Five Unique, Generative Alphabets

Factual Questions
1

My overly inquisitive boss put to me a question about the origin of particular alphabets, as he showed me a coffee mug decorated with the Ethiopian alphabet. He wanted me to find out how many unique, original alphabets there are that are ancestors of currently used alphabets, or still in use today.

Chinese kanji is one, I believe. I also tenatively offered Ionian, which I believe is the origin of the Roman alphabet, and possibly the Cyrillic. We could identify a few more, but lacked the proper names for them or their ancestors: arabic script and/or sanskrit. Korea uses a unique alphabet, but it was developed only a few hundred years ago, and has no descendents.

Any ideas?

Never attribute to an -ism anything more easily explained by common, human stupidity.

2

Arabic and Hebrew are both semetic languages that are descended from a common language. However, Hebrew and Arabic both have different alphabets.

3

I thought Cyrillic borrowed liberally from the Greek alphabet.

Didn’t the Egyptian demotic alphabet get borrowed from a lot too? Or was it heiroglyphic?

How about the Japanese kanas? I mean, wasn’t there an old Japanese phonetic alphabet before they started importing Chinese ideographs … and they are both used in modern kanji … or is kanji exclusively derived from Chinese?

The Nepalese also have their own alphabet, but I don’t know if it’s derivative of something else.

  • Boris B, Hellacious Ornithologist
4

Greek, Cyrillic, Roman and its progeny can be traced to Hebrew and Phonecian. Interestingly there are many Hebrew letters that look like corresponding Hieroglyphs used for phonetic spelling sounds. I would put all of these in one group then, and add Coptic from both Egyptian Demotic and Greek combined.

Mayan Seems to be a separate entity.

Cunieform is an entity unto itself. It was used for Babylonian, Sumerian, and Assyrian.

I suspect this list would get quite long if you are looking for mutually exclusive non related alphabet systems. While all languages may be related (from “Nostratic”) alphabets arose long after this proto-language split into distint language groups.

Isn’t Kanji Japanese??

5

This seems to be an easy question, but a darn complicated answer.

As has already been pointed out, Hebrew and Arabic are both semitic languages, and share some root words that are pretty similar, though their alphabets are completely different.

Farsi and Urdu use the Arabic alphabet with a few additional letters, though each language is completely different from Arabic. Interestingly, spoken Urdu and spoken Hindi are nearly identical, yet Hindi has its own alphabet. There are gobs more languages on the subcontinent, including Punjabi, Mehman, and Peshto, but I don’t know what alphabets they use.

6

The Chinese ideograms aren’t alphabets; however, there is an alphabet used for Chinese (more of a syllabry) but rarely used.

The two kana systems in Japanese are also syllabries and also are derived from the Chinese characters.

Korean uses Han-gul which is a true alphabet (regardless of what goff thinks) and is not derived from any precursor.

Cherokee uses a syllabry and it was derived from English in so far as Sequoyah not having any other example before him (he was illiterate so the symbols in Cherokee which look like English letters don’t represent the same sounds as in English).

There’s a great book, Writing Systems of the World, which I’ve mentioned before on this board. As soon as I can find it, I’ll post the ISBN.

7

To add to what Monty said:

There is no “Chinese kanji,” unless by kanji you mean what a Japanese person might say (I’m guessing) to describe Chinese writing. (Kanji is a Japanese term.)

Chinese is purely ideogrammatic, that is, each symbol is a word. There are standard components to the ideograms (if you know what to look for you can see how the symbol is made up) but AT BEST one might be able to guess at the general meaning of an ideogram from the compnents that make it up - and one might be very wrong. There is also bopomofo, which is equivalent to a syllable-based alphabet, BUT it is used only for teaching purposes as far as I know, and was developed millennia after the writing system as a way to describe pronunciation (which isn’t intuitive to the ideogram).

