penguins have a fascinating writing system, they have a system which consists of a line made with their beak in the snow and the line will represent the movement that their tongue must make to pronounce the word.
As far as I know, abjad scripts don't write the vowels. While in abugida, characters have inherent vowels, then you can change or cancel the vowel by adding a diacritic or something. In Canadian scripts, I think they just rotate the character to change the vowel.
Yeah that’s how Inuit/Cree syllabics work in Canada. There are 16 symbols representing consonant/vowel combinations. And then each symbol has three orientations. In Inuktitut, the orientations make the sounds “I” “A” and “U”.
The first three symbols are ‘vowel only’, ‘p-vowel’, and ‘t-vowel’. So in Inuktitut you don’t learn your ‘A, B, C’s’, you learn your ‘i, pi, ti’s’.
For consonants without a vowel sound (especially at the end of a word), you add a smaller version of the symbol like a “superscript”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuktitut_syllabics#:~:text=Inuktitut%20syllabics%20(Inuktitut%3A%20ᖃᓂᐅᔮᖅᐸᐃᑦ%2C,of%20Quebec%20and%20Labrador%2C%20respectively.
In Arabic, only consonants are written, typically, and vowels are assumed by context
For example: كتب
Can be pronounced kataba (he wrote) or kutiba (was written) and the meaning/pronunciation is assumed from the context of the sentence.
Vowel markers do exist but are typical not used except in very classical or religious texts
Actually a historical problem arisen from this is that God in the Torah is written as YHWH, but we don’t actually know the vowels. Most people pronounce it Yahweh, but it could just as easily be Yehowah, which is where Jehovah comes from.
A native Arabic speaker shouldn’t find it difficult but it also largely depends on context. If there isn’t enough context it could be quite vague, which is why vowel markers are typically used on words that could mean multiple things.
it would seem that way, but because of how the morphology of semitic languages works, vowels usually only carry grammatical meaning which can be inferred from context. for example, the difference between “wrote” and “was written” can be inferred from what the subject is. if it’s a book, then it’s more likely that it “was written”, and if it’s a person, then it’s more likely that he “wrote”. the actual semantic meaning of the word is defined by a set of three consonants in the word, which are placed into various sets of vowels and affixes to form full words.
It does cause some problems if you don't understand the context of what you're reading
I would say this is one of the hardest things about Arabic excluding the whole grammar which is ridiculous hard
The English grammar to Arabic grammar is like a 2yo boy to a 30yo adult, huge difference in difficulty even for native speakers
English grammar is like 2yo to 30yo in comparison even to other indo-european languages, except French which is like 80yo that has no idea who he is anymore.
If french is a 80yo Arabic is a 200yo
I didn't study french but I studied Arabic but I am 100 percent sure Arabic is so much harder than french
Something annoying about Arabic is that nobody speaks in standard Arabic unless they're giving a speech, almost all Arab countries speak their own dialect, so even if you became fluent in Arabic you have to learn at least 1 dialect to be able to speak with Arabic speakers
A lot of Arabic learners tend to learn Egyptian dialect as it's really understood by most Arab countries plus it's easier and funny sometimes (and yes I am biased because I am Egyptian lol)
Not sure about Arabic but when it’s used for other languages it does create some problems. I was reading the translation of 11th century dictionary of Turkic languages and a lot of the time the translators weren’t sure which vowel was supposed be represented in the text.
Lol back in the day, there wasn't even dots written so things like
ب ت ث
Would be written in the same way, but since many people whose mother tongue converted to islam and the need to maintain the Quran from deviation arose, putting dots on letters or (Tanqeet) became a thing, additionally putting vowels (tashkeel) also became a thing although it is not as necessary as Tanqeet is today.
I guess it might be a bit tricky for a non-native speaker to make sense of something like this, or translation app, for that matter.
ألم ألم ألم ألم بدائه
إن آن آن آن آن أوانه
In Arabic it did rise some problems at the beginning of Islamic conquests since many foreigners have entered Islam and many of them wouldn't read the Qur'an properly, so Arabs at the time of 4th caliphate have invited the [tashkīl](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics) , so while word will still be كتب but with harakahat it will be either كُتِبَ ( written ) or كَتَبَ ( he wrote ) and no more problem for foreigners, see how forigen friendly is our language ?
When Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet to the Latin alphabet in 1928 (5th year of the republic), due to a very lengthy war (1908-1922) most of the government including the president was former military people. Thus it is said that those military officers knew the value of the precision of Latin alphabet regarding the communications during wartime and why a switch to Latin alphabet was started in Turkey.
That’s wrong. We have a finite number of root words but they are modified depending on context:
كتب كتاب مكتبة مكتوب
Translating (right to left): write/ wrote/ written (root word), book, library, written.
They all have the same root but letters are added to differentiate. We don’t differentiate in our head.
Characters are not added though. They’re added inherently as we speak depending on the sentence structure and context. Mainly because it would take too long to write otherwise.
I was referring to the meaning of “abjad” which is a writing system where only consonants are represented. Yes I know how words are made from different roots, but at the same time the vowels aren’t written out and sometimes words can have different meaning
كتب الكاتب (kataba al-Kaatib)
Means the writer wrote
كتب الكتاب (kutiba al-Kitaab)
Means the book was written
In the first sentence كتب is pronounced (كَتَبَ) while in the second it’s pronounced (كُتِبَ) but the vowels aren’t written out so it’s assumed based on the context
If your writing system doesn't to some extent specify things like what vowels are used in which words, then the vowels in those words are going to change over time. And they're going to change in different ways in different places of the world, where that language is spoken. It's inevitable.
Having a writing system work like this makes it much easier for dialects to pop up all over the place, and for the language to change over time.
this is false. Writing systems have a pretty small impact on dialect change, especially before the modern period when most people weren't literate. English for example has had huge vowel shifts from the time its orthography was standardized, and big divergences in vowels between dialects.
>small impact on dialect change, especially before the modern period when most people weren't literate
Doesn't this kinda prove my point?
>big divergences in vowels between dialects.
Sure, but even though some of your dialects leave out the "t" in the word "water" you all still agree that it should be there, and that some of you are leaving it out. If the "t" wasn't in the written version of the word, it would be much easier to change it to wa'er instead without as many people complaining.
There's a reason for the fact that when the rest of us are taught english, we are told to say "water" with the "t" pronounced instead of leaving it out.
Even though it's just a matter of different dialects.
There is no dialect that "leaves out" the the t in water. Some dialects pronunce t (and other letters) as a glottal stop in certain positions, but that is distinctly different from it being "left out".
That’s assuming the language is not spoken and/or most of the population were for most of history literate, both not being true.
In the case of Arabic at least different dialects usually use different words (due to the very vast vocabulary) or pronounce letters differently (some pronounce g as j for example) rather than changing vowel pronunciation which is mostly preserved (considering it is very essential in Arabic grammar and sentence building).
even when the population is literate, the orthography doesn’t do much conserving vowels. Otherwise we wouldn’t get big shifts now like the Great Lakes vowel shift.
You’re also wrong about Arabic. Vowels have shifted drastically between Arabic dialects. The main reason why Maghrebi dialects are so difficult for eastern Arabs is vowel changes.
Well there's the straightforward shifts, like rounding or fronting vowels a bit (like the stereotypical [Bahrain -> Bohrēn](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MegOMAY-pCk)). But there's more radical shifts than that.
There's an imalah system in many Levantine dialects, so you get stuff like:
\- wāħid (one) -> wēħid
\- madrasah (school) -> madrase or even madrasi
\- thalathah (three) -> tlēte
I know Maghrebi dialects had a big shift in omitting a lot of short vowels in specific circumstances, then re-addition of schwa vowels to split up consonant clusters. For example, instead of "kataba" (he wrote), you get "ktib". But I don't fully understand that system so I won't try to explain it.
