Update: 2005-03-27 06:59 AM -0500

Scripts or Writing Systems

script

A collection by U Kyaw Tun, M.S. (I.P.S.T., U.S.A.). Not for sale. Prepared for students of TIL Computing and Language Center, Yangon, MYANMAR.

These pages are in Arial Unicode MS font. Please remember that not all Unicode fonts are alike. Myanmar characters are in gif picture format and you do not need any Myanmar font to read it. Myanmar spellings in both Myanmar script and in Romabama and are included. Romabama spellings are within { }, and words within < > are regular English words.

Scripts or Writing Systems
Definition of a script
Types of writing systems
Abjad -- Consonantal alphabetic -- Arabic
Abugida -- Alpha-syllabic alphabet -- Devanagari, Myanmar
Artificial abugida -- Phagspa
Alphabet -- C and V Alphabetic -- Roman, Cyrillic
Artificial alphabet -- Armenian
Syllabary -- Katakana and Hiragana
Logogram -- Chinese, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Japanese
Proto-Writing -- Aztec
Unknown -- Phaistos disc
What about ideographic?
Footnotes
References

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Scripts or Writing Systems

In the West and elsewhere in the world, there are many writing systems. We have heard about the Egyptian hieroglyphics which is made up of little pictures, and we know a lot about the alphabetic system such as the English script. We know that the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Koreans write in scripts that are neither hieroglyphic nor alphabetic, though it was said they all had their beginnings in little pictures like the Egyptian writing system. Then, those who have been to India and Myanmar (Burma) knows that the peoples of those places write in characters which seem to be alphabetic, but are not exactly so.

Our story is about the different writing systems of the world. But first let's make ourselves clear by what we mean by a language and a script. Please remember that I am a bilingual Burmese (born in the 1930's in Burma, now officially known as Myanmar). Though my first language is Burmese, both my parents spoke English and I started speaking English very early in life. My story about writing systems is from the point of view of a Myanmar (Burmese) who have spent much of his life in Myanmar who speak both Burmese and English fluently, and who has a deep respect of both the Eastern and Western cultures on which the languages are based.

We all get ourselves mixed up with two words: language and script. In Myanmar (the country), when I went to school in my childhood, I went to learn Myanmar way of writing {mran-ma sa}. Of course, I already knew how to speak Burmese {ba.ma sa.ka:}. At least in this paper, I will make a distinction: Burmese is the spoken language {saka:} whereas Myanmar {mran-ma} is the written script {sa}. The child also learns English, but we say in Burmese that "the child is learning the English script {in:kaleit sa}" Please note that the emphasis is on to how to read and write. We say {in:kaleit sa} without realising that English is the spoken part of "the language" whereas the script is Roman (or Latin).

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Definition of a script

A script is a set of characters (symbols or glyphs) arranged in a particular order to represent the sounds of the human speech (or language). A cluster of characters or combination of characters, is not a script unless it can convey human ideas. Just as an animal or human making grunts and whines does not make sense, any cluster of characters is incapable of conveying ideas. Unless a human makes vocal sounds that convey an idea, we cannot say he is speaking or making the use of a language. Similarly, our group of characters must convey an idea before we can call it a script. This is my "crude" definition of a script. We write (or make use of a script) to record a language.

What about Egyptian Hieroglyphs? Is it just a collection of little pictures? No, it can convey and record human ideas, so it qualifies as a script. But do we know how it sounds like? Again, no. Until very recently there is no way to record sound, and therefore we do not exactly know how those little symbols sound like. However, it must have represented the Egyptian speech, and so it qualifies as a script even though we have never heard it spoken. What about the so-called proto-writing? See what Lawrence Lo ( http://www.ancientscripts.com/alphabet.html ) has to say:

Proto-Writing. "This is the most rudimentary type of writing system. Examples of this type usually have small inventory of signs and large room for interpretation. They don't denote full running texts but instead serve more like mnemonic devices for the reader. However, they are writing systems because in some small way they do represent the underlying language, no matter how poorly." Internet links: Aztec | Naxi | Mixtec.