I remember that Japanese had three writing systems: katakana, hiragana, and kanji. (My memory might be wrong.) I believe they were used for different purposes or by different strata of society. Kanji might be said to be Chinese ideograms plus hiragana - my understanding is that, since Japanese is inflected but Chinese isn’t, you write a Chinese character and then modify it with Japanese symbols (like a suffix, I guess).

One interesting (and for non-native students, very frustrating) aspect to kanji is apparently that it comprises two separate usage systems within one written system. Thus, one could write the Chinese-derived kanji character for, say, tree, and mean “tree,” or one could write that character for its sound (as pronounced in Japanese), which sound is then used as part of some other word meaning.** Worse, a writer can switch between usages within the same sentence!

**I don’t quite know how to make that clear if you don’t see it, especially since I am not a Japanese or kanji expert, but try this: we have a symbol, “2” which means the ordinal number “two” and is pronounced tu. If I write “I have 2 oranges,” you understand. If I write “We buried her in the 2mb,” you might also get it. But if I write “We 2 went 2 the store 2ce today 2 get 2bes of sunscreen before our visit 2 the 2mb” - and then if you realize that almost every other word in that sentence would also be written with a single symbol - you might start to comprehend the difficulties I’ve been told about. (By the way, 2ce is “twice,” as the ordinal number meaning of 2 was what was intended.)

8

The Brahmi alphabet (or it may be a syllabary I forget) from India is the source of all of the Indic scripts (Though, some think it may have Semitic origins, especially because of the inherent ‘a’ sound in the syllables).

Anyway, one particular Indic script called Pallava was the source of the South East Asian scripts (Burmese, Javanese, Tagalog, etc). There was also a script widely used in South East Asia called “Kawi” which is now extinct.

The Tagalog script (which is a syllabary BTW, si it might not count for you :))is interesting because it supplanted the more “perfect” kawi script. The script could only reprsent V and CV syllables (Tagalog has more syllable constructions than that). Words like ak, and kam would be written as ‘a’, and ‘ka’, and through a system no one knows anymore, the missing final consonant would be figured out.

Anyway, there are a couple of other related scripts that are still in use among some Filipino tribes.
In Mongolia, there was also a script called Soyombo.
Links:

9

{:-Df:

Oh yeah? I thought the ordinal of ‘two’ was ‘second’. ‘Twice’ is more like a multifold (?) of two.

Well, what about my alphabet. I just use the 7 LED segments. Like you can get the sum of 7 taken 0 to 7 at a time combinations of different characters that way, with at least some 50 of them unfragmented and character-space-filling. Those illiterate humanities types just don’t know what they’re doing, trying to draw water, camels, houses, whatever. :wink: They shoulda thought ahead a little. I guess the Babylonians were almost on the right track. If those people’d done this task right back then, LED displays woulda looked much more natural and obvious. They coulda used palm fronds like mechanical 7-segment displays to signal each other, right? Steada all them birds ‘n’ pharoahs ‘n’ whateveryagot. HLF<font size=2 face=“symbol”>PG</font>E – this sort of thing. (You can illuminate these characters in your diary, but leave 'em alone for LEDs, OCR, traffic signs, etc.)

Ray (When will alpha get outta beta?)

10

I’m pretty sure Han-gul is a syllabary.

Jarrett Diamond goes into alphabets, syllabaries, and other forms of writing at some length in his book “Guns, Germs and Steel.”

11

Then you’re incorrect, Beruang. As this site, http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Pagoda/1876/hangul.htm , shows very well, Korean uses an alphabet; to wit: one symbol represents a particular sound, two or more symbols together represent those sounds in sequence.

For more information, you can go to http://www.embassy.org and check the Korean embassy’s homepage for cultural notes.

BTW, back in my Army days, I took and passed the Defense Language Proficiency Test for Korean.

As the component symbols of Han-gul represent individual sounds, some of which (14, actually) are only consonants, then alphabet it is.