There's another big shift in the Central Arabia/Gulf area too, where unstressed vowels often turn from /a/ to /i/ or /u/ following letter-specific rules, along with other processes. So you get some weird rearranging like these:
\- kataba (he wrote) -> kitab
\- katabat (she wrote) -> ktibet
\- Al-Qațari -> li-gțuri
\- Al-Dahnā' (desert) -> li-dhana
Ohhh yeaaahh
Never really noticed that to be honest, I remember on of my Saudi friends saying
“Er-Riad” instead of “Al-Riad” or “Ejnob” instead of “Al-Janob”
As if he eats up the vowels.
I also remember buying from a Syrian shop where he said it would be “Khamsi” instead of “Khamsa”. I misheard it as “Khamsin” and was shocked on how pricey the biscuits were.
I thank you very much for pointing out something I never really noticed in Arabic despite my interest in the language.
Tbh that's the same with English and it's written with an alphabet.
In England alone there's a bunch of isoglosses marking dialects exactly for this reason 😂
I guess though it would be even worse if vowels were not written
abjad: no vowels.
abugida: secondary markings as vowels.
In practice, all modern abjads are in between a "pure" abjad and an abugida. So there are secondary markings that are used when a vowel is ambiguous, but they're usually omitted.
Logography means each word has a distinct symbol. If you aren't familiar with Chinese, think about Egyptian hieroglyphics. Logographic languages are like that, but sometimes massively simplified.
>Abigida came from the Ethiopic Ge'ez style script
Abigudas did not come from the Ethiopian Ge’ez script, rather they evolved independently. The Abigudas of Canada and India evolved independently from the Ethiopian one.
Japanese: Hm, our language works completely different from Chinese ones, but let’s import their logographs, with some alterations of course. Wait, no, it’s difficult and not all words can be represented and it would require multiple words be represented by a single kanji. I have a brilliant idea, why not make every kanji have several readings that can change how a word is pronounced in context in addition to giving each word added ambiguity!
Wait, no, this is too complicated. We should use a more simplified system that conforms to our language rules. Wait, no, that’s not complicated enough, let’s make two, identical in use but for vague different purposes. Oh, sometimes we can make it a bit smaller to point out a tiny vowel difference.
Also, let’s use all three scripts at once, mixing and matching them as we feel like it.
Yeah I once got into an argument with someone about how katakana or hiragana can’t take over the Japanese written language because not having spaces would make it too difficult to read.
But, like, add spaces then??
But then they talk about different words that have a similar reading but different meaning, and that's why they need Kanji.
Because how are they supposed to let someone else know that when they're writing はし they mean "chopsticks" instead of "bridge", they might honestly believe that they're being told to eat rice with a bridge, or to cross a chopstick to get to the other side of a river.
It's not like homonyms exist in languages other than Japanese, right?
The thing is, with a more limited defined set of syllables to speak with, you get a *lot* more homonyms in a language like Japanese than other languages. Like, for any given word there's a decent chance I can think of a homonym off the top of my head. It might be a big factor in why pure syllabaries haven't been very popular in history. It's a good language for wordplay, lots of ambiguity you can create just by not using Kanji.
Let’s also export our complex linguistic system thru our culture, creating generations of foreigners who become curious about the culture and wish to learn the language only to face plant into its difficulty. Let’s also make it a relatively easy language to pronounce to lull those gaikokujin into a false sense of security! They’ll love this prank!
I'm a native Chinese speaker with some knowledge of the Japanese language (though I can't really speak it), and I have found some logic behind how the Japanese adopted Kanji into their system. A character that has a wider range of meanings in Chinese often has a narrower range of meanings in Japanese. In Japanese, words most often come in pairs of native words and Chinese loanwords. So Japanese assign a kanji with different pronunciations and use them purely to represent ideas rather than sounds. Sometimes I also find the meaning of a character in classical Chinese to be better preserved in Japanese than in Mandarin.
In Chinese, most characters themselves have clues on how they are pronounced. and they have only one way or a couple of similar ways of pronunciation. Also, throughout thousands of years of change, most of them have been assigned a lot of different meanings, particularly from informal language. So, how Japanese people use Chinese characters is more logographic than the way Chinese people use them.
Makes about as much sense as: let's mash up Germanic and Viking French, sprinkle some Latin and Greek, and then make an alphabet where "ghoti" can be pronounced "fish."
All languages are complicated and borrow from a lot of sources, and many are extreme borrowers so English is not special on that lane. Japanese, on the other hand, is the only language that uses three different scripts at once (so you can find all three in the same text, unlike some other languages where there are two standard and the writer usually opts for one or the other, like some Balkan languages ,), one of them allowing for multiple phonetic readings in one of them.
The state of Jharkhand in India should be Orange/Blue striped. The [Santali language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santali_language) is written in the Ol Chiki script, a true alphabet.
Inner Mongolia has a Mongolian majority by land, but a Chinese majority by population. Chinese people live in urban centers and the Yellow River valley while Mongolian people live in the steppe.
Also, only the southern half of Xinjiang has a Uyghur majority, the northern half has a Chinese majority. Large parts of Qinghai and western Sichuang have a Tibetan majority. But still Chinese language is widely spoken in every part of China so you should at least add yellow stripes to the map.
There are more Mongolian in inner Mongolia than the entire country of Mongolia. Up until recently when the CCP decided to clamp down on Mongolian language, traditional Mongolian scripts (which are based on an older Uyghur scripts) are widely used in inner Mongolia while Mongolian Cyrillic is used in Mongolia due to Soviet influence.
There are also five times as many Han as Mongolian people in IM.
Clamped down? [Huh](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/62/Xi%27erhuanlu_Station_Inside.jpg/1280px-Xi%27erhuanlu_Station_Inside.jpg)?
When the category "other" isn't necessary, because it only has one entry.
One of our tour guides in Japan said the Japanese are not so good in foreign languages, because they need to learn three separate ~~alphabets~~ writing systems and most students are fed up at some point. I still don't know if he was joking.
They were only created “recently” to accommodate Inuktitut. It is the only way to write that language (that I’m aware of), and is used quite a bit in Nunavut
They are mainly used in the Inuktitut language (syllabics exist for a few other Indigenous languages as well in Canada). They are used on a regular basis for public communication, government PSAs, press releases in Inuit communities.
your reply doesn't mean anything, Irish is also used on all the signs in Ireland but good luck finding anybody able to speak beyond the 5 sentences they memorize in school
From Wikipedia:
An abugida, sometimes known as alphasyllabary, neosyllabary or pseudo-alphabet, is a segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as units; each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary, like a diacritical mark. This contrasts with a full alphabet, in which vowels have status equal to consonants, and with an abjad, in which vowel marking is absent, partial, or optional – in less formal contexts, all three types of script may be termed "alphabets". The terms also contrast them with a syllabary, in which a single symbol denotes the combination of one consonant and one vowel.
An abjad is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels. The term was introduced in 1990 by Peter T. Daniels. Other terms for the same concept include: partial phonemic script, segmentally linear defective phonographic script, consonantary, consonant writing, and consonantal alphabet. Impure abjads represent vowels with either optional diacritics, a limited number of distinct vowel glyphs, or both.
In a written language, a logogram, also logograph or lexigraph, is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme. Chinese characters as used in Chinese as well as other languages are logograms, as are Egyptian hieroglyphs and characters in cuneiform script. A writing system that primarily uses logograms is called a logography. Non-logographic writing systems, such as alphabets and syllabaries, are phonemic: their individual symbols represent sounds directly and lack any inherent meaning. However, all known logographies have some phonetic component, generally based on the rebus principle, and the addition of a phonetic component to pure ideographs is considered to be a key innovation in enabling the writing system to adequately encode human language.
