In the

linguistic Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

study of written languages, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the

syllable A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of Phone (phonetics), speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered t ...

s or (more frequently) moras which make up

word A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no conse ...

s. A symbol in a syllabary, called a

syllabogram Syllabograms are grapheme, signs used to write the syllables (or Mora (linguistics), morae) of words. This term is most often used in the context of a writing system otherwise organized on different principles—an alphabet where most symbols repre ...

, typically represents an (optional)

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced wi ...

sound (simple

onset Onset may refer to: * Onset (audio), the beginning of a musical note or sound *Onset, Massachusetts, village in the United States ** Onset Island (Massachusetts), a small island located at the western end of the Cape Cod Canal *Interonset interval ...

) followed by a

vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (l ...

sound (

nucleus Nucleus ( : nuclei) is a Latin word for the seed inside a fruit. It most often refers to: *Atomic nucleus, the very dense central region of an atom *Cell nucleus, a central organelle of a eukaryotic cell, containing most of the cell's DNA Nucle ...

)—that is, a CV or V syllable—but other phonographic mappings, such as CVC, CV- tone, and C (normally nasals at the end of syllables), are also found in syllabaries.

Types

writing system A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication, based on a script and a set of rules regulating its use. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a reliable for ...

using a syllabary is ''complete'' when it covers all syllables in the corresponding spoken language without requiring complex orthographic / graphemic rules, like implicit codas ( ⇒ /C₁VC₂/) silent vowels ( ⇒ /C₁V₁C₂/) or

echo vowel An echo vowel, also known as a synharmonic vowel, is a paragogic vowel that repeats the final vowel in a word in speech. For example, in Chumash, when a word ends with a glottal stop and comes at the end of an intonation unit, the final vowel is ...

s ( ⇒ /C₁V₁C₂/). This loosely corresponds to ''shallow'' orthographies in alphabetic writing systems. ''True'' syllabograms are those that encompass all parts of a syllable, i.e. initial onset, medial nucleus and final coda, but since onset and coda are optional in at least some languages, there are ''middle'' (nucleus), ''start'' (onset-nucleus), ''end'' (nucleus-coda) and ''full'' (onset-nucleus-coda) true syllabograms. Most syllabaries only feature one or two kinds of syllabograms and form other syllables by graphemic rules. Syllabograms, hence syllabaries, are ''pure'', ''analytic'' or ''arbitrary'' if they do not share graphic similarities that correspond to phonic similarities, e.g. the symbol for ''ka'' does not resemble in any predictable way the symbol for ''ki'', nor the symbol for ''a''. Otherwise they are ''synthetic'', if they vary by onset, rime, nucleus ''or'' coda, or ''systematic'', if they vary by all of them. Some scholars, e.g. Daniels, reserve the general term for analytic syllabaries and invent other terms (

abugida An abugida (, from Ge'ez: ), sometimes known as alphasyllabary, neosyllabary or pseudo-alphabet, is a segmental writing system in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as units; each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel nota ...

abjad An abjad (, ar, أبجد; also abgad) is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with other alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels ...

) as necessary. Some systems provide

katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived fro ...

language conversion.

Languages using syllabaries

Languages that use syllabic writing include Japanese, Cherokee, Vai, the Yi languages of eastern Asia, the English-based

creole language A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one within a fairly brief period of time: often, a pidgin evolved into a full-fledged language. Wh ...

Ndyuka,

Xiangnan Tuhua Xiangnan Tuhua (), or simply Tuhua, is an unclassified Chinese variety of southeastern Hunan. It is spoken throughout most of Yongzhou prefecture (apart from Qiyang County in the northeast) and in the western half of Chenzhou prefecture, in wh ...

, and the ancient language

Mycenaean Greek Mycenaean Greek is the most ancient attested form of the Greek language, on the Greek mainland and Crete in Mycenaean Greece (16th to 12th centuries BC), before the hypothesised Dorian invasion, often cited as the '' terminus ad quem'' for the ...

(

Linear B Linear B was a syllabic script used for writing in Mycenaean Greek, the earliest attested form of Greek. The script predates the Greek alphabet by several centuries. The oldest Mycenaean writing dates to about 1400 BC. It is descended fr ...

). In addition, the undecoded Cretan

Linear A Linear A is a writing system that was used by the Minoans of Crete from 1800 to 1450 BC to write the hypothesized Minoan language or languages. Linear A was the primary script used in palace and religious writings of the Minoan civi ...

is also believed by some to be a syllabic script, though this is not proven.

Chinese characters Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the Written Chinese, writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are ...

, the

cuneiform script Cuneiform is a logo- syllabic script that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Middle East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. It is named for the characteristic wedge- ...

used for Sumerian, Akkadian and other languages, and the former Maya script are largely syllabic in nature, although based on

logogram In a written language, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced ''hanzi'' in Mandarin, ''kanji'' in Japanese, '' hanja'' in Korean) are generally logograms, ...

s. They are therefore sometimes referred to as ''logosyllabic''. The contemporary Japanese language uses two syllabaries together called

kana The term may refer to a number of syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. Such syllabaries include (1) the original kana, or , which were Chinese characters ( kanji) used phonetically to transcribe Japanese, the most p ...

