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Asemi-syllabary is awriting system that behaves partly as analphabet and partly as asyllabary. The main group of semi-syllabic writing are thePaleohispanic scripts of ancient Spain, a group of semi-syllabaries that transform redundantplosive consonants of thePhoenician alphabet intosyllabograms.
Out of confusion, the term is sometimes applied to a different alphabetic typology known asabugida, alphasyllabary or neosyllabary, but for the purposes of this article it will be restricted to scripts where some characters are alphabetic and others are syllabic.
ThePaleohispanic semi-syllabaries are a family of scripts developed in theIberian Peninsula at least from the 5th century BCE – possibly from the 7th century. Some researchers conclude that their origin lies solely with thePhoenician alphabet, while others believe theGreek alphabet also had a role.Paleohispanic semi-syllabaries are typologically unusual because their syllabic and alphabetic components are equilibrated: they behave as asyllabary for thestop consonants and as analphabet for other consonants and vowels. In the syllabic portions of the scripts, each stop-consonant sign stood for a different combination of consonant and vowel, so that the written form ofga displayed no resemblance toge. In addition, the southern original format did not distinguishvoicing in these stops, so thatga stood for both /ga/ and /ka/, but one variant of thenortheastern Iberian script, the older one according to the archaeological contexts, distinguishedvoicing in the stop consonants by adding a stroke to the glyphs for thealveolar (/d/~/t/) andvelar (/g/~/k/) syllables.
The Tartessian or Southwestern script had a special behaviour: although the letter used to write a stop consonant was determined by the following vowel, the following vowel was also written. Some scholars treat Tartessian as a redundant semi-syllabary, others treat it as a redundant alphabet. Notably,Etruscan and earlyLatindid something similar with C, K, and Q, using K before a, Q before o and u, and C elsewhere, for both /k/ and /g/.
Other scripts combine attributes of alphabet and syllabary. One of these isbopomofo (orzhuyin), a phonetic script devised for transcribing certainvarieties of Chinese. Bopomofo includes several systems, such asMandarin Phonetic Symbols forMandarin Chinese,Taiwanese Phonetic Symbols forTaiwanese Hokkien andHakka, andSuzhou Phonetic Symbols forWu Chinese. Bopomofo is not divided into consonants and vowels, but intoonsets andrimes. Initial consonants and "medials" are alphabetic, but the nucleus and coda are combined as in syllabaries. That is, a syllable likekan is writtenk-an, andkwan is writtenk-u-an; the vowel is not written distinct from a final consonant.Pahawh Hmong is somewhat similar, but the rime is written before the initial; there are two letters for each rime, depending on which tone diacritic is used; and the rime /āu/ and the initial /k/ are not written except in disambiguation.
Old Persian cuneiform was somewhat similar to the Tartessian script, in that some consonant letters were unique to a particular vowel, some were partially conflated, and some simple consonants, but all vowels were written regardless of whether or not they were redundant.
The practice ofplene writing inHittite cuneiform resembles the Old Persian situation somewhat and may be interpreted such that Hittite cuneiform was already evolving towards a quasi-alphabetic direction as well.
The modernBamum script is essentially CV-syllabic, but does not have enough glyphs for all the CV syllables of the language. The rest are written by combining CV and V glyphs, making these effectively alphabetic.
TheJapanese kana syllabary occasionally acts as a semi-syllabary, for example when spelling syllables that do not exist in the standard set, like トゥ,tu, or ヴァ,va. In such cases, the first character functions as the consonant and the second as the vowel.