Linguistics - Writing Systems
Refactored from Linguistics Notes Meta
- Aka orthography
- Some definitions
- graphemes are symbols
- glyphs are written symbols like letters
- diacritics are glyphs added to another more basic glyph like accents
- ligatures are glyphs combined together, for example ae becomes æ and et becomes &
- Types of scripts:
- Ideographic: symbols to represent ideas, but not necessarily words or phonemes
- Logographic: when words or morphemes are represented by glyphs. For example Chinese.
- Syllabaries: like Japanese kana, which uses glyphs to represent syllables
- Abjad: like Pitman shorthand in which vowels are represented by diacritics if needed
- Abugida: like abjada but the vowels are required
- Alphabet: like latin alphabets
- Writing directionality
- sinistrodextral: left to right
- dextrosinistral: right to left
- vertical
- boustrophedonical, this is when the direction of reading alternates
^[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boustrophedon.png]
- There are tradeoffs between the script types