In human communication, the art of writing serves as a tool to preserve the research, discovery, stories, histories and aspirations of many diverse cultures. Today, there are five principal conductors: the Logographic, the Abjad, the Abugida, the Alphabetic and the Syllabic. These distinct writing systems have been used throughout the ages to transform the thoughts of humanity into timeless written expression. This post explores the assorted scripts of the world.
Logographic writing systems
The first known writing system was the Sumerian writing system in Mesopotamia, which was already in existence prior to 3000BCE and was primarily logographic.
Logographic writing systems are characterised by the use of one symbol representing one word or morpheme. Perhaps the most renowned example of these today is the Chinese writing system, commonly known as ‘Hanzi’. China employs Hanzi for Mandarin, Cantonese and other Chinese languages, so, despite extensive linguistic differences, speakers of the various Chinese dialects can communicate through writing, as the logographic nature of Hanzi is one and the same for all.
Japan, too, uses a logographic system known as ‘Kanji’, which is derived from the Chinese characters. While Kanji is a fundamental component of Japanese writing, it also coexists with ‘syllabic’ scripts (see section below) such as Hiragana and Katakana, creating a blend of characters in written communication. The Japanese writing system today is a combination of these three writing systems.
Beyond East Asia, ancient civilisations of the world also used logographic symbols. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, with their pictorial representations, adorned the walls of temples and tombs and captured the essence of that civilisation so that today, although the writing is no longer in use, we have some understanding of thanks to the Rosetta Stone.
However, logographic systems are not as prevalent globally as alphabetic or syllabic systems. Each logographic script carries a unique visual identity, reflecting the cultural and historical evolution of its respective region. While logographic systems may share certain visual elements due to historical connections, such as the influence of Chinese characters on Japanese Kanji, linguistic meanings can vary significantly.
The abjad writing system
The abjad writing system, employed by languages such as Arabic and Hebrew, is distinct in its representation of consonants. Unlike alphabetic systems that typically include vowels, abjads focus primarily on consonantal sounds. The term ‘abjad’ is derived from the Arabic word for alphabet, ‘alif, ba, jeem, daal,’ which represent the initial letters of the Arabic script.
Arabic is one of the most widely spoken languages that uses the abjad system, and it is renowned for its diverse dialects. The Arabic spoken in Tunisia, for example, is considerably different to the Arabic that is spoken in Saudi Arabia because over hundreds of years new terms and words enter languages differently in different countries. The written form of Arabic, however, remains largely consistent across the dialects of all Arabic-speaking countries. This unifying characteristic is due to the fact that Arabic script primarily represents consonants, and the vowels are often indicated with diacritical marks. As a result, Arabic speakers from different regions can read the same written text, even if their spoken dialects differ significantly.
The Hebrew language also follows an abjad script. The Hebrew alphabet, as with Arabic, represents consonants and relies on vowel marks or points to indicate vowel sounds. Both Arabic and Hebrew share historical and cultural ties, contributing to the similarities in their writing systems.
As for the origin of the abjad system, it is not the first sound-based writing system. The first sound-based writing system is often attributed to the Phoenicians, who developed an early version of the alphabet around 1200 BCE. The Phoenician alphabet, also characterised by representing consonantal sounds, became a precursor not only to the Abjad writing systems, but also the European alphabets.
The abugida writing system
Most abugida writing systems are descended from the Brahmi script which was fully developed by the third century BCE. The abugida is a type of writing system in which each character represents a consonant followed by a specific vowel sound. The inherent vowel sound is typically a short ‘a’ sound, and additional diacritical marks or modifications are used to change the vowel associated with the consonant. This system is common in many South and Southeast Asian scripts.
One prominent example of an abugida is the script used for many Indian languages, such as Devanagari for Hindi, and Marathi. In Devanagari, characters represent a consonant with an inherent ‘a’ sound, and additional marks or modifications indicate other vowel sounds.
The term ‘abugida’ is a concept introduced by the linguist Peter T. Daniels that combines the first three Ethiopic (Ge’ez) script symbols: ‘a,’ ‘bu,’ ‘gi.’
The alphabetic writing system
The alphabetic writing system is a script in which symbols, known as letters, represent individual sounds, both consonants and vowels. The term ‘alphabet’ is derived from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta.
