Syllabary, a set of written symbols used to represent the syllables of the words of a language. Writing systems that use syllabaries wholly or in part include Japanese, Cherokee, the ancient Cretan scripts (Linear A and Linear B), and various Indic and cuneiform writing systems. Some syllabaries include separate symbols for each possible syllable that may occur in the language; others use a system of consonant symbols that include an inherent vowel. In the former type of syllabary, for example, there will be separate symbols representing ka, ke, ki, ko, and ku; whereas in the latter type of syllabary a symbol for ka might be paired with a symbol for the vowel e to represent ke but would stand alone when it represented ka. Other types of syllabaries combine syllabic symbols to represent syllables for which there is no one symbol; in such systems, for example, there may be symbols for ka, ke, ki, etc., but no symbols for kan, ken, kin, etc. Syllables of this latter type might be represented in such a system by combining the symbol for ka with that for an to form kan (ka-an), the symbol for ke with that for en to form ken (ke-en), etc.
Although syllabic writing systems are a great improvement over logographic and mixed phonetic and logographic writing systems (which may require thousands of distinct symbols), they are still much bulkier than alphabetic writing systems, which reduce the number of signs (letters) to the minimum number required for representing the sounds of a language.
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writing: Types of writing systemsSyllabaries provide a distinctive symbol for each distinct syllable. A syllable is a unit of speech composed of a vowel sound or a combination of consonant and vowel sounds; the sounds
pa, pe, pi, po, puare different syllables and are easily distinguished in a…
Greek language: Greek syllabariesStarting from a foreign script known as Linear A (used in Crete to record a native language known as Minoan), the Greeks devised, toward 1500
bceat the latest, a syllabic script to record their own language. Known as Linear B, this script was…
writing: The rise of literacySyllabaries such as the Cree syllabary are reported to be learnable in a day, while the indigenous Vai syllabary used in Liberia and Sierra Leone is learned in a few days. Consonantal scripts and alphabets are difficult to learn and usually require a few years…
alphabetIn a syllabary, on the other hand, the same language would require 30 × 5 symbols to represent each possible consonant-vowel syllable (e.g., separate forms for
ba, be, bi, bo, bu; da, de, di; and so on) and an additional five symbols for the vowels, thereby making…
North American Indian languages: Writing and texts…not an alphabet but a syllabary, in which each symbol stands for a consonant-vowel sequence. The forms of characters were derived in part from the English alphabet but without regard to their English pronunciation. Well suited to the language, the syllabary fostered widespread literacy among the Cherokee until their society…
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