The smallest pronounceable segment of speech is a syllable, but a syllable may be analyzed into the distinctive underlying constituents called phonemes. This information should not be considered complete, up to date, and is not intended to be used in place of a visit, consultation, or advice of a legal, medical, or any other professional. 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. The number of syllables in a language, while differing considerably from language to language, is always quite large; hence, some hundreds of graphs may be required to make a functioning syllabary. The syllable pa is produced by passing a column of air through the vocal cords, an action that constitutes the vocalic element, bounded at the outset by sudden release of air through the lips, an action that constitutes the consonantal element. Such writing is of little use for conveying new messages, since there is no convention for decoding them and to that extent it cannot be a general writing system. While such a script would be greatly limited in explicitness or completeness for a language with complex syllable structure such as English, it is relatively complete for Semitic languages in which vowel differences are rarely contrastive. Some scholars consider consonantal writing to be also alphabetic, since the symbol (grapheme) in consonantal writing generally corresponds to one speech sound. Chinese script is primarily a logographic script; each word or morpheme is represented by a single graph or character. The reading of such a script would rely upon the reader’s prior knowledge and ability to work from the context, along with some guesswork.

General writing systems all analyze the linguistic form into constituents of meaning or sound.

It therefore relies upon both word-based and sound-based principles. 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. Tag: consonantal writing.

The Semitic abjad! For the Chinese language a logographic system is more efficient.

Finally, a writing system such as Hangul, based upon the articulatory features that underlie the phoneme (such as voicing and place of articulation), is called a featural writing system. Conversely, alphabets often provide different graphic representations for homophones (words that sound identical but have different meanings) the more clearly to distinguish their meanings, as in meat, meet, mete; pain, pane; be, bee. No orthography is a pure system. Consonantal writing systems, as the name implies, represent the consonantal value of a syllable while ignoring the vocalic element. And to exploit the aesthetic properties of the writing system, artistic forms of writing were developed (see calligraphy). The achievement of the alphabet is to analyze the syllable into its underlying consonant and vowel constituents. Such scripts have graphs for consonant sounds but not…. Such a system, therefore, would represent the syllables pa, pe, pi, po, pu with a single character. 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. Consonantal writing systems, as the name implies, represent the consonantal value of a syllable while ignoring the vocalic element. So, for example, the common spelling for the root photo is preserved in the words photograph and photography even though they are pronounced somewhat differently.

As the phonological system is organized around some dozen such features, an efficient script can be constructed out of 24 basic graphs. All content on this website, including dictionary, thesaurus, literature, geography, and other reference data is for informational purposes only. The phonemes represented by the letters n and d share the feature of the tongue touching the alveolar ridge above the upper teeth. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica. A syllabary such as Linear B, the Mycenaean script dating from about 1400 bce, would have a graph for each of those syllables. Such a system, therefore, would represent the syllables pa, pe, pi, po, pu with a single character.

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