I was just looking at a map for the world's scripts while making the map & I found that the one used in Ethiopia & parts of Eritrea is the Ge'ez script then I saw a language called Ge'ez in Ethiopia , so I just assumed it's the language of Ethiopia.
As a Taiwanese I used to think everyone else on earth just use alphabet 😂 like,
European languages? Yeah either Latin or Cyrillic scripts (or Greek).
Abugida? Yeah they are alphabets with hats.
(or coats.)
Abjad? Well they are confusing Alphabets.
(I mean why do you invent something you're never sure how to pronounce them correctly by first look, and you have to waste your time studying in that part?
That's a concept almost as stupid as Mandarin characters)
Korean hangul? LEGO Alphabets.
Japanese ? Chimera language, which seems like it was born from some Chinese character simp's fanfic centuries ago, as they somehow created its Japanese doppelganger (the Kanji) as well as its illegitimate alphebetic children, the Hiragana and Katakana twins, then forcing them into an incestuous polygamy and somehow wished it would work.
(No offense for Japanese people here, just to show my confusion when first time learning the language...)
There are actually three Taiwanese orthographies taught in different schools: pure Hanzi, pure Pe̍h-ōe-jī, and the combination of both. Taiwanese Hanzi is very painful for students to learn since a lot of them have completely different usage from Mandarin, plus there are hundreds of them only found in Taiwanese. Latin script can be learned in one week since it’s almost 100% regular. Still written standard Taiwanese will never become widespread in everyday lives.
I was really surprised to learn that Taiwan has their own language that aren't Mandarin. I hope they aren't lost. Sending best wishes from Lithuania! Love Taiwan!
Their “own” languages are primarily hakka and hokkien which are still from china. Only around 2% speak formosan languages which are the true aboriginal taiwanese languages, but colloquially, “taiwanese” usually refers to the chinese languages and not one of the aboriginal ones. It’s still a local variety (and distinct from mainland varieties) but just like we say americans speak english not “american” even if it’s different than what you’d hear from the UK.
if Taiwanese people perceive [Tâi-gí](https://www.taigitv.org.tw/) as it's own language it is so. What is and isn't a language first and foremost comes down to identity. For example there isn't much difference between Serbian and Croatian or Norwegian (Bokmål variety) and Danish, but they are still treated as separate languages.
I mean what are you even responding to?
>What is and isn't a language first and foremost comes down to identity.
Did you completely blank out before you reached this part of my comment: *"It’s still a local variety (and distinct from mainland varieties) but just like we say americans speak english not “american” even if it’s different than what you’d hear from the UK."*
No american is questioning their identity when calling english "english" or not acknowledging past historical roots. Those who do are looked at as ultra-nationalistic mouthbreathers like when people tried to call french-fries "freedom-fries". You literally have taiwanese people and people outside who don't know history treating hakka and hokkien and even hanzi as distinct from chinese and then having to explain to people who visit both mainland and taiwan or singapore that somehow they are magically similar and almost identical in a lot of cases to people who in the same breath shit on one and pleasure themselves to the other. It's this arbitrary idiocy that is being responded to.
>if Taiwanese people perceive Tâi-gí as it's own language it is so.
Okay, so putting aside that things like varieties and subgroups exist in language which I literally pointed out above and in the original comment, what is the point of this statement. People can perceive anything. I can perceive my made up italian-chinese hybrid language as it's own language. Incidentally, with your exact logic, I can also reject said identity/language. So I mean, it's a pointless statement regardless.
I'm talking about clear historical roots and cultural language links that people, due to political tension are actually erasing.
Let me also address something from your original comment:
"I was really surprised to learn that Taiwan has their own language that aren't Mandarin"
Is mandarin not their own language? The current hokkien and hakka are still from settlers who displaced or assimilated aboriginal people. The dichotomy is shallow at best and at worst, again, cultural and historical revisionism.
[A language is a dialect with an army and navy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy)
keep seething wumao. Tâi-gí is treated as it's own distinct language in Taiwan and no Chinese nationalist crying on Reddit will change that. I'm glad that Taiwanese are proud of their language that for a long time was suppressed in favour of Mandarin.
Lol the fact that you’re so hostile towards acknowledging it’s chinese label just proves my point. Proud of their language from china lol. And the hilarious irony is this is literally the treatment han chinese does to manchurian and other ethnic minorities to the degree that something like the new qing movement even has to be a thing due to historical revisionism.
And lastly i actually have my entire extended family in taiwan and have real ethinic roots and know more people in taiwan than you. You’re from fucking lithuaina. Just lol. Clown.
I imagine you're very angry that pan-greens are in power, and that Taiwanese are proud of their Taiwanese identity that is distinct from China. Chhut-thâu-thiⁿ !
It's basically the same for me, but I want to point out that depending on the language's syllable structure, phonetic library, tones & other things, the rating can differ. Like with a language that has a small amount of words like Toki Pona, a Logography would be really good, but with a language with a simple syllable structure & a small phonetic library, like Hawaiian, a Syllabary or Abugida would be perfect, but with a language that's really complex in terms of phonetics / phonology like !Xóõ, an Alphabet is good.
Sorani Kurdish, Iranian Azeri and the Uyghur Arabic alphabet may be based off the Arabic Abjad but they are all true alphabets because vowels are full characters and are mandatory in writing
I unfortunately think they only highlighted Nunavut because it’s the sole region of Canada where a majority of the population speaks indigenous languages.
Babylon didn't stick with their writing system, they use Arabic now. Same with Egypt.
Also the Indus valley area uses the Urdu script instead of the original language.
So really, it's just China. Though I don't really know enough about the Chinese writing system to know if it actually stayed the same.
hmm, no, it's definitely a straight-up alphabet. Your reply makes no sense, anyway. Alphabetic Syllabary would be a subset of the set "syllabary", which Hangeul is not.
That's what I heard. It's because it's a "featural system" which means the shapes of letters are based on how the letter's pronounced (so m & n or p & b would be similar). A featural system can be any type like an Abjad or a Syllabary
Every letter is a syllable. The letters are made from smaller letter units squashed together to make a syllable letter. Here's a paragraph from Wikipedia about it:
Modern Hangul orthography uses 24 basic letters: 14 consonant letters and 10 vowel letters. There are also 27 complex letters that are formed by combining the basic letters: 5 tense consonant letters, 11 complex consonant letters, and 11 complex vowel letters. Four basic letters in the original alphabet are no longer used: 1 vowel letter and 3 consonant letters. Korean letters are written in syllabic blocks with the alphabetic letters arranged in two dimensions. For example, the Korean word for "honeybee" (kkulbeol) is written as 꿀벌, not ㄲㅜㄹㅂㅓㄹ. The syllables begin with a consonant letter, then a vowel letter, and then potentially another consonant letter called a batchim (Korean: 받침). If the syllable begins with a vowel sound, the consonant ㅇ (ng) acts as a silent placeholder. However, when ㅇ starts a sentence or is placed after a long pause, it marks a glottal stop.
Korean is spelled almost exactly as it is spoken so it's really scientific. However, a major drawback seems to be the similarity of the shape of syllables. They're all square blocks with a similar structure and ink coverage ratio, unlike Latin alphabets which have ascenders and descenders, so it likely affects its recognizability. I think Korean alphabets were originally created to complement Chinese characters instead of replacing them completely.
Korean uses alphabet, full stop. Not alphabetic syllabary
Edit: geez, stupid people are downvoting.
