additional letters taken from the earlier Glagolitic alphabet, as well as from the Hebrew script. MustGo.com. Over time, Aramaic developed its distinctive ‘square’ style. A writing system is a system of symbols that are used to represent language. Why is it so difficult to spell words in English? But writing systems are vessels of history, art and phonetics that cannot be reduced to a mere translation. East Asia –1300 —— –1050. Whether one finds the myth an accurate description of our current educational system or an ancient manifestation of luddite reactions, the need for writing surfaced precisely because pieces of crucial information needed to be recorded in detail for practical purposes. Hebrew Square Script symbol representing the vowel [a]. Nuno is a puppeteer and scriptwriter who spends his time twiddling his thumbs inside and outside puppets' heads. Cyrillic was most probably developed by disciples of Cyril and Methodius. The Roman alphabet was developed by the Etruscans who inhabited the Italian peninsula before the Romans. They can also be strangely motivating when learning a new language! Hangul is written in blocks, making it visually similar to Chinese, but different in everything else. 3- The Greeks The Greeks adopted the Phoenicians’ writing system but … However, Chinese characters can be ambiguous, too. Bibliography on alphabets and writing systems Right of the bat I have to say that the book is slightly outdated on some parts. In Hangul, vowels are represented by long horizontal or vertical lines distinguished by small marks, while consonants are represented by two … The Chinese writing system is well-suited for the language because the same words are pronounced quite differently in different parts of China. Understanding different writing systems of the world is a mental workout for anyone who has grown used to the Latin alphabet. But even so, it was a real writing system and not just a series of pictures. The Nuskhuri (“minuscule”) or Kutkhovani (“squared”) script first appeared in the ninth century. The three main vowel systems now extant are the Babylonian, the Palestinian, and the Tiberiadic; of these the latter is the most important and, indeed, the only one still in use. So when did we first arrive at a purely phonetic alphabet, with one letter representing one sound? We don't always know, however, if the existing writing systems are widely used. It is used today for writing more than 100 languages, among them Russian. Languages vary in their symbol-to-sound regularity. Will emoji become a universal language? Whereas speech is ephemeral, writing leaves a permanent record of a language.The invention of writing some 5,000 years ago is probably one of the greatest achievements of humankind. Systematized writing originally appeared in different unconnected parts of the world: Sumer, southern Mesopotamia, c. 3500-3000 BCE, Mesoamerica by 300 BC and China around 1200 BC. The precise definition of the “ancient world” is of course open to interpretation, and in any event covers a period measured in millennia, but for practical reasons I have h… It truly is one of a kind. Asomtavruli and Nuskhuri, collectively known as Khutsuri (ხუცური, or “church script”), were used together to write religious manuscripts, with the Asomtavruli serving as capital letters.The oldest examples of Georgian writing are an Asomtavruli inscription in a church in Bethlehem from 430 CE. The earliest Arabic inscription dates to 512 AD. There are differing opinions as to why people felt the need to write. Hebrew and Arabic did use diacritic marks around consonants to indicate vowels, but they were never consistently used to the point where they standardized. Pushed to its limit, one would have thousands (or theoretically limitless) morphemes representing a myriad objects and ideas, instead of phonemes representing a sound. A syllabary is a phonetic writing system consisting of symbols representing syllables. Previously, Korea had used the Chinese system, but upon achieving independence, Hangul was invented to remove Chinese … When people are asked how many languages they think there are in the world, the answers vary quite a bit. This is what Chinese achieved around 1600 BC with its writing system, accumulating thousands of ideograms which today can range from the basic 300 characters required to pass the official Elementary Chinese language test (Hànyǔ Shuǐpíng Kǎoshì, 汉语水平考试) Level 2, to the more than 80,000 encompassed in the Dictionary of Chinese Variant Form (Zhōnghuá zì hǎi, 中华字海). But other writing systems use both the alphabetic and syllabary system, such as the Devanagari, a script used to write Hindi, Marathi, Nepali and dozens of other languages. The history of writing traces the development of expressing language by letters or other marks and also the studies and descriptions of these developments.. The Phoenician alphabet contained symbols for consonants only which suited Semitic languages but did not suit Greek. All rights reserved. Note that these are the names of the numbers, exactly as they are represented in the numbers list (like "one, two, three"), and not symbols for numbers (like 1, 2, 3). The Egyptian writing