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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 syllables 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 signs used to write the syllables (or 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 represent phonemes, or a logograph ...
, 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) 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 (leng ...
sound ( nucleus)—that is, a CV or V syllable—but other
phonographic A phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a generic name in the UK since 1910) or since the 1940s called a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogu ...
mappings, such as CVC, CV- tone, and C (normally nasals at the end of syllables), are also found in syllabaries.


Types

A writing system using a syllabary is ''complete'' when it covers all syllables in the corresponding spoken language without requiring complex orthographic / graphemic rules, like
implicit coda Implicit may refer to: Mathematics * Implicit function * Implicit function theorem * Implicit curve * Implicit surface * Implicit differential equation Other uses * Implicit assumption, in logic * Implicit-association test, in social psychology * ...
s ( ⇒ /C1VC2/)
silent vowel Silent may mean any of the following: People with the name * Silent George, George Stone (outfielder) (1876–1945), American Major League Baseball outfielder and batting champion * Brandon Silent (born 1973), South African former footballer * C ...
s ( ⇒ /C1V1C2/) or echo vowels ( ⇒ /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 n ...
, abjad) as necessary. Some systems provide katakana language conversion.


Languages using syllabaries

Languages that use syllabic writing include
Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...
,
Cherokee The Cherokee (; chr, ᎠᏂᏴᏫᏯᎢ, translit=Aniyvwiyaʔi or Anigiduwagi, or chr, ᏣᎳᎩ, links=no, translit=Tsalagi) are one of the indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States. Prior to the 18th century, t ...
, Vai, the
Yi languages The Yi or Nuosu people,; zh, c=彝族, p=Yízú, l=Yi ethnicity historically known as the Lolo,; vi, Lô Lô; th, โล-โล, Lo-Lo are an ethnic group in China, Vietnam, and Thailand. Numbering nine million people, they are the s ...
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. ...
Ndyuka, Xiangnan Tuhua, 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 th ...
( Linear B). 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 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 known as ''kanji ...
, the cuneiform script 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 family of scripts, Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese ...
and romaji), 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 contrast ...
and katakana, 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'' writing system. Languages that use syllabaries today tend to have simple
phonotactics Phonotactics (from Ancient Greek "voice, sound" and "having to do with arranging") is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes. Phonotactics defines permissible syllable struc ...
, 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 Linear B, which was used to transcribe
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 th ...
, 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 so ...
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 mainlan ...
, as well as the Ethiopian Semitic languages, 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 syllab ...
called an ''
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 n ...
'' or ''alphasyllabary''. In these scripts, unlike in pure syllabaries, syllables starting with the same consonant are generally expressed with graphemes 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 (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
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 contrast ...
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, 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 echo vowel, as if the syllable coda were a second syllable: ''ba-gu'' for "bag", etc.


See also

* List of syllabaries


References

{{List of writing systems , Syllabaries