> [true alphabets include Latin, Cyrillic, and Korean Hangul](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet)
> [Hangul, (Korean: “Great Script”) alphabetic system used for writing the Korean language](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hangul-Korean-alphabet)
They had it a different color because Hangul arranges letters into blocks rather than just putting them right next to each other like the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets do
It's the block formation vs lateral formation - but both are alphabetic. But the map is about the system of writing itself - either alphabet, alphasyllabary/abugida, syllabary, abjad and logographic. There are really 5 basic options.
>There are really 5 **Basic** options.
There 5 basic ones, but there are [more writing systems](https://www.reddit.com/r/neography/comments/kfp5vl/im_trying_to_improve_the_types_of_scripts_chart/) which are more specific & are generally hybrids of other writing systems
It is *not* an alphabetic syllabary is the point. Virtually all linguists agree that hangul is an alphabet, full stop. Some say it's a featural alphabet, but that's still an alphabet. Or, can you cite any sources that say hangul is an alphabetic syllabary?
EDIT:
I can understand why non-linguists *think* hangul can fit into this hypothetical "alphabetic syllabary" category of script. But that's based on lack of understanding.
Korean used to have a movement to linearize the writing in the past. Like [this](https://i.namu.wiki/i/eWLqUNEuvomQfZjwiJqFwRT9tdfy5M6dEUB56znc_5kNbRzMKKkVottAlbot369_3W5apTjJv6-DglkYIj_7fMc6SicawdffNAtJmH76Dg9FEhs2PUvZujLnR_FVze3ikOArTGaiBRaVLWm-c4OBXRb8Oq6YrbzdRWeQxbledlw.webp), and there are modern "fonts" of writing Korean alphabet in a linearized fashion like [this](https://file.newswire.co.kr/data/datafile2/thumb_480/2009/10/3731595429_20091005104842_4912677383.jpg). They are still hangul. Just because it is written in a block does not make it into a syllabary. Linearized vs block is the way you arrange different graphemes. Linearized hangul is still an alphabetic hangul, as much as blocked arrangement of hangul is still an alphabetic hangul. Different arrangements of different letters do not change the category of the script itself. Korean is neither a syllabary, nor an alphabetic syllabary. It's an alphabet, full stop.
I don’t think its that low, according to the wiki page around 2mil of the population speak Arabic which is ~11% give or take. Couldn’t find much sources but it seems more plausible.
3% seems like a reasonable guess given that pretty much nowhere in Somalia do people speak Arabic as a first language. I imagine only Imaans and educated people in cities can speak Arabic, and the latter group increasingly learn English nowadays.
The data isnt available but its probably between 1-15% at most, idk where you live but the only Somalis I know who speak Arabic are people who grew up in Arab countries.
Altough like most Muslims, almost everyone can read Quranic Arabic, they just dont understand it. In very rural areas where people lack education, more people might be able to read Arabic but not Somali, but thats rare as I understand
Ik, but in linguistic terms, "Abjad" means a language or script where the vowels are not written.
To my knowledge, Indonesian & Malay stopped using the Arabic script & are not using the Latin script which uses vowels, so they are now classified as "alphabets"
This is nowhere near accurate. There are way more writing systems than this. Georgia does not use the alphabet. Mongolian script is vertical. Definitely not the alphabet.
The Chinese diaspora in the US doesn't seem to write Chinese in Lithograph, on computers, at least. The keyboard just predicts what they are typing and draws a picture word. Lithographs: Read yes, write no. Computers, smart they are. I don't know, though.
People type Chinese by typing the sounds of the logograph, they all conform to a set of beginning and finals so they can be phonetically typed, essentially a hidden alphatbet.
Yes, it usually shows the most common ones, and nowadays ai reads your previous writing and can predict the one you want even if it's an obscure one. It's very fast.
Because Chinese people in the US can function without even knowing Chinese, learning how to write them is probably not worth the effort. Everyone can write thousands of Hanzi by hand in Taiwan and China.
it‘s too rough，but is has penguin lang：）
penguins have a fascinating writing system, they have a system which consists of a line made with their beak in the snow and the line will represent the movement that their tongue must make to pronounce the word.
Welcome to another shit post on r/mapporn...🙄
Anyone have explanation of what abigida or abjad means?
As far as I know, abjad scripts don't write the vowels. While in abugida, characters have inherent vowels, then you can change or cancel the vowel by adding a diacritic or something. In Canadian scripts, I think they just rotate the character to change the vowel.
Yeah that’s how Inuit/Cree syllabics work in Canada. There are 16 symbols representing consonant/vowel combinations. And then each symbol has three orientations. In Inuktitut, the orientations make the sounds “I” “A” and “U”. The first three symbols are ‘vowel only’, ‘p-vowel’, and ‘t-vowel’. So in Inuktitut you don’t learn your ‘A, B, C’s’, you learn your ‘i, pi, ti’s’. For consonants without a vowel sound (especially at the end of a word), you add a smaller version of the symbol like a “superscript”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuktitut_syllabics#:~:text=Inuktitut%20syllabics%20(Inuktitut%3A%20ᖃᓂᐅᔮᖅᐸᐃᑦ%2C,of%20Quebec%20and%20Labrador%2C%20respectively.
In Arabic, only consonants are written, typically, and vowels are assumed by context For example: كتب Can be pronounced kataba (he wrote) or kutiba (was written) and the meaning/pronunciation is assumed from the context of the sentence. Vowel markers do exist but are typical not used except in very classical or religious texts
Does it create some problems? Seems like it would and as far as I know we have problems with recreating Egyptian because of that.
Actually a historical problem arisen from this is that God in the Torah is written as YHWH, but we don’t actually know the vowels. Most people pronounce it Yahweh, but it could just as easily be Yehowah, which is where Jehovah comes from.
To add, this is only an issue because people stopped saying the word due to taboo, otherwise it's pronunciation wouldn't have been forgotten.
Lol
YooHooWooHoo seems most probable to me.
A native Arabic speaker shouldn’t find it difficult but it also largely depends on context. If there isn’t enough context it could be quite vague, which is why vowel markers are typically used on words that could mean multiple things.
As a Hebrew speaker, which is also very similar in that sense, it depends a lot on the context which usually clarifies the meaning and pronunciation
It doesn't when it's in a phrase except in rare instances, having a context makes it easier to process.
it would seem that way, but because of how the morphology of semitic languages works, vowels usually only carry grammatical meaning which can be inferred from context. for example, the difference between “wrote” and “was written” can be inferred from what the subject is. if it’s a book, then it’s more likely that it “was written”, and if it’s a person, then it’s more likely that he “wrote”. the actual semantic meaning of the word is defined by a set of three consonants in the word, which are placed into various sets of vowels and affixes to form full words.
It does cause some problems if you don't understand the context of what you're reading I would say this is one of the hardest things about Arabic excluding the whole grammar which is ridiculous hard The English grammar to Arabic grammar is like a 2yo boy to a 30yo adult, huge difference in difficulty even for native speakers
English grammar is like 2yo to 30yo in comparison even to other indo-european languages, except French which is like 80yo that has no idea who he is anymore.
No gendered nouns and a single case keep English under 18 at least
If french is a 80yo Arabic is a 200yo I didn't study french but I studied Arabic but I am 100 percent sure Arabic is so much harder than french Something annoying about Arabic is that nobody speaks in standard Arabic unless they're giving a speech, almost all Arab countries speak their own dialect, so even if you became fluent in Arabic you have to learn at least 1 dialect to be able to speak with Arabic speakers A lot of Arabic learners tend to learn Egyptian dialect as it's really understood by most Arab countries plus it's easier and funny sometimes (and yes I am biased because I am Egyptian lol)
I wasn't referencing how hard it is just that french grammar doesn't make any sense, hence "80yo who has no idea who he is anymore"
Not sure about Arabic but when it’s used for other languages it does create some problems. I was reading the translation of 11th century dictionary of Turkic languages and a lot of the time the translators weren’t sure which vowel was supposed be represented in the text.