(in addition to the non-syllabic systems

kanji are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequ ...

and

romaji The romanization of Japanese is the use of Latin script to write the Japanese language. This method of writing is sometimes referred to in Japanese as . Japanese is normally written in a combination of logographic characters borrowed from Ch ...

), namely

hiragana is a Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with ''katakana'' as well as ''kanji''. It is a phonetic lettering system. The word ''hiragana'' literally means "flowing" or "simple" kana ("simple" originally as contras ...

and

, which were developed around 700. Because Japanese uses mainly CV (consonant + vowel) syllables, a syllabary is well suited to write the language. As in many syllabaries, 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 A mora (plural ''morae'' or ''moras''; often symbolized μ) is a basic timing unit in the phonology of some spoken languages, equal to or shorter than a syllable. For example, a short syllable such as ''ba'' consists of one mora (''monomoraic'') ...

'' writing system. Languages that use syllabaries today tend to have simple phonotactics, with a predominance of monomoraic (CV) syllables. For example, the modern Yi script is used to write languages that have no diphthongs or syllable codas; unusually among syllabaries, there is a separate glyph for every consonant-vowel-tone combination (CVT) in the language (apart from one tone which is indicated with a diacritic). Few syllabaries have glyphs for syllables that are not monomoraic, and those that once did have simplified over time to eliminate that complexity. For example, the Vai syllabary originally had separate glyphs for syllables ending in a coda ''(doŋ),'' a long vowel ''(soo),'' or a diphthong ''(bai),'' though not enough glyphs to distinguish all CV combinations (some distinctions were ignored). The modern script has been expanded to cover all moras, but at the same time reduced to exclude all other syllables. Bimoraic syllables are now written with two letters, as in Japanese: diphthongs are written with the help of V or ''h''V glyphs, and the nasal coda is written with the glyph for ''ŋ'', which can form a syllable of its own in Vai. In

, which was used to transcribe

, a language with complex syllables, complex consonant onsets were either written with two glyphs or simplified to one, while codas were generally ignored, e.g. ''ko-no-so'' for '' Knōsos'', ''pe-ma'' for ''sperma.'' The Cherokee syllabary generally uses dummy vowels for coda consonants, but also has a segmental grapheme for /s/, which can be used both as a coda and in an initial /sC/ consonant cluster.

Difference from abugidas

The languages of

India India, officially the Republic of India ( Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the ...

and

Southeast Asia Southeast Asia, also spelled South East Asia and South-East Asia, and also known as Southeastern Asia, South-eastern Asia or SEA, is the geographical south-eastern region of Asia, consisting of the regions that are situated south of mainland ...

, as well as the

Ethiopian Semitic languages Ethiopian Semitic (also Ethio-Semitic, Ethiosemitic, Ethiopic or Abyssinian) is a family of languages spoken in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Sudan. They form the western branch of the South Semitic languages, itself a sub-branch of Semitic, part of t ...

, have a type of

alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a sy ...

called an ''

'' or ''alphasyllabary''. In these scripts, unlike in pure syllabaries, syllables starting with the same consonant are generally expressed with

graphemes In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called ''graphemics' ...

based in a regular way on a common graphical elements. Usually each character representing a syllable consists of several elements which designate the individual sounds of that syllable. In the 19th century these systems were called ''syllabics'', a term which has survived in the name of

Canadian Aboriginal syllabics Canadian syllabic writing, or simply syllabics, is a family of writing systems used in a number of Indigenous Canadian languages of the Algonquian, Inuit, and (formerly) Athabaskan language families. These languages had no formal writing sy ...

(also an abugida). In a true syllabary there may be graphic similarity between characters that share a common consonant or vowel sound, but it is not systematic or at all regular. For example, the characters for 'ke', 'ka', and 'ko' in Japanese

have no similarity to indicate their common "k" sound (these being: け, か and こ). Compare this with

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental writing system), based on the ...

, an abugida, where the characters for 'ke', 'ka' and 'ko' are के, का and को respectively, with क indicating their common "k" sound.

Comparison to alphabets

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

, along with many other Indo-European languages like German and Russian, allows for complex syllable structures, making it cumbersome to write English words with a syllabary. A "pure" syllabary based on English would require a separate glyph for every possible syllable. Thus one would need separate symbols for "bag", "beg", "big", "bog", "bug", "bad", "bed", "bid", "bod", "bud", "bead", "bide", "bode", etc. Since English has well over 10,000 different possibilities for individual syllables, a syllabary would be poorly suited to represent the English language. However, such pure systems are rare. A workaround to this problem, common to several syllabaries around the world (including English loanwords in Japanese), is to write an

, as if the

syllable coda A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "b ...

were a second syllable: ''ba-gu'' for "bag", etc.

References

{{List of writing systems , Syllabaries

Types

Languages using syllabaries

Difference from abugidas

Comparison to alphabets

See also

References