Talk:Syllabary

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This page mentions (and has a broken link to) the "ethiopic language". I assume it is referring to Amharic - since it is the predominant official language in Ethipia - though it may also be referring to Ge'ez.

You are on the right track. Although "Ethiopic" is an umbrella term including Amharic, Ge'ez and Trigri.

The article says "It would be rather cumbersome to write the English word extra in CV syllables." To me, "CV" means "curriculum vitae". Obviously it means something else here. Whoever wrote that should explain. Michael Hardy 23:27 Jan 13, 2003 (UTC)

consonant-vowel would fit. Matthew Woodcraft

I had already surmised that, but it would have been inappropriate to inform the author of the page of my surmise. His or her way of writing it is uncouth. Michael Hardy 23:43 Jan 13, 2003 (UTC)

The paragraph...

The Indian languages and the Ethiopian languages have alphabets (called abugidas by some scholars) that look like syllabaries to western eyes, but are not. They both use separate consonant and vowel signs. Most often, the vowel sign is added to the consonant sign which may give the impression of a syllabic unit.

...stands in direct contrast to the fairly learned looking [1]. I suppose that the term syllabery is used sometimes to refer to such languages. The paragraph in the article is wrong to some extent - actually, the consonants such these languages carry a vowel, in that writing the so-called consonant 'k' actually results in the complete syllable 'ka', which is changed to another complete syllable 'ke', 'ko', etc. by the addition of a vowel suffix. --prat 05:38, 2004 Feb 23 (UTC)

Hrrm, writing systems cleans this up .. syllabaries "have one distinct symbol per possible syllable, and the signs for each syllable have no systematic graphic similarity". The above source labels languages with systematic graphic similarity between syllables as syllabaries, and is therefore incorrect. --prat 05:42, 2004 Feb 23 (UTC)

[edit] English Language

Actually, it seems that one would need a syllable for 'ba' and a syllable for 'g' to write 'bag'. In the long run it would be very simple to write a syllabary for English if one follows this pattern. In other words, ban, bad, bag, bat, barrio, bastard, Bantu, barrister would use one first syllabary element and ball, bought, balk, born, boring, borscht, Boston, boron, Baltimore, baud, Baltic would use another. Bat, bought, fought and Crete would use one ending element and fog, bag, grog, frog, gig, big, log, brag, tug and brig would use another. It is very simple; I don't know if these examples are American English as opposed to British English; perhaps the syllabaries would differ. I suppose regional differences would show up easily in a syllabary system. Why isn't a syllabary constucted already? --McDogm 00:55, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It's possible, but I don't think it's "simple", and it would require the reader to learn more characters than currently for reading a text, without giving any other true advantage. (Basically, Japanese has twice as many phonetic characters than English, but only half as many sounds.) If you're suggesting English ortography should be more phonetic, it could easily be done with an alphabet, as proven by the International Phonetic Alphabet. 惑乱 分からん 17:12, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Also, what you're proposing doesn't really seem as a true syllabary, but more of a syllabic-like alphabet, similar to hangul. 惑乱 分からん 14:24, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Syllabaries most often begin as simplified logograms?

On this article the image on top says that Syllabaries most often begin as simplified logograms. What makes anyone say that? As far as I can tell only Japanese hiragana, katakana and Nü Shu have been invented in this way. Meanwhile all of the other Syllabaries I have found so far were either invented by a single man, missionary, or developed independently. I really don’t see how most of the Syllabaries on earth begin as simplified logograms when only 3 of the 15 Syllabaries I have seen so far have began that way. Are there some other Syllabaries that began this way that Idont know about?--66.176.63.70 20:16, 9 November 2007 (UTC)