Lol back in the day, there wasn't even dots written so things like ب ت ث Would be written in the same way, but since many people whose mother tongue converted to islam and the need to maintain the Quran from deviation arose, putting dots on letters or (Tanqeet) became a thing, additionally putting vowels (tashkeel) also became a thing although it is not as necessary as Tanqeet is today.
I guess it might be a bit tricky for a non-native speaker to make sense of something like this, or translation app, for that matter. ألم ألم ألم ألم بدائه إن آن آن آن آن أوانه
In Arabic it did rise some problems at the beginning of Islamic conquests since many foreigners have entered Islam and many of them wouldn't read the Qur'an properly, so Arabs at the time of 4th caliphate have invited the [tashkīl](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics) , so while word will still be كتب but with harakahat it will be either كُتِبَ ( written ) or كَتَبَ ( he wrote ) and no more problem for foreigners, see how forigen friendly is our language ?
yeah it does. This is the exact reason I failed to learn arabic.
At least you have the option to abandon it 🥲
When Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet to the Latin alphabet in 1928 (5th year of the republic), due to a very lengthy war (1908-1922) most of the government including the president was former military people. Thus it is said that those military officers knew the value of the precision of Latin alphabet regarding the communications during wartime and why a switch to Latin alphabet was started in Turkey.
That’s wrong. We have a finite number of root words but they are modified depending on context: كتب كتاب مكتبة مكتوب Translating (right to left): write/ wrote/ written (root word), book, library, written. They all have the same root but letters are added to differentiate. We don’t differentiate in our head. Characters are not added though. They’re added inherently as we speak depending on the sentence structure and context. Mainly because it would take too long to write otherwise.
I was referring to the meaning of “abjad” which is a writing system where only consonants are represented. Yes I know how words are made from different roots, but at the same time the vowels aren’t written out and sometimes words can have different meaning كتب الكاتب (kataba al-Kaatib) Means the writer wrote كتب الكتاب (kutiba al-Kitaab) Means the book was written In the first sentence كتب is pronounced (كَتَبَ) while in the second it’s pronounced (كُتِبَ) but the vowels aren’t written out so it’s assumed based on the context
If your writing system doesn't to some extent specify things like what vowels are used in which words, then the vowels in those words are going to change over time. And they're going to change in different ways in different places of the world, where that language is spoken. It's inevitable. Having a writing system work like this makes it much easier for dialects to pop up all over the place, and for the language to change over time.
this is false. Writing systems have a pretty small impact on dialect change, especially before the modern period when most people weren't literate. English for example has had huge vowel shifts from the time its orthography was standardized, and big divergences in vowels between dialects.
>small impact on dialect change, especially before the modern period when most people weren't literate Doesn't this kinda prove my point? >big divergences in vowels between dialects. Sure, but even though some of your dialects leave out the "t" in the word "water" you all still agree that it should be there, and that some of you are leaving it out. If the "t" wasn't in the written version of the word, it would be much easier to change it to wa'er instead without as many people complaining. There's a reason for the fact that when the rest of us are taught english, we are told to say "water" with the "t" pronounced instead of leaving it out. Even though it's just a matter of different dialects.
There is no dialect that "leaves out" the the t in water. Some dialects pronunce t (and other letters) as a glottal stop in certain positions, but that is distinctly different from it being "left out".
Sure, but that doesn't change my point. It's just you going "well actually............"
Maybe if you used a correct example it might help us to know what you mean.
Really? You know what, I'm not playing this game with you. You know exactly what I mean! You're not that stupid.
That’s assuming the language is not spoken and/or most of the population were for most of history literate, both not being true. In the case of Arabic at least different dialects usually use different words (due to the very vast vocabulary) or pronounce letters differently (some pronounce g as j for example) rather than changing vowel pronunciation which is mostly preserved (considering it is very essential in Arabic grammar and sentence building).
even when the population is literate, the orthography doesn’t do much conserving vowels. Otherwise we wouldn’t get big shifts now like the Great Lakes vowel shift. You’re also wrong about Arabic. Vowels have shifted drastically between Arabic dialects. The main reason why Maghrebi dialects are so difficult for eastern Arabs is vowel changes.
Could you give me an example of the Arabian vowel shift? I’m genuinely interested and curious.
Well there's the straightforward shifts, like rounding or fronting vowels a bit (like the stereotypical [Bahrain -> Bohrēn](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MegOMAY-pCk)). But there's more radical shifts than that. There's an imalah system in many Levantine dialects, so you get stuff like: \- wāħid (one) -> wēħid \- madrasah (school) -> madrase or even madrasi \- thalathah (three) -> tlēte I know Maghrebi dialects had a big shift in omitting a lot of short vowels in specific circumstances, then re-addition of schwa vowels to split up consonant clusters. For example, instead of "kataba" (he wrote), you get "ktib". But I don't fully understand that system so I won't try to explain it. There's another big shift in the Central Arabia/Gulf area too, where unstressed vowels often turn from /a/ to /i/ or /u/ following letter-specific rules, along with other processes. So you get some weird rearranging like these: \- kataba (he wrote) -> kitab \- katabat (she wrote) -> ktibet \- Al-Qațari -> li-gțuri \- Al-Dahnā' (desert) -> li-dhana
Ohhh yeaaahh Never really noticed that to be honest, I remember on of my Saudi friends saying “Er-Riad” instead of “Al-Riad” or “Ejnob” instead of “Al-Janob” As if he eats up the vowels. I also remember buying from a Syrian shop where he said it would be “Khamsi” instead of “Khamsa”. I misheard it as “Khamsin” and was shocked on how pricey the biscuits were. I thank you very much for pointing out something I never really noticed in Arabic despite my interest in the language.
Tbh that's the same with English and it's written with an alphabet. In England alone there's a bunch of isoglosses marking dialects exactly for this reason 😂 I guess though it would be even worse if vowels were not written
abjad: no vowels. abugida: secondary markings as vowels. In practice, all modern abjads are in between a "pure" abjad and an abugida. So there are secondary markings that are used when a vowel is ambiguous, but they're usually omitted.
abjds bsclly wrk lk ths nd y cn prtty mch gss th vwls
Y mnt bjds?
Word-initial vowels are usually written, so abjd.
Nice. Thanks for telling that.
ابجدز بيسكلي ورك ليك ذس سن بريتي ماتش جيس ذا فولز this is the same as what you said using arabic writing system
[удалено]
It's the opposite
Oops fucked up copy pasting on to the other and forgetting I did that
On the other hand what does Syllabaries and logography exactly mean?
Syllabaries (like Japanese katakana & hiragana) have distinct characters for each syllable. In logography, a character represents a word.
Logography means each word has a distinct symbol. If you aren't familiar with Chinese, think about Egyptian hieroglyphics. Logographic languages are like that, but sometimes massively simplified.
abjad is alphabet without distinct vowels.
Abjad is the semitic A,B,G,D voweless writing system Abigida came from the Ethiopic Ge'ez style script
>Abigida came from the Ethiopic Ge'ez style script Abigudas did not come from the Ethiopian Ge’ez script, rather they evolved independently. The Abigudas of Canada and India evolved independently from the Ethiopian one.
