The shaping of a writing system to make it suitable for a wide range of cultural purposes required other developments besides the invention of a system of characters for representing linguistic form. The morphemic unit is so fundamental to the reading process that some linguists have concluded that, for an orthography to be practical and efficient, it is more important to provide an invariant visual form for each meaningful unit than for each sound unit. Get kids back-to-school ready with Expedition: Learn. Old Persian cuneiform and the Meroitic script are a transitional stage from word-syllable or syllabic writing to consonantal writing. Alphabetic writing systems represent the phonological structure of the language. Rather, phonemes may be analyzed into sets of distinctive features. In Hangul, vowels are represented by long horizontal or vertical lines distinguished by small marks, while consonants are represented by two-dimensional signs that suggest the articulations involved: pairs of lines representing lips together, tongue touching the roof of the mouth, an open throat, and the like. Abjads / Consonant alphabets Abjads, or consonant alphabets, represent consonants only, or consonants plus some vowels. The failure to notice the intimate relation between the morphophonemic structure of the language and the type of orthography has led some scholars to underestimate the efficiency of consonantal writing systems and, perhaps, to overestimate the centrality of the invention of the alphabet to the evolution of Western culture. This evolution continued through the invention of printing and the invention of type fonts (see history of typography).
…Semitic scripts, following Sampson, as consonantal writing systems. 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. It is a script particularly suited to representing a language in which morphological differences are marked in phonological differences; it is less useful for a language like Chinese, in which one syllable represents a large number of morphemes. The smallest pronounceable segment of speech is a syllable, but a syllable may be analyzed into the distinctive underlying constituents called phonemes.
By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica. Featural writing systems analyze the sounds described as consonants and vowels into their shared and distinguishing features. These relations may be depicted as follows: 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. But in Semitic languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic, the absence of characters representing vowels is much less serious, because in these languages vowel differences generally do not distinguish morphemes.
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