Though we rarely pay attention to the order in which the glyphs (or characters of a writing system) are presented, it is very important in the study of scripts. The following passage is from http://www.ancientscripts.com/alphabet.html

"The earliest example of an abecedary (a list of the letters in an alphabet in the some kind of order) was found in the city of Ugarit. This abecedary shows a total of 30 symbols used in the Ugaritic script. However, instead of being written in some kind of linear West Semitic, Proto-Sinaitic-derived form, the clay tablet that recorded this abecedary was written in some kind of cuneiform. While the letters in this script were made up of wedges and strokes, the forms of the characters were unrelated to any other cuneiform like Sumerian or Akkadian. There is some similarity, though, between the Ugaritic signs and linear West Semitic letters."

UKT: The word abecedary is not listed in AHTD.

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Types of writing systems

Writing systems have been classified in many ways. The following is one way of classification based on:
• http://mlcr.nagaokaut.ac.jp/main1/signs_of_syllables.htm
Izumi Suzuka, speaking at a student seminar in 2003 at The Laboratory of Professor Osatospoke on Writing Systems -- Signs of Syllables had classified writing systems into five types.
• http://www.ancientscripts.com/phonetics.html
Lawrence K. Lo, Ancient Scripts. (go to resumé)
Based on the material I have, Ancient Scripts is more informative of the two.

In this article, I will group the writing systems into seven groups:
1. Abjad | 2. Abugida (akshara or {ak-hka.ra} ) | 3. Alphabet |
4. Syllabary | 5. Logogram | 6. Proto-Writing | 7. Unknown

It should be emphasised here that: the Myanmar {ak~hka.ra} is NOT an Alphabet.

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1 Abjad

from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad

"An abjad is a type of writing system where there is one symbol per consonantal phoneme. Abjads differ from alphabets in that they lack characters for vowels. The term takes its name from the old order of the Arabic alphabet's consonants Alif, Bá, Jim, Dál, though the word may have earlier roots in Phoenician or Ugaritic.

"Some abjads (such as the Arabic abjad) have characters for some vowels as well, but only use them in special contexts. All known abjads belong to the Semitic family of scripts, and derive from the original Northern Linear Abjad. The reason for this is that Semitic languages have a morphemic structure which makes the denotation of vowels redundant in most cases.

"Many scripts derived from abjads have been extended with vowel symbols to become full alphabets. This has mostly happened when the script was adapted to a non-semitic language, the most famous case being the derivation of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician abjad. Other times, the vowel signs come in the form of little points or hooks attached to the consonant letters, producing an abugida.

"Many non-Semitic languages such as English can be written without vowels and read with little difficulty. (For example, the previous sentence could be written Mny nn-Smtc lnggs sch `s `nglsh cn b wrttn wtht vwls `nd rd wth lttl dffclty. and still be fairly legible.) In fact, omitting vowels from English orthography could serve to make it more phonetic without the problem of vowel representation, as the vowels differ greatly among the different dialects of English.

"See also Bahá'í, where abjad is a numerological system."

UKT: The above description of abjad should be compared with

Consonantal alphabet
Consonantal alphabetic
from: http://www.ancientscripts.com/ws_types.html

"Alphabets that consist of consonantal letters only. Some vowels may be optionally indicated in writing, however vowel sounds had to be supplied by the speaker or reader. North Semitic* languages such as Arabic and Hebrew, and also the languages that use modified Arabic letters: Persian, Urdu (Pakistan), Uighur belong to this category. (*Semitic: A language family that includes Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic (spoken in Ethiopia) and Tigrinya (Northern Ethiopia and Eritrea).)
from: http://mlcr.nagaokaut.ac.jp/main1/signs_of_syllables.htm

"Vowels are not written in purely consonantal alphabets, which are descendents of Proto-Sinaitic. "Alphabet" for this type of script is somewhat controversial, because you can also argue that it is a syllabic script where each sign consists of consonant and a vowel, but the vowel is not specified.
Internet links: Ugaritic | Berber and Tifinagh | Proto-Sinaitic | Phoenician | South Arabian | Thamudic | Aramaic | Arabic | Hebrew | Pahlavi | Syriac "

UKT: It seems that the term abjad is the coined term for "consonantal alphabet".