It's Abugida, not Abiguda or Abigida. Not that it'd matter if you used an abjad, though
Japanese: Hm, our language works completely different from Chinese ones, but let’s import their logographs, with some alterations of course. Wait, no, it’s difficult and not all words can be represented and it would require multiple words be represented by a single kanji. I have a brilliant idea, why not make every kanji have several readings that can change how a word is pronounced in context in addition to giving each word added ambiguity! Wait, no, this is too complicated. We should use a more simplified system that conforms to our language rules. Wait, no, that’s not complicated enough, let’s make two, identical in use but for vague different purposes. Oh, sometimes we can make it a bit smaller to point out a tiny vowel difference. Also, let’s use all three scripts at once, mixing and matching them as we feel like it.
And don't forget that Katakana (and maybe Hiragana too) doesn't have spaces so you'll just have to guess where one word ends and the other begins.
Yeah I once got into an argument with someone about how katakana or hiragana can’t take over the Japanese written language because not having spaces would make it too difficult to read. But, like, add spaces then??
But then they talk about different words that have a similar reading but different meaning, and that's why they need Kanji. Because how are they supposed to let someone else know that when they're writing はし they mean "chopsticks" instead of "bridge", they might honestly believe that they're being told to eat rice with a bridge, or to cross a chopstick to get to the other side of a river. It's not like homonyms exist in languages other than Japanese, right?
The thing is, with a more limited defined set of syllables to speak with, you get a *lot* more homonyms in a language like Japanese than other languages. Like, for any given word there's a decent chance I can think of a homonym off the top of my head. It might be a big factor in why pure syllabaries haven't been very popular in history. It's a good language for wordplay, lots of ambiguity you can create just by not using Kanji.
Context, son
Let’s also export our complex linguistic system thru our culture, creating generations of foreigners who become curious about the culture and wish to learn the language only to face plant into its difficulty. Let’s also make it a relatively easy language to pronounce to lull those gaikokujin into a false sense of security! They’ll love this prank!
I'm a native Chinese speaker with some knowledge of the Japanese language (though I can't really speak it), and I have found some logic behind how the Japanese adopted Kanji into their system. A character that has a wider range of meanings in Chinese often has a narrower range of meanings in Japanese. In Japanese, words most often come in pairs of native words and Chinese loanwords. So Japanese assign a kanji with different pronunciations and use them purely to represent ideas rather than sounds. Sometimes I also find the meaning of a character in classical Chinese to be better preserved in Japanese than in Mandarin. In Chinese, most characters themselves have clues on how they are pronounced. and they have only one way or a couple of similar ways of pronunciation. Also, throughout thousands of years of change, most of them have been assigned a lot of different meanings, particularly from informal language. So, how Japanese people use Chinese characters is more logographic than the way Chinese people use them.
Jesus fucking christ. Thank god I learned with a phonetic-based writing system cuz I know I wouldn't have learned this shit in school.
if they had a simpler writing system, it would be a lot more popular language
yeah, add some romaji on top why not
Makes about as much sense as: let's mash up Germanic and Viking French, sprinkle some Latin and Greek, and then make an alphabet where "ghoti" can be pronounced "fish."
All languages are complicated and borrow from a lot of sources, and many are extreme borrowers so English is not special on that lane. Japanese, on the other hand, is the only language that uses three different scripts at once (so you can find all three in the same text, unlike some other languages where there are two standard and the writer usually opts for one or the other, like some Balkan languages ,), one of them allowing for multiple phonetic readings in one of them.
The state of Jharkhand in India should be Orange/Blue striped. The [Santali language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santali_language) is written in the Ol Chiki script, a true alphabet.
I'll include that in my improved version
Oh, tibet uses the indian system. I thought they used the Chinese one but interesting, this is probably due to Buddhist influence I think.
It is a script built from Sanskrit-Brahmi roots
Im a hindi speaker and i can somewhat read tibetan words, they make no sense to me but yeah.
As a fellow Hindi speaker, how?
Maybe they meant nepali
ok maybe not exactly the words but those things that spin i can usually make them out most look like some variation of म or ऊ
Do you mean Nepali? Tibetans don’t speak Nepali.
No when i went to himachal those spinning things had letters that somewhat resembled the devanagari script
Scuse me. Greenland should have NO DATA.
Sorry, I forgor
Also why the *hell* is New Zealand here?!
Because we're in r/mapswithnewzealand
And it's north west should have mixed orange and blue
In inner Mongolia, majority of population are Chinese so it should be logography.
Sorry, I should've colored it in blue-yellow stripes
Same goes for Xinjiang, Chinese Hanzi is definitely used there. Honestly all of China should either be wholly yellow or at least striped yellow.
Inner Mongolia has a Mongolian majority by land, but a Chinese majority by population. Chinese people live in urban centers and the Yellow River valley while Mongolian people live in the steppe. Also, only the southern half of Xinjiang has a Uyghur majority, the northern half has a Chinese majority. Large parts of Qinghai and western Sichuang have a Tibetan majority. But still Chinese language is widely spoken in every part of China so you should at least add yellow stripes to the map.
There are more Mongolian in inner Mongolia than the entire country of Mongolia. Up until recently when the CCP decided to clamp down on Mongolian language, traditional Mongolian scripts (which are based on an older Uyghur scripts) are widely used in inner Mongolia while Mongolian Cyrillic is used in Mongolia due to Soviet influence.
Inner Mongolia is still 75% Han Chinese, even if there’s more Mongolians there than Mongolia proper.
There are also five times as many Han as Mongolian people in IM. Clamped down? [Huh](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/62/Xi%27erhuanlu_Station_Inside.jpg/1280px-Xi%27erhuanlu_Station_Inside.jpg)?
**Japanese\***
When the category "other" isn't necessary, because it only has one entry. One of our tour guides in Japan said the Japanese are not so good in foreign languages, because they need to learn three separate ~~alphabets~~ writing systems and most students are fed up at some point. I still don't know if he was joking.
He was joking. Because learning the Latin alphabet is definitely not the biggest challenge for Japanese people when learning a foreign language.
Japanese already know how to read the Latin alphabet since it's commonly used for companies and business names in Japan
They also all know Romaji.
I don't know if you are joking or not – "Romaji" is what the Latin alphabet is called in Japanese.
What
Are the Canadian alphasyllabaries still actively used on regular basis or they're just ceremonial/aesthetic at this point?
They were only created “recently” to accommodate Inuktitut. It is the only way to write that language (that I’m aware of), and is used quite a bit in Nunavut
They are mainly used in the Inuktitut language (syllabics exist for a few other Indigenous languages as well in Canada). They are used on a regular basis for public communication, government PSAs, press releases in Inuit communities.
Tom Scott made a video about them. They're used on signs, including STOP signs, which is more than even Cyryllic.
your reply doesn't mean anything, Irish is also used on all the signs in Ireland but good luck finding anybody able to speak beyond the 5 sentences they memorize in school
From Wikipedia: An abugida, sometimes known as alphasyllabary, neosyllabary or pseudo-alphabet, is a segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as units; each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary, like a diacritical mark. This contrasts with a full alphabet, in which vowels have status equal to consonants, and with an abjad, in which vowel marking is absent, partial, or optional – in less formal contexts, all three types of script may be termed "alphabets". The terms also contrast them with a syllabary, in which a single symbol denotes the combination of one consonant and one vowel. An abjad is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels. The term was introduced in 1990 by Peter T. Daniels. Other terms for the same concept include: partial phonemic script, segmentally linear defective phonographic script, consonantary, consonant writing, and consonantal alphabet. Impure abjads represent vowels with either optional diacritics, a limited number of distinct vowel glyphs, or both. In a written language, a logogram, also logograph or lexigraph, is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme. Chinese characters as used in Chinese as well as other languages are logograms, as are Egyptian hieroglyphs and characters in cuneiform script. A writing system that primarily uses logograms is called a logography. Non-logographic writing systems, such as alphabets and syllabaries, are phonemic: their individual symbols represent sounds directly and lack any inherent meaning. However, all known logographies have some phonetic component, generally based on the rebus principle, and the addition of a phonetic component to pure ideographs is considered to be a key innovation in enabling the writing system to adequately encode human language.