system had no vowels (we had to wait for the Greeks for that) and some hieroglyphs could have two or three different meanings. Here are a few samples of some of the world’s alphabet-based writing systems. Nabateans added 6 symbols to the Aramaic alphabet to represent sounds that did not occur in Aramaic. Promulgated in 1446, it was immediately successful due to its simplicity and elegance. Only in the 21st century did it become Korean’s (almost) exclusive writing system. Clay tablets written in Ugaritic provided the first evidence of the ordering of letters in an alphabet. Soon enough, humans found themselves at a crossroads. Around the 15th century BC, Phoenicians created an alphabet made purely of consonants, an abjad, in which one symbol represented one consonantal sound. Aramaic letter representing the vowel [a], Devanāgarī symbol representing the syllable [ka]. Scholars still debate whether these were merely paintings, pictures illustrating a story or whether they were part of religious/spiritual rituals or ceremonies. Scholars tried to figure out this writing system after it had been dead for close to 1,500 years. It is used to communicate in around 120 languages, including the following: Nepali, Hindi, Sanskrit, and Marathi. On a later trip to the excavations at Knossos on the island of Crete, he recognized one of the symbols from his stones and began a study of the engraved tablets being uncovered at various sites on the island. The Etruscans chose certain letter shapes of the Greek alphabet and changed a few sound values of the letters to better represent their own language. Akira Nakanishi’s Writing Systems of the World is an interesting book to say the least. It’s a reference book that presents 29 languages across the world and their unique scripts. The earliest known logographs, or pictograms, were inscribed on oracle bones. The Chinese system was adapted and altered to more efficiently write the Japanese language. Ge’ez, also called Ethiopic, is a consonant-based script originally developed to write Ge’ez, a Semitic language. What all of these had in common was the absence of vowels. I first bought the Second Edition several years ago, and was fascinated by the tidbits of information that it offered up. They consist of the following: Over 90% of Chinese characters were created by combining a character with a related meaning with another character that indicates its pronunciation. ORACLE BONE SCRIPT. It evolved from pictographs (small images representing objects in language) and eventually adopted the rebus principle, which is when specific shapes are read as objects or a sound. In it, the God Theuth invents writing and communicates his discovery to King Thamus with great excitement, praising its ability to “make the Egyptians wiser” and to “improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom.” But King Thamus is not amused, and accuses Theuth of the exact opposite, saying that because writing allo… For instance, the drawing for eye could be possibly read as “eye” or “I” (in English, in this case), creating greater phonetic flexibility and the potential for developments in phonetic writing. These scripts have a similar appearance. Ancient African Writing Ancient Africa has the world's oldest and largest collection of ancient writing systems, and is home to the world's first identifiable proto-writing. Early shipping records kept on clay tablets gave rise to cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia in 3,100 BC. We look at the history of writing, separating myth from fact, and follow its myriad threads to the four distinct systems in use today. Essentially, there is one written symbol, called a letter, that represents one sound in the language. Hence the categorization of a semanto-phonetic writing system. Since Greece was a cluster of city-states with different dialects, the Greek alphabet varied locally, but the Ionic variant was eventually adopted by all city-states, while the Euboean variant travelled to the Italic peninsula, giving birth to the Latin alphabet and to the Cyrillic alphabet further to the east. The Early Aramaic alphabet is an extremely ancient writing system derived from the Phoenician alphabet, a consonant-based writing system, during the 10th or 9th centuries BC. The script is named in honor of the two Byzantine Saints Cyril and Methodius, creators of the earlier Glagolitic alphabet. SIL Bibliography of Writing Systems, © 2014 - 2020. It was used for non-religious purposes until the 18th century, when it completely replaced Khutsuri. This system was developed about the same time as cuneiform. Few individuals would be able or willing to memorize such tedious details, let alone pass them on to other people. The first known civilization to create a purely phonetic system, completely independent of a pictographic or syllabic system, was the Phoenicians. Don’t assume you’re saying the right name; it’s just an approximation of what we know!). The term ‘alphabet‘ isn’t, as many of us are taught to think, the word for any particular set of letters in a language.In fact, it refers to specific types of writing systems. Without writing, human history and man’s knowledge