Posted by cav on November 12, 2005 at 09:44:44:
In Reply to: on beyond abecedaries.... posted by giveawayboy on November 12, 2005 at 03:30:15:
: Leaving abecedaries behind, I want to know the difference between an alphabet and a syllabary. Any takers?
An alphabet (a term which incidentally is not much different than "abecedary" in origin...alpha, beta) is a set of symbols that represent the basic sounds of a language.
A syllabary is a set of symbols that represent syllables. For example, in Japanese and other languages of certain types, like Cherokee, and a form of Greek, they don't separate the consonant sounds from the vowels. We don't do this in English because we have too many sounds and the combinations get kind of complex. We'd need distinct symbols for sounds such as "bag", "seen", etc. And I imagine dipthongs would make it even more tricky, like "the". In a syllabic language like Japanese these sound combinations don't exist. So to represent foreign words they have to change them to バグ "ba-gu", シーン "shii-n" (the dash here elongates the vowel with no stopping of breath), and ザ "za".
Another system of writing uses logograms or ideograms. These are sysmbols that represent meanings and not sounds. This is like Chinese, which was also imported to Japan and adapted. Thus the symbol 子 represents the meaning "child" and 木 represents "tree" or "wood". This system gets very complex and can be difficult because it doesn't tell the reader how to SAY the word, it only conveys the meaning. And meanings can have different pronunciations based on context. The symbols can be combined to make words such as 子犬 "puppy" made from "child" and "dog". Or more complexly, 休 "rest" made from "man" and "tree" as in, "a man leaning against a tree is at rest."
We can obviously see how the ideographic system was developed from pictograms, but there is debate about how the alphabetic system came about. I mean there had to be some logical reason for assigning certain symbols to certain sounds. I saw an article by one researcher proposing that it originated as representations of the way the sound is made, mouth shapes, breath flow, tongue position, etc. This is logical to me. He even worked out a speculative origin using very early forms of our own letters. For example, "B" composed of two lips pressed together, which you must do to make the sound. Of course in the original shapes the letters weren't drawn as we see them so the connections may have been clearer at that point. Interesting.
And just for the record, I found alot of this information on the internet, Wikipedia had great definitions for alphabet and syllabary that I paraphrased above.