A symbol in a syllabary, called asyllabogram, typically represents an (optional)consonant sound (simpleonset) followed by avowel sound (nucleus)—that is, a CV (consonant+vowel) or V syllable—but otherphonographic mappings, such as CVC, CV- tone, and C (normally nasals at the end of syllables), are also found in syllabaries.[citation needed]
Eachsyllable (σ) branches intoconsonantalonset (ω) andrime (ρ) that is divided intonucleus (ν) andcoda (κ), non-/supra-segmental parameters liketone (τ) affect the syllable as a whole
Awriting system using a syllabary iscomplete when it covers all syllables in the corresponding spoken language without requiring complexorthographic / graphemic rules, likeimplicit codas (⟨C1V⟩ ⇒ /C1VC2/),silent vowels (⟨C1V1+C2V2⟩ ⇒ /C1V1C2/) orecho vowels (⟨C1V1+C2V1⟩ ⇒ /C1V1C2/). This loosely corresponds toshallow orthographies in alphabetic writing systems.[citation needed]
True syllabograms are those that encompass all parts of a syllable, i.e., initial onset, medial nucleus and final coda, but since onset and coda are optional in at least some languages, there aremiddle (nucleus),start (onset-nucleus),end (nucleus-coda) andfull (onset-nucleus-coda) true syllabograms. Most syllabaries only feature one or two kinds of syllabograms and form other syllables by graphemic rules.
Syllabograms, hence syllabaries, arepure,analytic orarbitrary if they do not share graphic similarities that correspond to phonic similarities, e.g. the symbol forka does not resemble in any predictable way the symbol forki, nor the symbol fora. Otherwise, they aresynthetic, if they vary by onset, rime, nucleusor coda, orsystematic, if they vary by all of them.[citation needed]Some scholars, e.g., Daniels,[1] reserve the general term for analytic syllabaries and invent other terms (abugida,abjad) as necessary.
The contemporary Japanese language uses two syllabaries together calledkana (in addition to the non-syllabic systemskanji andromaji), namelyhiragana andkatakana, which were developed around 800 CE. Because Japanese uses mainly CV (consonant + vowel) syllables, a syllabary is well suited to write the language. As in many syllabaries, vowel sequences and final consonants are written with separate glyphs, so that bothatta andkaita are written with three kana: あった (a-t-ta) and かいた (ka-i-ta). It is therefore more correctly called amoraic writing system, with syllables consisting of two moras corresponding to two kana symbols.
Languages that use syllabaries today tend to have simplephonotactics, with a predominance of monomoraic (CV) syllables. For example, the modernYi script is used to write languages that have no diphthongs or syllable codas; unusually among syllabaries, there is a separate glyph for every consonant-vowel-tone combination (CVT) in the language (apart from one tone which is indicated with a diacritic).
Few syllabaries have glyphs for syllables that are not monomoraic, and those that once did have simplified over time to eliminate that complexity. For example, the Vai syllabary originally had separate glyphs for syllables ending in a coda(doŋ), a long vowel(soo), or a diphthong(bai), though not enough glyphs to distinguish all CV combinations (some distinctions were ignored). The modern script has been expanded to cover all moras, but at the same time reduced to exclude all other syllables. Bimoraic syllables are now written with two letters, as in Japanese: diphthongs are written with the help of V orhV glyphs, and the nasal codas will be written with the glyph forŋ, which can form a syllable of its own in Vai.
InLinear B, which was used to transcribeMycenaean Greek, a language with complex syllables, complex consonant onsets were either written with two glyphs or simplified to one, while codas were generally ignored, e.g.,ko-no-so forΚνωσόςKnōsos,pe-ma forσπέρμαsperma.
The Cherokee syllabary generally uses dummy vowels for coda consonants, but also has a segmental grapheme for /s/, which can be used both as a coda and in an initial /sC/ consonant cluster.
The languages ofIndia andSoutheast Asia, as well as theEthiopian Semitic languages, have a type ofalphabet called anabugida oralphasyllabary. In these scripts, unlike in pure syllabaries, syllables starting with the same consonant are largely expressed withgraphemes regularly based on common graphical elements. Usually each character representing a syllable consists of several elements which designate the individual sounds of that syllable.
In the 19th century these systems were calledsyllabics, a term which has survived in the name ofCanadian Aboriginal syllabics (also an abugida).
In a true syllabary there may be graphic similarity between characters that share a common consonant or vowel sound, but it is not systematic or at all regular. For example, the characters forka ke ko in Japanesehiragana – か け こ – have no similarity to indicate their common /k/ sound. Compare this withDevanagari script, an abugida, where the characters forka ke ko are क के को respectively.
English, along with many other Indo-European languages like German and Russian, allows for complex syllable structures, making it cumbersome to write English words with a syllabary. A "pure" English syllabary would require over 10,000 separate glyphs for each possible syllable[3] (e.g., separate glyphs for "half" and "have"). However, such pure systems are rare. A workaround to this problem, common to several syllabaries around the world (includingEnglish loanwords in Japanese), is to add aparagogic dummy vowel, as if thesyllable coda were a second syllable:ha-fu for "half" andha-vu for "have".
TheKorean scriptHangul has been described as a syllabic alphabet as it combines the features of alphabetic and syllabic writing systems.[4][5] Korean letters are written in syllabic blocks with the alphabetic letters arranged in two dimensions. For example,Seoul is written as서울, notㅅㅓㅇㅜㄹ.[6]