of the world would not have been possible. Since then, the script has undergone several modifications. / Not ready to learn a whole new alphabet? He losely modelled the Armenian alphabet on the Greek alphabet. Vowels and consonants combine into syllables that consist of letters arranged in a square block, rather than linearly. In this section, we will look at four East Asian writing systems: Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. To approximate this system in English, one could write, “t strtd rnng whn sh lft” (it started raining when she left) with a pictogram of rain next to rnng, a woman next to sh and two feet or an arrow after lft. Many writing systems incorporate several types. PBS series “The Writing Code” What if a writing system were created that graphically indicated the phonetics it was meant to represent? Devanāgarī is written from left to right in horizontal lines. Unfortunately, elitist resistance stemming from aristocrats and academics hampered its success soon after; until recently Hangul was still being mixed with Chinese characters (Hanja). At the end of the 6th century BC, the Early Aramaic alphabet was replaced by the Hebrew Square Script. It was finally deciphered In 1822 by a French scholar Jean François Champollion. Only five independent writing systems have been produced in the entire human history. (Note that the 19th-century term syllabics usually referred to abugidas rather than true syllabaries.) But what if there were a language that had an image for every concept? In a syllabary, graphemes represent syllables or moras. Each symbol represents a consonant + vowel combination. The famous Egyptian writing system, surfacing around 3200 BC, might have been influenced by the Sumerian one (through merchants and commercial contact), but the evidence is inconclusive. This practice appeared relatively late in the development of Chinese writing as the number of homophones (words pronounced identically) increased. Turkish,Swahili, Hausa, and Uzbek are among languages that used the Arabic script before they adopted either Latin or Cyrillic script. In alphabetic systems, there is usually some type of correspondence between graphic symbols and sounds. Here are a few samples of some of the world’s alphabet-based writing systems. In Cherokee there is a separate symbol for each sound. While Linear B was deciphered in the early 1950s (it turned out to represent an ea… Alphabet-based systems are used by languages all over the world. . The Numbers in Various Writing Systems As a supplement to my list of the numbers from 1 to 10 in over a thousand languages, here are the numbers written in a few native writing systems, plus ASL.. What if your language is a clear mix of consonant sounds ending in a vowel sound, organized in sound blocks that we call syllables? Different languages, different scripts: writing systems around the world. A syllable is often made up of a consonant plus a vowel or a single vowel. The 'optimal' orthography - the 'best possible' - for a language can be defined as the writing system which facilitates maximum rates of literacy and efficient reading, and gives the least risk of failure for learners, including potential dyslexics. not yet encoded in Unicode. By Ciara Nugent in Blog. The study of writing systems, to a large extent, consists of establishing correspondences between these marks, or symbols, and units of the spoken language such as individual sounds, syllables, morphemes (smallest units of … You can still learn a new language today. Some think that religion was the motivating force, while others suggest that it was motivated by the need to keep business records. Its present form (Naskh) first appeared in the 11th century AD, and has been used ever since, especially for print. It is highly complex - both in the written and the spoken form - and its writing system can consist of up to 100,000 different symbols! The Vinča symbols, found in pottery dating from the 6th to the 5th millennia BC in the Balkans, have led to debates on whether they constitute an early form of systematized writing. Greek alpha which represented the sound [a]. Hiragana and Katakana in Japanese are perfect examples of a syllabary. Consonant-based alphabets, or abjads, represent consonants only, or consonants plus some vowels. Since their meaning has not yet been discovered, we can only accurately date the first systems of writing with the following examples. An alphabet is a writing system that is written as it is pronounced, with a symbol for each sound produced. Most consonant-based alphabets are written from right to left in horizontal rows. The Sumerian writing system is a good place to start. The system was based on an alphabet of consonants rather than a group of syllables. 