The Roman alphabet, also known as the Latin alphabet, has become one of the most widely used alphabets in the world today. It originated in ancient Italy and was adapted by the Romans from an earlier version used by the Etruscans. The Roman alphabet became the foundation for various European languages and eventually spread globally, finding applications in many modern languages.
However, the term ‘alphabetic writing system’ encompasses more than just the Roman alphabet. Various cultures developed their own alphabets, each with unique characters and adaptations to suit the phonetic characteristics of their languages. These include the Greek Alphabet, which served as the basis for the Roman alphabet and is still used today in modern Greek; the Cyrillic Alphabet, which was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire and is used today in many Slavic languages, including Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian; and the Armenian Alphabet, which was developed by Saint Mesrop Mashtots and is still used with the Armenian language.
While the concept of an alphabet implies a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds, in reality the pronunciation of letters varies across languages. This is why the idea of a phonetic alphabet was born. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a standardised system that represents the sounds of spoken language by providing a set of symbols that accurately depict the sounds humans make to form any language, regardless of its writing system. Despite the phonetic nature of alphabets, spelling and pronunciation still do not always align perfectly due to linguistic and regional factors. Variations in accent often lead to differences between the intended pronunciation and the actual spoken word.
Syllabic writing systems
The syllabic writing system, as the name suggests, is a script in which each character represents a syllable, providing a more direct representation of spoken language.
One of the best-known examples of a syllabic writing system is the Japanese writing system, specifically the two scripts known as Hiragana and Katakana are syllabic though blended with the logographic Kanji. Each character in these Hiragana and Katakana scripts represents a syllable, combining a consonant sound with a vowel sound. Hiragana is often used for native Japanese words and grammatical elements, while Katakana is used for loanwords and foreign names.
Another example of a syllabic writing system is the Cherokee script, developed by a Native American called Sequoyah in the early nineteenth century for the Cherokee language.
The origins of syllabic writing systems vary, but such systems frequently emerge in response to the need for a writing system that more directly reflects the structure of the spoken language of its creators.
Other scripts
In addition to these five main writing systems, there are several others that have been developed and utilised around the world.
Featural scripts are writing systems that encode phonetic features such as voicing, place and manner of articulation, and the Korean script, Hangul, is one example of these.
Semi-syllabic scripts are systems that fall between alphabetic and syllabic scripts, with characters that represent a combination of consonants and vowels, and the Cree syllabary script of the Canadian Aboriginals is just one example of these.
There are pictographic and ideographic systems, which while not being as prevalent as logographic scripts also use characters that represent ideas or concepts directly. Ancient scripts such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mayan glyphs fall into this category. Writing systems such as geometric and cryptic scripts use geometric shapes or symbols of which the ‘Blissymbols’ script, developed after the second world war by Charles Bliss to aid communication with individuals who have communication disorders, is an example.
Other writing systems still in use include sign writing, which has been developed for writing sign languages. Sign writing uses symbols to represent manual gestures, facial expressions and other elements of sign languages that are used predominantly to communicate with the deaf and hearing impaired. Likewise, braille, a tactile writing system used by individuals with visual impairments, while not a script for a spoken language, can be considered a writing system, and it represents letters and numbers using arrangements of raised dots.
Conclusion
This short overview of the surprising variety of writing systems exemplifies the incredible ways in which humans have adapted and continue to adapt to the linguistic needs of different communities across the globe and cultures throughout the ages. It is this drive to communicate in such detail that caused humans not only to speak thousands of diverse languages, but also, as time progressed, to create hundreds of writing systems as a means of recording these.
If you have any questions or comments, please do enter them below.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aitchison, Jean. Language Change: Progress or Decay, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 1991)
Bragg, Melvyn. The Adventure of English (Hodder & Stoughton, 2003)
Cresswell, Julia. Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, 3rd edn (Oxford University Press, 2021)
Crystal, David. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 3rd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
Crystal, David. The Stories of English (Penguin, 2005)
Cushing, Ian. Language Change (Cambridge Topics in English Language) (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018)
Huddleston, Rodney, and others. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
McWhorter, John. The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language (Harper Perennial, 2003)
Oppenheimer, Stephen. The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain (Robinson, 2007)
Quirk, Randolph, and others. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, reprint edn (Pearson, 2011)
Roach, Peter. English Phonetics and Phonology: A Practical Course, 4th edn (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
Robinson, Andrew. The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs and Pictograms, 2nd edn (Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2007)
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/