Writing Systems Explained: Alphabets, Abjads, Abugidas, Characters

What one sign stands for

The usual way to compare scripts asks what unit of language one sign writes. In an alphabet such as Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Georgian or Armenian, consonants and vowels each get letters of their own. The linguist Peter T. Daniels named two further types in 1990.¹ An abjad writes the consonants and leaves the vowels out or marks them with optional signs; Daniels took the name from the Arabic word for the traditional order of its letters, and Arabic and Hebrew are the familiar examples. An abugida writes a consonant together with an inherent vowel and changes that vowel with added marks.¹

The word abugida itself comes from Ethiopia, where it names the Geʽez script after its first letters ʾä, bu, gi and da, the way abecedary is built from a, be, ce, de.¹ In Ethiopic the base letter ሀ reads hä, and ሁ with a mark on the right reads hu. Devanagari works the same way: क is ka, कि is ki, and the halant, a vowel-killing mark, leaves a bare k.¹

Chinese characters stand for words or parts of words. Japanese writes with Chinese characters, kanji, together with two syllabaries, and Korean Hangul is an alphabet whose letters are stacked into syllable blocks. The table shows each type in the name of a language written in its own script.

Thai: 44 consonants and no spaces

Thai is an abugida descended from the Old Khmer script. It has 44 consonant letters for 21 consonant sounds at the start of a syllable, 16 vowel symbols that combine into at least 32 vowel forms, and four tone marks.² Spaces are not used between words.² The Ram Khamhaeng inscription, dated 1292, is often cited as the first appearance of the script, although many scholars doubt its reliability.²

Hangul: a script with a date of birth

Few scripts can be dated. Hangul can: it was presented, apparently in a mostly complete form, to the court of King Sejong in the twelfth month of 1443, and the text that explains it, the Hunminjeongeum, was published around October 1446.³ The preface counts twenty-eight letters; some of them have since fallen out of use.³ Its letters are grouped into syllable blocks, so the block 한 joins ㅎ (h), ㅏ (a) and ㄴ (n).

How many characters do readers need?

No reader learns all Chinese characters, and governments publish lists of the ones schools teach. Japan’s current list of jōyō kanji, the characters for general use, has 2,136 entries and was issued in 2010.⁴ Kana, the two syllabaries, fill in grammatical endings and loanwords, so a Japanese sentence mixes three kinds of sign.

At the other end of the scale, the Rotokas alphabet of Papua New Guinea has twelve letters, A, E, G, I, K, O, P, R, S, T, U and V, and is described as the smallest alphabet in use today.⁵ The alphabet tables, starting with A to B, set out each script letter by letter.