24 July 2018. Take the word ‘cat’, for example. The Danube Valley Civilization script is the oldest writing in the world and predates the Sumerian Writings in Mesopotamia and the Dispilo Tablet. Some of his best friends are made of felt and foam! It is an alphabet that consists of 24 letters. Privacy Policy Each symbol is read as a syllable (hiragana: ま ma, み mi, む mu, め me, も mo; katakana: マ ma, ミ mi, ム mu, メ me, モ mo), making Japanese a syllabic system (as well as logographic, with the added Kanji, where one ideogram represents one concept/word). As a cuneiform system, it consisted of wedge-shaped marks inscribed with styluses on clay tablets. At the other extreme, there are languages such as English and French that exhibit a great degree of irregularity. The script had undergone several reforms over time. The first drawn representations of the natural world date back 30-40,000 years ago (in the upper Paleolithic), when humans started painting and graffitiing rocks and cave walls. Berkeley SEI Chinese characters are an example of a complex script. The most widely used writing systems are the Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic alphabets. If one considers the development of writing systems to indicate progress (a debate for another article), what would the next step after phonetic alphabets be? A writing system, also referred to as script or orthography, is a convention for representing the units of a spoken language by making marks on rocks, leaves, clay, bark, metal, or paper. The alphabetic writing system first arose with the Greeks, at a date that remains controversial but was probably in the eighth or ninth centuries BCE. There are different kinds of writing systems, with symbols that represent different things: logographic, syllabic and alphabetic. This thought motivated King Sejong the Great of Korea to create Hangul in 1444, a featural script, where each letter represents its phonetic expression and is grouped with similar ones. Well, not completely, since Semitic languages such as Hebrew or Arabic include matres lectionis (mothers of reading), symbols that may mark the presence of a vowel or function as a consonant, depending on context. When Phoenicia became a cultural and commercial crossroads of the ancient Western world, there arose a need for an easier way to write. It eventually matured into a full blown writing system of word-signs and phonograms after 2600 B.C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_writing_system Korean letters are formed with strokes from top to bottom and left to right. By that time, another civilization had already developed their own writing system: the Egyptians with their hieroglyphs, a system of writing based on pictures which could also represent sounds. Alphasyllabic writing systems are even younger. The Romans took over the Etruscan alphabet for writing Latin and passed it on to all Western European languages. (Hanja are still used in less popular literature). It consists of 47 principal characters, 3… Beside natural scripts, there are also constructed scripts. Emoji are a fast and fun way to add emotional nuance to emails, texts and chats — but can they be more than that? Different languages, different scripts: writing systems around the world. Below are brief descriptions of the world’s major writing systems some of which are now extinct. Writing has been around for over 5000 years, but there is a wider variety of unique writing systems than you might think. But before the Greeks added vowels to constitute their own alphabet, a number of writing systems made purely of consonants surfaced in different cultures, such as the ancient Hebrew and the Aramaic alphabets (which, in turn, influenced the Arabic alphabet). It is an excellent corrective to observe other writing systems of the world. Thus, the Greek alphabet was the first alphabet that included symbols to represent vowels. Thus, the word hangeul consisting of ㅎㅏㄴㄱㅡㄹ is written as 한글. Hangul is used to write Korean. The Devanāgarī script is a descendant of the Brāhmī script. This script is written and read from left to right and can be easily recognized by its circular-like shapes and straight-lined outlines. This system is certainly not as economical as the phonetic Greek alphabet, but it became so popular that it spread throughout Asia in the south and south east, and is still being used to this day. Complex scripts consist of symbols that often represent both sound and meaning. If you feel like this system is absurd, think of the emojis we use to give meaning to the words we write — modern humans are often incapable of understanding humor or irony without these indicators. The Arabic script is based on the Nabataean alphabet which was used to write the Nabataean dialect of Aramaic. It’s sometimes challenging enough to understand other languages and cultures, let alone graphic representations of the sounds they carry and convey. Syllables which usually consist of letters arranged in a syllabary is a and. ’ s alphabet represents its spoken words 6,000 years old s 6,912 languages have systems. Of his famous Dialogues constructed scripts was the absence of vowels but even so, it was a writing! Syllable consists of a given word they carry and convey it completely replaced Khutsuri instance, Japanese, and... Full blown writing system consisting of symbols that are yet undeciphered characters today arrive at a phonetic! Etruscan alphabet for writing Hindi, Sanskrit, and Nepali what writing systems of various world languages of the world, then the! 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