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2. Abugida

Alpha-syllabary, Syllabic alphabet, or Semi-syllabary
Syllabic alphabetic

UKT: Abugida (or alphasyllabary) is a term coined by Peter T. Daniels, a scholar of writing systems and the co-editor of the book The Worlds' Writing Systems. The term is derived from the first four characters of an order of the Ethiopic script. From: http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Abugida
One source of confusion in collecting materials for these articles is because different authors use different terms for the same item. Please remember:
The character of an abugida is an akshara, whereas, the character of an alphabet is a letter.

Writing systems, in which characters sometimes represent a single consonant or vowel, as in an alphabet, and sometimes a syllable, as in a syllabary. More specifically, each basic consonant character is represented by the graphic syllable where the consonant is modified by the inherent vowel, the most frequently used vowel, usually /a/. When a consonant is modified by any other vowel, a signature (or diacritic form) of the vowel is added around the graphic syllable.
Alpha-syllabary is a characteristic for Amharic and languages in or derived from India such as: Devanagari, Bengali, Oriya, Assamese, Gujarati, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Sinhalese, Burmese, Thai, Lao, Khmer, and Tibetan.
from: http://mlcr.nagaokaut.ac.jp/main1/signs_of_syllables.htm

UKT: Inherent vowel -- The presence of an inherent vowel, usually /a/ (in Myanmar: {a.} -- neither {a}, nor {a:}), in each characters is a hall-mark of most of the abugidas that I know. Because of its presence, each character is a syllable, and in order to form more syllables, the inherent vowel has to be killed at times. This involves a vowel-killer or virama {a.thut} (in Burmese).

UKT: An example of an artificial abugida in the East:
During the Chinese Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), Kublai Khan (1215-1294) asked Phagspa (a Tibetan Lama called Matidhvaja Sribhadra (1239-1280)) to design a new character to be used by the whole empire. Phagspa in turn modified the traditional Tibetian alphabet and gave birth to a new character called Phagspa characters. These characters were not well accepted, but served only as a way for Mongolians to learn Chinese characters and came to an end with the fall of the Yuan Dynasty. Adapted from: http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Mongolian-alphabet
Pagan (the Upper Burma kingdom) was invaded by the Chinese during the Yuan Dynasty, and my question is: Did the developers of the Myanmar script during the Pagan period knew about the script invented by Phagspa?

UKT: One of the differences between the Roman alphabet (script for writing English) and Myanmar abugida is the way in which the characters are arranged: abecedary (a list of the letters in an alphabet in the some kind of order). In English alphabet the first letter is a vowel, but the second is a consonant. The rest of vowels are imbedded randomly among the consonants. This is not so in an abugida where the vowels form a separate list, and the consonant letters are in a separate list. The consonant letters are arranged in an order based on phonetics.

UKT: An abugida like Myanmar is entirely suited to Bama (Burmese) in which the syllables are of CV type. In cases where a consonant is included in the coda (end position of the syllable), the inherent vowel of that consonant has to be killed. See Encoding Priciples. For easy reference, I have reproduced the relevant passages below.
Internet link: http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ch09.pdf (page 219)

"The writing systems that employ Devanagari and other Indic scripts constitute abugidas -- a cross between syllabic writing systems and alphabetic writing systems. The effective unit of these writing systems is the orthographic syllable, consisting of a consonant and vowel (CV) core and, optionally, one or more preceding consonants, with a canonical structure of (((C)C)C)V. The orthographic syllable need not correspond exactly with a phonological syllable, especially when a consonant cluster is involved, but the writing system is built on phonological principles and tends to correspond quite closely to pronunciation."

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3. Alphabet

C and V Alphabetic

UKT: One source of confusion in collecting materials for these articles is because different authors use different terms for the same item. Please remember:
The character of an abugida is an akshara, whereas, the character of an alphabet is a letter.

