4/7/2014 Writing system - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Predominant scripts at the national level, with selected regional and minority

scripts.

Alphabet Latin

Cyrillic&Latin Greek

Georgian Armenian

Logographic+Syllabic

Hanzi (L) Kana (2S)+Kanji(L) Hangul(Featural-

alphabetic S)+limited Hanja(L)

Abjad Arabic&Latin

Hebrew

Abugida N, S Indic Ethiopic Thaana Canadian

Syllabic

Writing systemFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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A writing systemis an organized,regular method(typicallystandardized) ofinformation storageand transfer for thecommunication ofmessages(expressingthoughts or ideas) ina language byvisually (or possiblytactilely) encodingand decoding(known as writingand reading) with aset of signs orsymbols, bothknown generally ascharacters (with theset collectively

referred to as a 'script').[1] These characters, often including letters and numbers, are usuallyrecorded onto a durable medium such as paper or electronic storage/display, although non-durable methods may also be used, such as writing in sand or skywriting.

The general attributes of writing systems can be placed into broad categories such as alphabets,syllabaries, or logographies. Any particular system can have attributes of more than one category.In the alphabetic category, there is a standard set of letters (basic written symbols or graphemes)of consonants and vowels that encode based on the general principle that the letters (or letterpair/groups) represent phonemes (basic significant sounds) of the spoken language. A syllabarytypically correlates a symbol to a syllable (which can be a pairing or group of phonemes, and areconsidered the building blocks of words). In a logography, each character represents a word,morpheme or semantic unit (which themselves can be pairings or groups of syllables). Othercategories include abjads (which is an alphabet where vowels are not indicated at all) andabugidas, also called alphasyllabaries (where vowels are shown by diacritics or other modificationof consonants). A system's category can often be determined just by identifying the number ofsymbols used within the system. Alphabets typically use a set of 20-to-35 symbols to fully expressa language, whereas syllabaries can have 80-to-100, and logographies can have severalhundreds of symbols.

Most systems will typically have an ordering of its symbol elements so that groups of them can becoded into larger clusters like words or acronyms (generally lexemes), giving rise to many morepossibilities (permutations) in meanings than the symbols can convey by themselves. Systems willalso enable the concatenation (a "stringing together") of these smaller groupings (sometimesreferred to by the generic term 'character strings') in order to enable a full expression of the