Word Finder - syllabary

definition

A table or list of syllabic letters or syllables

definition

A writing system where each character represents a complete syllable

example

It shouldn't be hard to come up with a musical syllabary in which pitches code for vowels and timbres code for consonants.

Women as well as men learned to read and write, and in Semitic times this involved a knowledge of the extinct Sumerian as well as of a most complicated and extensive syllabary.

Iwleanwhile an inquirer is confronted by the strange fact that of three neighboring countries between which frequent communication existed, one (China) never deviated from an ideographic script; another (Korea) invented an alphabet, and the third (Japan) devised a syllabary.

At last, the central advanced tribes made the names of the abbreviated pictures useful in other connexions, and were far on the way to a syllabary.

Fourth on my list of reasons why today is a Good Day is my progress with hiragana, the primary Japanese syllabary.

The Babylonian syllabary which thus arose, and which, as the culture passed on to the north - known as Assyria - became the Babylonian Assyrian syllabary, 3 was enlarged and modified in the course of time, the Semitic equivalents for many of the signs being distorted or abbreviated to form the basis of new "phonetic" values that were thus of " Semitic " origin; but, on the whole, the " non-Semitic " character of the signs used as syllables in the phonetic method of writing Semitic words was preserved; and, furthermore, down to the latest days of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires the mixed method of writing continued, though there were periods when " purism " was the fashion, and there was a more marked tendency to spell out the words laboriously in preference to using signs with a phonetic complement as an aid in suggesting the reading desired in any given instance.

The Greeks who migrated to Cyprus, possibly as the result of the Dorian invasion, adopted a syllabary, not an alphabet (see Plate; also Writing).

The characters of the syllabary were all arranged and named, and elaborate lists of them were drawn up. The literature was for the most part inscribed with a metal stylus on tablets of clay, called laterculae coctiles by Pliny; the papyrus which seems to have been also employed has perished.

It is doubtful ness, smallness whether they classified the signs of the huge hieroglyphic syllabary with any strictness.

The Ethiopic system is thus rather a syllabary than an alphabet.

Yet, even in those days, the Babylonian syllabary continued to be a mixture of ideographic and phonetic writing.

But a syllabary where each syllable is made by the combinations of a symbol for a consonant with that for a vowel can furnish no proof of the existence of a syllabary in the strict sense, where each symbol represents a syllable; it is rather evidence against the existence of such writing.

This double method of writing words arises from the circumstance that the cuneiform syllabary is of non-Semitic origin, the system being derived from the non-Semitic settlers of the Euphrates valley, commonly termed Sumerians (or Sumero-Akkadians), to whom, as the earlier settlers, the origin of the cuneiform script is due.

To this day the spoken language of Japanese women is appreciably simpler and softer than that of the men, and to this day while the educated woman uses the hiragana syllabary in writing, eschews Chinese sords and rarel pens an ideograph, the educated man employs the ideograp entirely, and translates his thoughts as far as possible into thi mispronounced Chinese words without recourse -to which it would be impossible for him to discuss any scientific subject, or even tc refer to the details of his daily business.

The syllabary upon the Galassi vase indicates in all probability that the vase, which resembles an ink-bottle, belonged to a child, for whose edification the syllables pa, pi, pe, pu and the rest were intended.

In 1876 Sayce pointed out the resemblance between certain Hittite signs and characters in the lately deciphered Cypriote syllabary, and suggested that the comparison might lead to a beginning of decipherment; but the hope has proved vain.