A writing system, in which consonants (C) and vowels (V) are represented equally by separate letters. Greek and Roman alphabets, Cyrillic alphabet, and some artificial alphabets such as Armenian that was invented in 405 and still in use today belong to this category. (UKT: See an artificial abugida.)
from: http://mlcr.nagaokaut.ac.jp/main1/signs_of_syllables.htm

Nearly all the sounds in a language can be represented by an appropriate consonant and vowel glyph. (UKT: Lawrence Lo had used the word "alphabet" which I have changed to "glyph". Clicking on his link brought up a page (a section from which is given below) in which you can see what he had meant by the word "alphabet". It is unfortunate that he had used the word "alphabet" very loosely.) However, just take a look at English spelling and you can almost feel we're back to logographic systems!
Internet links: Armenian | Avestan | Coptic | Cyrillic | Etruscan | Futhark | Georgian | Greek | Glagolitic | Korean Hangul | Latin | Ogham | Oscan | Venetic
from: from: http://www.ancientscripts.com/ws_types.html

UKT: The following is what Lawrence Lo had meant by his alphabet

"Believe it or not, the set of characters displayed before your eyes, the so-called Roman Alphabet, was the result of nearly 4000 years of transformation.

"While we can claim that it was ultimately the cuneiform script which in one way or another caused the appearance of writing systems around the Mediterranean, in the Middle East and in India, we choose a particular script, the Proto-Sinaitic, as the first recognizable form of the alphabet for reasons that will become evident later on.

"Also, notice that while we are most familiar with the Roman and Greek alphabets, there are many other alphabets and even "syllabaries" that belong in the same family of scripts. Therefore, I'll try to incorporate as much of these lesser known scripts as possible into this page."

You will notice that in presentation of an alphabet, we always follow a definite order. The same is true in abugida. However one of the differences between the Roman alphabet (script for writing English) and Myanmar abugida (akshara or {ak~hka.ra}) is the way in which the characters are grouped. English-script presents all the characters in a single group, whereas Myanmar-script presents the characters in two groups: the consonants and the vowels. The order within a group is known as abecedary (a list of the letters in an alphabet in the some kind of order). In English-abecedary, the first character is a vowel, but the second is a consonant. The rest of the vowels are imbedded randomly among the consonants. This is not so in an abugida. In the consonantal-abecedary, the characters are arranged in an order based on phonetics. The vowel-abecedary is also presented according to phonetics, however it is not as striking as the phonetical presentation of the consonants.

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4. Syllabary

Syllabic

Writing system in which each character represents a syllable, typically consisting either CV or V-type syllable: e.g. Japanese Katakana and Hiragana.
from: http://mlcr.nagaokaut.ac.jp/main1/signs_of_syllables.htm

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5. Logogram

Ideogram ?
Logographic and Logophonetic

A character in writing which represents complete word is called logogram. Examples are Chinese character, and early Egyptian hieroglyph and Sumerian cuneiform.
from: http://mlcr.nagaokaut.ac.jp/main1/signs_of_syllables.htm

A system of this kind uses a tremendous number of signs, each to represent a morpheme. A morpheme is the minimal unit in a language that carries some meaning. So, a logogram, a sign in a logographic system, may represent a word, or part of a word (like a suffix to denote a plural noun). Because of this, the number of signs could grow to staggering numbers like Chinese which has more than 10,000 signs (most of them unused in everyday usage).
Internet links: Chinese | Nushu | Indus (?) | Classic Yi | Jurchen | Khitan
from: http://www.ancientscripts.com/ws_types.html

(UKT: It seems that in some logographic systems, there are two types of signs, one denoting morphemes and the other denoting sound. As such, these should be called Logophonetic.)

This is sort of like stripped down versions of logographic systems. In essence, there are two types of signs, ones denoting morphemes and ones denoting sound. Most of the logo-phonetic are logo-syllabic, meaning that they denote syllables. An exception is Egyptian, whose phonetic signs denote consonants.
Internet links: Sumerian | Akkadian/Assyrian cuneiform | Hieroglyphic Luwian | Epi-Olmec | Maya | Zapotec (?) | Japanese | Egyptian Hieroglyphs
from: http://www.ancientscripts.com/ws_types.html

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6. Proto-Writing

This is the most rudimentary type of writing system. Examples of this type usually have small inventory of signs and large room for interpretation. They don't denote full running texts but instead serve more like mnemonic devices for the reader. However, they are writing systems because in some small way they do represent the underlying language, no matter how poorly.
Internet links: Aztec | Naxi | Mixtec
from: http://www.ancientscripts.com/ws_types.html

