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( Syllabary)
A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate) syllables, which make up words. A symbol in a syllabary typically represents an optional consonant sound followed by a vowel sound. Languages that use syllabic writing include Mycenaean Greek (Linear B), the Native American language Cherokee, the African language Vai, the English-based creole language Ndyuka (the Afaka script), Yi language in China, the Nü Shu syllabary for Yao people, China, and the ancient Filipino script Alibata. The Chinese, Cuneiform, and Maya scripts are largely syllabic in nature, although based on logograms. They are therefore sometimes referred to as logosyllabic. The Japanese language uses two syllabaries together called kana, namely hiragana and katakana (developed around 700 AD). They are mainly used to write some native words and grammatical elements, as well as foreign words, e.g. hotel is written with three kana, ??? (ho-te-ru), in Japanese. Because Japanese uses a lot of CV (consonant + vowel) syllables, a syllabary is well suited to write the language. As in many syllabaries, however, vowel sequences and final consonants are written with separate glyphs, so that both atta and kaita are written with three kana ??? (a-t-ta) and ??? (ka-i-ta). It is therefore sometimes called a moraic writing system. The English language allows complex syllable structures, making it cumbersome to write English words with a syllabary. A "pure" syllabary would require a separate glyph for every syllable in English. Thus one would need separate symbols for "bag," "beg," "big," "bog," "bug"&_160;; "bad," "bed," "bid," "bod," "bud," etc. However, such pure systems are rare. A work-around 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 was a second syllable ba-gu for "bag", etc. Another common approach is to simply ignore the coda, so that "bag" would be written ba. This obviously would not work well for English, but was done in Mycenean Greek when the root word was two or three syllables long and the syllable coda was a weak consonant such as n or s (example chrysos written as ku-ru-so). >Syllable-based Anatolian&_160;· Cuneiform &_160;· Dongba script&_160;· Maya&_160;· Tangut script&_160;· Yi
Chinese-based Chinese characters (Traditional&_160;· Simplified)&_160;· Ch? Nôm&_160;· Hanja&_160;· Geba&_160;· Jurchen&_160;· Kanji&_160;· Khitan&_160;· Zhuang
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Syllabary Subcategories
Syllabary Articles
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