12

Doobieous:

The script you first refer to is Devanagari, the script of Sanskrit, and it is in fact a syllabary. Umpteen other languages besides Hindi do use it too, as you say, either (more or less) as it is or in variously modified forms - eg, Panjabi or Gujerati (?Bengali also). Cdn’t say offhand about Pushtu or the others, though. (Urdu uses Arabic script, but, I think, from left to right.) I’ve not heard that about poss Semitic origins before.

13

Durno: a casec can be made that all of the Indic scripts are, in fact, alphabets.

Yes, the basic letters are syllables; however, that’s because they’re considered to have an “inherent vowel,” usually the sound of “a.”

Presence of the other vowels, and lack of the inherent vowel, is indicated by specific marks or ligatures.

Cheers!
-Chip

14

Durno: No, I am not referring to Devanagari. Devanagari is a descendant of the Brahmi script. Brahmi is the predecessor of all of the Indic scripts.

From deja.com the post is here

Bolding is mine. Look around this site, ancient scripts of the world. They have a page on some of the Indic scripts (As well as MANY others) and have Brahmi (I couldn’t get into it, that’s why I went to Dejanews).

It’s worth the risk of burning, to have a second chance…

15

[quote]
(Urdu uses Arabic script, but, I think, from left to right.) I’ve not heard that about poss Semitic origins before.

[quote]

Urdu (and Farsi) use the Arabic script plus a few additional letters, and like Arabic are right-to-left. I didn’t mean to imply that Urdu had a Semitic origin; only that Arabic did.

16

I shd’ve looked at the www.cs.colostate.edu/~malaiya/scripts.html site beforeposting rather than after… interesting stuff. I’ll try the “ancient scripts” one later too, Doobieous, when I can take my time and not rush it.

I learnt Devanagari when I learnt Hindi (years ago and now forgotten, sadly) but this is the first time I heard of Brahmi. This being the case, an opinion on the possibility or otherwise of Semitic influences is not mine to give… I’m not surprised I was wrong about Urdu - I think I heard that from a man in a pub once.

Monty: when is a syllabary not a syllabary? I suppose it’s the same sort of question as: when is a dialect not a dialect but a separate language. My feeling - and it’s no more than that - is that the inherent ‘a’, at least in Devanagari, is sufficiently strong and pervasive to make it a syllabary - you can write whole words with no separate vowel indicators at all - but I don’t insist on it!

17

Durno:

Good question. That’s why I said “a case can be made.”

18

Monty –

If I am incorrect in saying Hangul is a syllabary, then I am not alone in my error. I concede that I am not a linguist, but I have read linguists who described Hangul as such. I too studied the language, though not to the extent you have. It is my understanding that, while every consonant and vowel does indeed have its own character, these characters never (in the case of consonants; rarely in the case of vowels) appear on their own. Rather, they appear in combinations, and those combinations become the building blocks of the language. (Rather like protons, neutrons and electrons build up atoms, and atoms go on to do various and sundry wonderful things.)

Every Hangul text, dictionary, and teacher in my experience used the syllables; I clearly remember having to deduce the letters for myself.

Perhaps it’s most accurate to say Hangul is neither an alphabet nor a syllabary, but something in-between … a “dipthongary”? :wink:

19

Ber: may I make two recommendations?

  1. Access the link I provided above. It exlains very well the Korean alphabet as an alphabet.

  2. Contact your teachers and scold them thus, “Bad teacher! Bad, bad teacher!”

20

Ber: I agree with Monty, it’s an alphabet. Each part of it has a single phoneme to it. A Syllabary has characters that usually consist of two phonemes. Also, while you can mix and match the different phonemes in Hangul to create syllables, you cannot do that in a true syllabary (as each character is a syllable unto itself). A mixed alphabet and syllabary has both syllable and phoneme characters.

Hangul also has rules as to what characters can go where and what sound they will take when in certain positions. Syllabaries aren’t like this (usually) since, each syllable can be put next to any other syllable, and there is no change in sound, or what have you.

It’s worth the risk of burning, to have a second chance…