История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 25 стр.

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UNIT 4

TYPES OF WRITING SYSTEMS

A writing system consists of a set of visible marks, forms, or structures

called characters or graphs that are related to some structure in the linguistic

system. Roughly speaking, if a character represents a meaningful unit, such as a

morpheme or a word, the orthography is called a logographic writing system; if it

represents a syllable, it is called a syllabic writing system; if a segment of a

syllable, it is called a consonantal writing system or an unvocalized syllabary; and

if a phoneme, it is called an alphabetic system.

While relatively pure examples of these different types of script are known,

most writing systems that have been used for general purposes combine properties

of more than one type.

General writing systems all analyze the linguistic form into constituents of

meaning or sound. Chinese script is primarily a logographic script; each word or

morpheme is represented by a single graph or character. Two words, even if they

sound exactly the same, will be represented by entirely dissimilar characters. But

as the number of distinguishable words in a language can run into the tens of

thousands (written English has a recorded vocabulary of some 1,500,000 words),

the number of logographic characters to be memorized is extremely large.

Syllabaries provide a distinctive symbol for each distinct syllable. A syllable

is a unit of speech composed of a vowel sound or a combination of consonant and

vowel sounds; the sounds pa, pe, pi, po, pu are different syllables and are easily

distinguished in a word. The word paper has two syllables, pa-per. Syllables are

the most readily distinguishable units of speech, and consequently, the earliest of

the sound-based, or phonographic, writing systems are syllabic. The number of

syllables in a language, while differing considerably from language to language, is

always quite large, hence some hundreds of graphs may be required to make a

functioning syllabary. Even such writing systems are far from explicit, for any