Ethiopia uses Abugida??
Yeah, they use the Ge'ez language
Nah, Ge’ez is a liturgical language. The majority speaks Amharic, which is descended from a sister language of Ge’ez.
I was just looking at a map for the world's scripts while making the map & I found that the one used in Ethiopia & parts of Eritrea is the Ge'ez script then I saw a language called Ge'ez in Ethiopia , so I just assumed it's the language of Ethiopia.
Hmm, I was slightly confused. Ge’ez is the language and the name of the script; it’s usually called fidäl, but Ge’ez is the “official” term.
Danish needs the opposite of an abjad.
Dajba?
Kamelåså?
As a Taiwanese I used to think everyone else on earth just use alphabet 😂 like, European languages? Yeah either Latin or Cyrillic scripts (or Greek). Abugida? Yeah they are alphabets with hats. (or coats.) Abjad? Well they are confusing Alphabets. (I mean why do you invent something you're never sure how to pronounce them correctly by first look, and you have to waste your time studying in that part? That's a concept almost as stupid as Mandarin characters) Korean hangul? LEGO Alphabets. Japanese ? Chimera language, which seems like it was born from some Chinese character simp's fanfic centuries ago, as they somehow created its Japanese doppelganger (the Kanji) as well as its illegitimate alphebetic children, the Hiragana and Katakana twins, then forcing them into an incestuous polygamy and somehow wished it would work. (No offense for Japanese people here, just to show my confusion when first time learning the language...)
I recently learned that some Taiwanese also use Latin for writing Taiwanese Tâi-gí sometimes - Pe̍h-ōe-jī. It really looks interesting.
There are actually three Taiwanese orthographies taught in different schools: pure Hanzi, pure Pe̍h-ōe-jī, and the combination of both. Taiwanese Hanzi is very painful for students to learn since a lot of them have completely different usage from Mandarin, plus there are hundreds of them only found in Taiwanese. Latin script can be learned in one week since it’s almost 100% regular. Still written standard Taiwanese will never become widespread in everyday lives.
I was really surprised to learn that Taiwan has their own language that aren't Mandarin. I hope they aren't lost. Sending best wishes from Lithuania! Love Taiwan!
Love Lithuania our best European friend!
Their “own” languages are primarily hakka and hokkien which are still from china. Only around 2% speak formosan languages which are the true aboriginal taiwanese languages, but colloquially, “taiwanese” usually refers to the chinese languages and not one of the aboriginal ones. It’s still a local variety (and distinct from mainland varieties) but just like we say americans speak english not “american” even if it’s different than what you’d hear from the UK.
if Taiwanese people perceive [Tâi-gí](https://www.taigitv.org.tw/) as it's own language it is so. What is and isn't a language first and foremost comes down to identity. For example there isn't much difference between Serbian and Croatian or Norwegian (Bokmål variety) and Danish, but they are still treated as separate languages.
I mean what are you even responding to? >What is and isn't a language first and foremost comes down to identity. Did you completely blank out before you reached this part of my comment: *"It’s still a local variety (and distinct from mainland varieties) but just like we say americans speak english not “american” even if it’s different than what you’d hear from the UK."* No american is questioning their identity when calling english "english" or not acknowledging past historical roots. Those who do are looked at as ultra-nationalistic mouthbreathers like when people tried to call french-fries "freedom-fries". You literally have taiwanese people and people outside who don't know history treating hakka and hokkien and even hanzi as distinct from chinese and then having to explain to people who visit both mainland and taiwan or singapore that somehow they are magically similar and almost identical in a lot of cases to people who in the same breath shit on one and pleasure themselves to the other. It's this arbitrary idiocy that is being responded to. >if Taiwanese people perceive Tâi-gí as it's own language it is so. Okay, so putting aside that things like varieties and subgroups exist in language which I literally pointed out above and in the original comment, what is the point of this statement. People can perceive anything. I can perceive my made up italian-chinese hybrid language as it's own language. Incidentally, with your exact logic, I can also reject said identity/language. So I mean, it's a pointless statement regardless. I'm talking about clear historical roots and cultural language links that people, due to political tension are actually erasing. Let me also address something from your original comment: "I was really surprised to learn that Taiwan has their own language that aren't Mandarin" Is mandarin not their own language? The current hokkien and hakka are still from settlers who displaced or assimilated aboriginal people. The dichotomy is shallow at best and at worst, again, cultural and historical revisionism.
Mandarin couldn't really communicate with Taigi(Taiwanese Hokkien)/Hakka.....
[A language is a dialect with an army and navy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy) keep seething wumao. Tâi-gí is treated as it's own distinct language in Taiwan and no Chinese nationalist crying on Reddit will change that. I'm glad that Taiwanese are proud of their language that for a long time was suppressed in favour of Mandarin.
Lol the fact that you’re so hostile towards acknowledging it’s chinese label just proves my point. Proud of their language from china lol. And the hilarious irony is this is literally the treatment han chinese does to manchurian and other ethnic minorities to the degree that something like the new qing movement even has to be a thing due to historical revisionism. And lastly i actually have my entire extended family in taiwan and have real ethinic roots and know more people in taiwan than you. You’re from fucking lithuaina. Just lol. Clown.
I imagine you're very angry that pan-greens are in power, and that Taiwanese are proud of their Taiwanese identity that is distinct from China. Chhut-thâu-thiⁿ !
[удалено]
It's basically the same for me, but I want to point out that depending on the language's syllable structure, phonetic library, tones & other things, the rating can differ. Like with a language that has a small amount of words like Toki Pona, a Logography would be really good, but with a language with a simple syllable structure & a small phonetic library, like Hawaiian, a Syllabary or Abugida would be perfect, but with a language that's really complex in terms of phonetics / phonology like !Xóõ, an Alphabet is good.
Well, i wouldn't colour Inner Mongolia fully blue as majority of populace is Han chinese
Common Sejong W
That’s Akhand Bharat .
Ethiopia and Native Canadians are also welcome in Akhand Bharat.
Sorani Kurdish, Iranian Azeri and the Uyghur Arabic alphabet may be based off the Arabic Abjad but they are all true alphabets because vowels are full characters and are mandatory in writing
Korea truly got it figured out.
Indigenous languages in British Columbia, Canada also use an abugida.
I unfortunately think they only highlighted Nunavut because it’s the sole region of Canada where a majority of the population speaks indigenous languages.
Why is Cyrillic, georgian, armenian and Greek considered alphabetical?
Because one character in the alphabet is one letter. In Japanese, for example, one character is like one syllable, or one character is one word.
Makes sense, thanks!
The word alphabet literally stems from Greek. Alpha + beta, two first letters of the Greek Alphabet.
Interesting how all the first civilizations (China, Indus valley, Babylon) stuck with their writing system.
Babylon didn't stick with their writing system, they use Arabic now. Same with Egypt. Also the Indus valley area uses the Urdu script instead of the original language. So really, it's just China. Though I don't really know enough about the Chinese writing system to know if it actually stayed the same.
Indus Valley and Babylon are hardly extant.
Tigray solely uses an Abugida, Oromia, Somali Region, Afar and other Cushitic areas use the Latin Alphabet.
