A semi-syllabary is a

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 fo ...

that behaves partly as an

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 syllab ...

and partly as a

syllabary In the linguistic study of written languages, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) moras which make up words. A symbol in a syllabary, called a syllabogram, typically represents an (option ...

. The main group of semi-syllabic writing are the Paleohispanic scripts of ancient Spain, a group of semi-syllabaries that transform redundant

plosive In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lip ...

consonants of the

Phoenician alphabet The Phoenician alphabet is an alphabet (more specifically, an abjad) known in modern times from the Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region. The name comes from the Phoenician civilization. The Phoenician al ...

into syllabograms. Out of confusion, the term is sometimes applied to a different alphabetic typology known as

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 no ...

, alphasyllabary or neosyllabary, but for the purposes of this article it will be restricted to scripts where some characters are alphabetic and others are syllabic.

Iberian semi-syllabaries

The Paleohispanic semi-syllabaries are a family of scripts developed in the

Iberian Peninsula The Iberian Peninsula (), ** * Aragonese and Occitan: ''Peninsula Iberica'' ** ** * french: Péninsule Ibérique * mwl, Península Eibérica * eu, Iberiar penintsula also known as Iberia, is a peninsula in southwestern Europe, def ...

at least from the 5th century BCE – possibly from the 7th century. Some researchers conclude that their origin lies solely with the

, while others believe the

Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as ...

also had a role. Paleohispanic semi-syllabaries are typologically unusual because their syllabic and alphabetic components are equilibrated: they behave as a

for the

stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), li ...

s and as an

for other consonants and vowels. In the syllabic portions of the scripts, each stop-consonant sign stood for a different combination of consonant and vowel, so that the written form of ''ga'' displayed no resemblance to ''ge''. In addition, the southern original format did not distinguish voicing in these stops, so that ''ga'' stood for both /ga/ and /ka/, but one variant of the northeastern Iberian script, the older one according to the archaeological contexts, distinguished voicing in the stop consonants by adding a stroke to the glyphs for the alveolar (/d/~/t/) and velar (/g/~/k/) syllables. The Tartessian or Southwestern script had a special behaviour: although the letter used to write a stop consonant was determined by the following vowel, the following vowel was also written. Some scholars treat Tartessian as a redundant semi-syllabary, others treat it as a redundant alphabet. Notably, Etruscan and early

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...

did something similar with C, K, and Q, using K before a, Q before o and u, and C elsewhere, for both /k/ and /g/. * Tartessian or Southwestern script – Tartessian or Southwestern language *

Southeastern Iberian script The southeastern Iberian script, also known as Meridional Iberian, was one of the means of written expression of the Iberian language, which was written mainly in the northeastern Iberian script and residually by the Greco-Iberian alphabet. Ab ...

–

Iberian language The Iberian language was the language of an indigenous western European people identified by Greek and Roman sources who lived in the eastern and southeastern regions of the Iberian Peninsula in the pre- Migration Era (before about 375 AD). The ...

* Northeastern Iberian script –

Celtiberian script The Celtiberian script is a Paleohispanic script that was the main writing system of the Celtiberian language, an extinct Continental Celtic language, which was also occasionally written using the Latin alphabet. This script is a direct adapt ...

– Celtiberian language

Other semi-syllabaries

Other scripts combine attributes of alphabet and syllabary. One of these is bopomofo (or ''zhuyin''), a phonetic script devised for transcribing certain

varieties of Chinese Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast of mai ...

. Bopomofo includes several systems, such as Mandarin Phonetic Symbols for

Mandarin Chinese Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language ...

, Taiwanese Phonetic Symbols for

Taiwanese Hokkien Taiwanese Hokkien () (; Tâi-lô: ''Tâi-uân-uē''), also known as Taigi/Taigu (; Pe̍h-ōe-jī/ Tâi-lô: ''Tâi-gí / Tâi-gú''), Taiwanese, Taiwanese Minnan, Hoklo and Holo, is a variety of the Hokkien language spoken natively by about ...

and

Hakka The Hakka (), sometimes also referred to as Hakka Han, or Hakka Chinese, or Hakkas are a Han Chinese subgroup whose ancestral homes are chiefly in the Hakka-speaking provincial areas of Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi, Guangxi, Sichuan, Hunan, Zhej ...

, and

Suzhou Phonetic Symbols Suzhou (; ; Suzhounese: ''sou¹ tseu¹'' , Mandarin: ), alternately romanized as Soochow, is a major city in southern Jiangsu province, East China. Suzhou is the largest city in Jiangsu, and a major economic center and focal point of trade ...

for

Wu Chinese The Wu languages (; Wu romanization and IPA: ''wu6 gniu6'' [] ( Shanghainese), ''ng2 gniu6'' [] (Suzhounese), Mandarin pinyin and IPA: ''Wúyǔ'' []) is a major group of Sinitic languages spoken primarily in Shanghai, Zhejiang, Zhejiang Provin ...

. Bopomofo is not divided into consonants and vowels, but into onsets and rimes. Initial consonants and "medials" are alphabetic, but the nucleus and coda are combined as in syllabaries. That is, a syllable like ''kan'' is written ''k-an,'' and ''kwan'' is written ''k-u-an;'' the vowel is not written distinct from a final consonant. Pahawh Hmong is somewhat similar, but the rime is written before the initial; there are two letters for each rime, depending on which tone diacritic is used; and the rime /āu/ and the initial /k/ are not written except in disambiguation.

Old Persian cuneiform Old Persian cuneiform is a semi-alphabetic cuneiform script that was the primary script for Old Persian. Texts written in this cuneiform have been found in Iran ( Persepolis, Susa, Hamadan, Kharg Island), Armenia, Romania ( Gherla), Turkey ( Va ...

was somewhat similar to the Tartessian script, in that some consonant letters were unique to a particular vowel, some were partially conflated, and some simple consonants, but all vowels were written regardless of whether or not they were redundant. The practice of ''plene writing'' in

Hittite cuneiform Hittite cuneiform is the implementation of cuneiform script used in writing the Hittite language. The surviving corpus of Hittite texts is preserved in cuneiform on clay tablets dating to the 2nd millennium BC (roughly spanning the 17th to 12th ...

resembles the Old Persian situation somewhat and may be interpreted such that Hittite cuneiform was already evolving towards a quasi-alphabetic direction as well. The modern Bamum script is essentially CV-syllabic, but doesn't have enough glyphs for all the CV syllables of the language. The rest are written by combining CV and V glyphs, making these effectively alphabetic. The Japanese kana syllabary occasionally acts as a semi-syllabary, for example when spelling syllables that do not exist in the standard set, like トゥ, ''tu'', or ヴァ, ''va''. In such cases, the first character functions as the consonant and the second as the vowel.

References

External links

{{list of writing systems Types of writing systems

Iberian semi-syllabaries

Other semi-syllabaries

Further reading

References

External links