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7. Unknown

Sometimes it is possible to infer what type a script is by counting the number of signs it has. However, sometimes it is impossible because there aren't enough textual evidence to establish what the type is. The most famous example of this is the Phaistos disc

UKT: Though we rarely pay attention to the order in which the glyphs (or characters of a writing system), it is very important in the study of scripts. The following passage is from http://www.ancientscripts.com/alphabet.html
"The earliest example of an abecedary (a list of the letters in an alphabet in the some kind of order) was found in the city of Ugarit. This abecedary shows a total of 30 symbols used in the Ugaritic script. However, instead of being written in some kind of linear West Semitic, Proto-Sinaitic-derived form, the clay tablet that recorded this abecedary was written in some kind of cuneiform. While the letters in this script were made up of wedges and strokes, the forms of the characters were unrelated to any other cuneiform like Sumerian or Akkadian. There is some similarity, though, between the Ugaritic signs and linear West Semitic letters."
The word abecedary is not listed in AHTD.

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What about ideographic?

Quote from Lawrence K Lo, from: http://www.ancientscripts.com/ws_types.html

""You may have also encountered the term "ideographic". What it describes is a writing system whose symbols represent ideas. So, an ideographic writing system can be read by any person speaking any language given that they know which symbol in the system represents which idea. However, the concept of an "ideographic" writing system does not apply to any known writing system. Every writing system in the world replicates a language, so it encodes sounds and grammatical rules. Even at the most primitive level, in writing systems like Naxi or Mixtec, where extremely pictorial signs consist of the main bulk of the system, tricks to spell names using the rebus principle can still be detected.

"Furthermore, because of the nature of language, putting words together make more complex ideas. Since there is an infinite number of combination of words, there clearly cannot be sufficient signs to represent each idea in a language. So, the writing system must mimick the natural language by putting two signs together to form a compound that represents the more complex idea. However, when this happens, signs don't just get juxtaposed randomly, but instead in some predescribed way that follows the grammatical rule of the language. All of a sudden, this turns into a logographic system!

"(Lawrence Lo's) is that ideographic systems don't exist. It is a myth. Any writing system starts off as logographic and grows from there.

"This is, of course, just my opinion, but I feel that it rests relatively well on solid data from writing systems of the world."

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Footnotes

Footnote 01. For maps of script and language distribution in South Asia, and further documentation, see Joseph E. Schwartzberg (ed.), A Historical Atlas of South Asia (Chicago and London, 1978), p. 102 et passim. For a brief account of the evolution of Indian scripts, see Colin P. Masica, The Indo-Aryan Languages (Cambridge, 1991), chapter 6: “Writing Systems”.
Note Internet link 1 will take you to http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgadkw/members/transliteration/html/translit2.html
Go back.

Footnote 02. See W. Sidney Allen, Phonetics in Ancient India (London, 1953).
Note Internet link: 2 will take you to http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgadkw/members/transliteration/html/translit3.html
Go back.

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References

• An Elementary Pali Course, Ashin (Ven.) Narada Thera,
   http://www.vipassana.info/pali%20contents.htm#Introduction
• Ancient Scripts, Lawrence K Lo,
http://www.ancientscripts.com/phonetics.html
• Daniel Jones English Pronouncing Dictionary, 16 ed, (DJPD16).
   Cambridge University Press 2003.
• Devanagari Script, Achariya,
http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/sanskrit/lessons/Devan/intro.html
• Myanmar Thudda, volumes 1 to 5 (in Myanmar),
  Text-book Committee, Basic Education, Ministry of Education, Myanmar, ca. 1986
• Romanization table for Sanskrit and Prakrit,.Library of Congress,
http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/sanskrit.pdf
• Sanskrit and Sanscrito, Gabriel Pradiipaka and Andrés Muni, © 1999-2004
   http://www.sanskrit-sanscrito.com.ar/english/essentials/index4i.html
• South Asian Languages, The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0,
http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ch09.pdf
• Transliteration of Devanagari, D. Wujastyk, 1996Jun25
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgadkw/members/transliteration/html/translit.html
See my references: various sources.

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