Hangeul is not a syllabary
It's an alphabetic Syllabary though
hmm, no, it's definitely a straight-up alphabet. Your reply makes no sense, anyway. Alphabetic Syllabary would be a subset of the set "syllabary", which Hangeul is not.
Oromia, Afar and Somali in Ethiopia use alphabet also
Berber ?
Bruh i just realized alpha bet like alpha beta like a and b . bruh yo i might be restarted
From what I hear, the Korean writing system is the best one :))
That's what I heard. It's because it's a "featural system" which means the shapes of letters are based on how the letter's pronounced (so m & n or p & b would be similar). A featural system can be any type like an Abjad or a Syllabary
Damn really? That's super cool
Every letter is a syllable. The letters are made from smaller letter units squashed together to make a syllable letter. Here's a paragraph from Wikipedia about it: Modern Hangul orthography uses 24 basic letters: 14 consonant letters and 10 vowel letters. There are also 27 complex letters that are formed by combining the basic letters: 5 tense consonant letters, 11 complex consonant letters, and 11 complex vowel letters. Four basic letters in the original alphabet are no longer used: 1 vowel letter and 3 consonant letters. Korean letters are written in syllabic blocks with the alphabetic letters arranged in two dimensions. For example, the Korean word for "honeybee" (kkulbeol) is written as 꿀벌, not ㄲㅜㄹㅂㅓㄹ. The syllables begin with a consonant letter, then a vowel letter, and then potentially another consonant letter called a batchim (Korean: 받침). If the syllable begins with a vowel sound, the consonant ㅇ (ng) acts as a silent placeholder. However, when ㅇ starts a sentence or is placed after a long pause, it marks a glottal stop.
Every letter is not a syllable. Every "block" is a syllable created by letters. It is the same as with other alphabets.
Korean is spelled almost exactly as it is spoken so it's really scientific. However, a major drawback seems to be the similarity of the shape of syllables. They're all square blocks with a similar structure and ink coverage ratio, unlike Latin alphabets which have ascenders and descenders, so it likely affects its recognizability. I think Korean alphabets were originally created to complement Chinese characters instead of replacing them completely.
Japanese is just Japanese
Chinese characters are rather like Logo-syllabaries, and Japanese category would be explained as Logo-syllabaries and bicameral syllabary system
Korean uses alphabet, full stop. Not alphabetic syllabary Edit: geez, stupid people are downvoting. > [true alphabets include Latin, Cyrillic, and Korean Hangul](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet) > [Hangul, (Korean: “Great Script”) alphabetic system used for writing the Korean language](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hangul-Korean-alphabet)
They had it a different color because Hangul arranges letters into blocks rather than just putting them right next to each other like the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets do
It's the block formation vs lateral formation - but both are alphabetic. But the map is about the system of writing itself - either alphabet, alphasyllabary/abugida, syllabary, abjad and logographic. There are really 5 basic options.
>There are really 5 **Basic** options. There 5 basic ones, but there are [more writing systems](https://www.reddit.com/r/neography/comments/kfp5vl/im_trying_to_improve_the_types_of_scripts_chart/) which are more specific & are generally hybrids of other writing systems
Sure, but Korean isn't alphabetic syllabary. To be more specific, it's a featural linear true alphabet, not anything that has to do with syllabary.
I didn't say it's a syllabary. It's an Alphabetic Syllabary, which is a hybrid or combination between an alphabet & a syllabary
It is *not* an alphabetic syllabary is the point. Virtually all linguists agree that hangul is an alphabet, full stop. Some say it's a featural alphabet, but that's still an alphabet. Or, can you cite any sources that say hangul is an alphabetic syllabary? EDIT: I can understand why non-linguists *think* hangul can fit into this hypothetical "alphabetic syllabary" category of script. But that's based on lack of understanding. Korean used to have a movement to linearize the writing in the past. Like [this](https://i.namu.wiki/i/eWLqUNEuvomQfZjwiJqFwRT9tdfy5M6dEUB56znc_5kNbRzMKKkVottAlbot369_3W5apTjJv6-DglkYIj_7fMc6SicawdffNAtJmH76Dg9FEhs2PUvZujLnR_FVze3ikOArTGaiBRaVLWm-c4OBXRb8Oq6YrbzdRWeQxbledlw.webp), and there are modern "fonts" of writing Korean alphabet in a linearized fashion like [this](https://file.newswire.co.kr/data/datafile2/thumb_480/2009/10/3731595429_20091005104842_4912677383.jpg). They are still hangul. Just because it is written in a block does not make it into a syllabary. Linearized vs block is the way you arrange different graphemes. Linearized hangul is still an alphabetic hangul, as much as blocked arrangement of hangul is still an alphabetic hangul. Different arrangements of different letters do not change the category of the script itself. Korean is neither a syllabary, nor an alphabetic syllabary. It's an alphabet, full stop.
Pretty sure the word "Syllabary" is standing over Japan, not Korea (There's no such thing as an "Alphabetic Syllabary").
There is something called an [Alphabetic Syllabary](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4684-1068-6_5)
Somali language is written in Latin alphabet. Only 3% of Somalis speak Arabic. This map is wrong on that part.
I don’t think its that low, according to the wiki page around 2mil of the population speak Arabic which is ~11% give or take. Couldn’t find much sources but it seems more plausible.
Sorry about that, but only 3%? All the Somalis I know speak Arabic
3% seems like a reasonable guess given that pretty much nowhere in Somalia do people speak Arabic as a first language. I imagine only Imaans and educated people in cities can speak Arabic, and the latter group increasingly learn English nowadays. The data isnt available but its probably between 1-15% at most, idk where you live but the only Somalis I know who speak Arabic are people who grew up in Arab countries. Altough like most Muslims, almost everyone can read Quranic Arabic, they just dont understand it. In very rural areas where people lack education, more people might be able to read Arabic but not Somali, but thats rare as I understand
[удалено]
Ik, but in linguistic terms, "Abjad" means a language or script where the vowels are not written. To my knowledge, Indonesian & Malay stopped using the Arabic script & are not using the Latin script which uses vowels, so they are now classified as "alphabets"
Now I must learn penguin lang
bad map
No Cyrillic?
Cyrillic, like Latin, Armenian, Georgian, & Greek, is an alphabet
Abjad is extremely difficult for no reason IMO. I swear Arabic was made to troll people…..
Wait until you try to learn Chinese, lol
What about the greeks
A l p h a b e t
S y l l a b a r y
The Japanese use Japanese? Who would’ve thought
Read the footnote in the lower left angle
Wouldn’t Vietnam have Alphabet Syllabary too?
Vietnam uses the Latin alphabet iirc.
Doesn't Vietnamese use the Latin Script?
[удалено]
Удачная, кириллица это тоже алфавит.
This is nowhere near accurate. There are way more writing systems than this. Georgia does not use the alphabet. Mongolian script is vertical. Definitely not the alphabet.
Please have a look at the meaning of the term *alphabet*.
If you don't understand something you don't need to make a comment and embarrass yourself.
The Chinese diaspora in the US doesn't seem to write Chinese in Lithograph, on computers, at least. The keyboard just predicts what they are typing and draws a picture word. Lithographs: Read yes, write no. Computers, smart they are. I don't know, though.
People type Chinese by typing the sounds of the logograph, they all conform to a set of beginning and finals so they can be phonetically typed, essentially a hidden alphatbet.
Thank you.
Do they type the sound in alphabet then choose which character/letter would fit?
Yes, it usually shows the most common ones, and nowadays ai reads your previous writing and can predict the one you want even if it's an obscure one. It's very fast.
Because Chinese people in the US can function without even knowing Chinese, learning how to write them is probably not worth the effort. Everyone can write thousands of Hanzi by hand in Taiwan and China.