Explore the World of Writing Systems

Overview of Writing Systems

• Writing systems are a method of visually representing verbal communication based on a script and a set of rules regulating its use.

• Writing differs from speech in being a reliable form of information storage and transfer.

• Writing systems can be placed into broad categories such as alphabets, syllabaries, or logographies, although any particular system may have attributes of more than one category.

• Alphabets typically use a set of less than 100 symbols to fully express a language, whereas syllabaries can have several hundred, and logographies can have thousands of symbols.

• Writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, which used pictograms, ideograms, and other mnemonic symbols.

• The invention of writing systems dates back to the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late Neolithic Era of the late 4th millennium BC.

• Writing systems require shared understanding between writers and readers of the meaning behind the sets of characters that make up a script.

• Reading a text can be accomplished purely in the mind as an internal process, or expressed orally.

• Writing systems can be independent from languages.

• Logographic writing systems use a single symbol for an entire word, while a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent syllables.

• Syllabaries are best suited to languages with relatively simple syllable structure, such as Japanese.

• To write English using a syllabary, every possible syllable in English would have to have a separate symbol.Writing Systems

• Japanese has around 100 possible syllables, while English has approximately 15,000 to 16,000.

• Yi script contains 756 different symbols, while the Chinese script represents syllables and includes separate glyphs for nearly all of the many thousands of syllables in Middle Chinese.

• Mycenaean Greek (Linear B) and Indigenous languages of the Americas such as Cherokee use true syllabaries.

• An alphabet is a small set of letters (basic written symbols), each of which roughly represents or represented historically a segmental phoneme of a spoken language.

• Abjad is an alphabetic writing system where there is one symbol per consonant.

• Abugida is an alphabetic writing system whose basic signs denote consonants with an inherent vowel and where consistent modifications of the basic sign indicate other following vowels than the inherent one.

• Featural scripts represent finer detail than an alphabet.

• The English writing system includes numerals and other logograms such as #, $, and &, and the written language often does not match well with the spoken one.

• Most writing systems are not purely one type.

• Linear writing systems are those in which the characters are composed of lines.

• Scripts are graphically characterized by the direction in which they are written.

• In computers and telecommunication systems, writing systems are generally not codified as such, but graphemes and other grapheme-like units that are required for text processing are represented by "characters" that typically manifest in encoded form.