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)

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)

English Reading and the Teaching of Reading

I have not been able to find a suitable place to ask this question, or make this suggestion, but the lists of syllables in the entry above tempted me to write it here. I am a former English teacher, now a psychologist, and have some familiarity with linguistics, and a lot of familiarity with learning theory. What I am interested is not a syllabary, per se, but it would teach in terms of syllables. It seems to me that the teaching of reading would be facilitated by lists of English syllables and minimal pairs of syllables. A child or new reader could learn all the words or syllables ending in, for example, "ab". They would be bab, cab, dab, fab, gab, hab, jab, and so on. Some of these are words, and some are contained in other words, but I am inclined to think that learning the simple ones first, (the three letter ones,) would give a student a sense of the logic of spelling, and command of a great many simple words. Of course, there are a lot of four letter words in English, and familiarity with all of the phonetically simple ones would be a very strong base for being a proficient reader and speller. I am not aware of any system which would use such a sequence to teach reading and spelling. More advanced lists might be such things as all the "ite" words and syllables -- bite, kite, mite, site, ... and "ight" words or syllables -- fight, light, night, right, tight, wight (now obsolete), wright, or "ought" words or syllables -- bought, fought, thought. Some of these lists would be short, but that would make them easy to learn. Consider the syllable "cience" and the words efficience, proficience, science, ... Not many words in the same list as "yacht" -- there are many oddities in English, but it helps to classify them, as oddities. I would appreciate being redirected to sites where such an idea is developed or considered. Janice Vian [email protected] Janice Vian, Ph.D. (talk) 02:06, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Since you seem to be interested in methods of teaching how to write, the syllable article, i.e. phonology, probably isn’t the best place to start, but I guess you’re looking for something like reverse dictionary, maybe combined with features of a phonetic dictionary. — Christoph Päper 06:39, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

I am more interested in teaching how to read, and the use of lists, such as I have suggested above, seem to me to allow for a playful and enjoyable way to learn the phonetics of English, and to rapidly give the learner a command of a huge number of words. Since the lists are intended to be essentially an exhaustive inventory of English syllables, the spelling of multi-syllabic words ought to seem logical and straightforward. At the same time, the many exceptions and oddities of spelling, for which English is famous, are easily identified as exceptions to the general phonetic patterns, which should tend to lessen the confusion they create. I would like to know if there is any program for teaching literacy which makes use of these ideas. Janice Vian, Ph.D. (talk) 16:09, 7 July 2011 (UTC) I have just revisited this page, and I am still interested in a phonetic, syllable-based method of teaching reading. Janice Vian, Ph.D. (talk) 22:31, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

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)

Derivation Of Katakana Characters Pictures

Hi,

From the original:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Katakana_origine.png

to

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Katakana_origine.svg

I noticed a few mistakes:

The last (bottom) stroke in the top radical in the kana for "sa" in the svg is highlighted red. That is incorrect

"te" also has a problem: the length of the descending left stroke between the horizontal strokes are highlighted red. This is also incorrect. Can you amend the svg, upload, replace, delete the links to the files in the corresponding articles (wikipedia and anywhere else), and copypasta? Thanks.174.3.103.39 (talk) 05:12, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Specifity of intro section

User:Kwamikagami lately added this text to the introduction:

In a syllabary, there is no systematic similarity between the symbols which represent syllables with the same consonant or vowel. That is, the symbol for ka does not resemble in any predictable way the symbol for ki, nor the symbol for a.

The reference cited is Daniels / Bright. These scholars, who are quite influential but not beyond critique, limit syllabaries to this definition indeed, but other authors disagree (and subsequently don’t use nor need names like abugida). Therefore this text should not appear in the introductory section. When I get the time (and back to my desk) I will move that part and add more references, unless someone does so earlier. — Christoph Päper 15:38, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

But that would have nothing to do with abugidas. If you don't use a specific term like abugida, those are just alphabets, not syllabaries. 21:31, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

That’s just a side note. Nevertheless, scholars who group scripts or writing systems by types of read-write entities instead of their original phonologic level of analysis do consider as syllabaries everything that Daniels / Bright label abugidas. — Christoph Päper 12:38, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

Comparison to Latin alphabet section

The second reference on this page (for the fact English has well over 10,000 possible syllable) links to a quora answer which itself has a broken article. At the very least, this should be replaced with a better source.

But is this section even worth saving? Almost half of the section is just listing different English monosyllabic words beginning with the letter B. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.113.158.182 (talk) 12:53, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

Sources and References

Seems like a lack of sources and references. One of the sources is a Quora entry. Dubious. MythicalAlien (talk) 01:58, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

Why does this website resemble this Wiki page? https://www.premierdentalclinic.co.uk/site/7ae57f-what-is-syllabary — Preceding unsigned comment added by JesseA123 (talk • contribs) 03:09, 26 October 2020 (UTC)

Disadvantages of an alphabet

The last paragraph is very culturally ignorant and in no way can Quora serve as a source, everyone could make up an answer just for it to be included on Wikipedia. Listing a bunch of words is not comparing, it just ridiculously implies the inefficiency of a syllabary in general and the alphabet's superiority. Someone should add something similiar to the article on alphabets. How about mentioning that alphabetic scripts use space very inefficiently? Long words span horizontally, screwing up table layouts. It often wastes more paper since sounds cannot be stacked and are expressed through several letters. --92.75.195.124 (talk) 02:46, 15 March 2017 (UTC)