Everything about Syllabary totally explained
A
syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate)
syllables, which make up
words. A symbol in a syllabary typically represents an optional
consonant sound followed by a
vowel sound.
Languages using syllabaries
Languages that use syllabic writing include
Mycenaean
Greek (
Linear B), the Native American language
Cherokee, the African language
Vai, the English-based
creole language Ndyuka (the
Afaka script),
Yi language in
China, the
Nü Shu syllabary for
Yao people,
China, and the ancient Filipino script
Alibata. The
Chinese,
Cuneiform, and
Maya scripts are largely syllabic in nature, although based on
logograms. They are therefore sometimes referred to as
logosyllabic.
The
Japanese language uses two syllabaries together called
kana, namely
hiragana and
katakana (developed around 700 AD). They are mainly used to write some native words and grammatical elements, as well as foreign words, for example hotel is written with three kana, ホテル (
ho-te-ru), in Japanese. Because Japanese uses a lot of CV (consonant + vowel) syllables, a syllabary is well suited to write the language. As in many syllabaries, however, vowel sequences and final consonants are written with separate glyphs, so that both
atta and
kaita are written with three kana: あった (
a-t-ta) and かいた (
ka-i-ta). It is therefore sometimes called a
moraic writing system.
Difference between an abugida and a syllabary
Indian languages and
Ethiopian languages have a type of
alphabet called an
abugida or
alphasyllabary. These are sometimes mistaken for syllabaries, but unlike in syllabaries, all syllables starting with the same consonant are based on the same symbol, and generally more than one symbol is needed to represent a syllable. In the 19th century these systems were called
syllabics, a term which has survived in the name of
Canadian Aboriginal syllabics (also an abugida). In a true syllabary there's no systematic graphic similarity between phonetically related characters (though some do have graphic similarity for the vowels). That is, the characters for "ke", "ka", and "ko" have no similarity to indicate their common "k"-ness (for example hiragana け, か, こ). Compare
abugida, where each
grapheme typically represents a syllable but where characters representing related sounds are similar graphically (typically, a common consonantal base is annotated in a more or less consistent manner to represent the vowel in the syllable).
Comparison to English alphabet
The
English language allows complex syllable structures, making it cumbersome to write English words with a syllabary. A "pure" syllabary would require a separate glyph for every syllable in English. Thus one would need separate symbols for "bag," "beg," "big," "bog," "bug" ; "bad," "bed," "bid," "bod," "bud," etc. However, such pure systems are rare. A work-around to this problem, common to several syllabaries around the world (including English loanwords in Japanese), is to write an echo vowel, as if the
syllable coda was a second syllable:
ba-gu for "bag", etc. Another common approach is to simply ignore the coda, so that "bag" would be written
ba. This obviously wouldn't work well for English, but was done in Mycenean Greek when the root word was two or three syllables long and the syllable coda was a weak consonant such as
n or
s (example:
chrysos written as
ku-ru-so).
Further Information
Get more info on 'Syllabary'.
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