The Typology of Writing Systems

Abstract

Type Each symbol represents Example Logographic morpheme Chinese characters Syllabic syllable or mora Japanese kana Abugida phoneme (consonant+vowel) Indian Devanāgarī Abjad phoneme (consonant) Arabic alphabet Alphabetic phoneme (consonant or vowel) Latin alphabet Featural phonetic feature Korean hangul Bibliography Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds. (1996) The World's Writing Systems. Oxford University Press. 920 pages plus endpapers showing the IPA. A spectacular survey of the entire panoply of writing systems in the world; a major achievement, and the sort of book a linguist will buy even if limited to buying one book every five years. Julie D. Allen et al., eds. (2007) The Unicode 5.0 Standard. Addison-Wesley. 1,420 pages. The complete presentation of the Unicode system of character encodings for all of the world's scripts and symbol systems, embracing 1,114,112 'code points', almost all available to encode characters â€" that may well be enough, even to include Chinese. Geoffrey Sampson (1985) Writing Systems. Stanford University Press. A readable survey (234 pages) by a linguist.

A Character-Based Constructional Approach to Chinese Imperfective Aspect Markers 在Zai and 着Zhe

“…Saussure referred to Chinese writing system as an "ideographic system" (1983, p. 26). More specifically, Chinese characters are also declared to be "logographic writing system" (Diringer, 1962;Fabar, 1992), "morpho-syllabic" (DeFrancis, 1989) "morphemic writing system" (Hill, 1967;Su, 2001). Although these classifications are based on different perspectives, they all acknowledge the semantic functions of Chinese characters.…”

Writing in the World and Linguistics

“…Is each Chinese character a grapheme, or the components it is compounded from, or even the individual brush strokes?) The Voegelins (Voegelin and Voegelin 1961), Hill (1967), andHerrick (1974) are among those in this school who essayed studies of the typology of writing. Bolinger (1946) and Berkeley's own Malkiel (1968) contributed articles on uses of writing that go beyond the simple representation of language.…”

Writing systems: A case study in cultural evolution

“…This requires incorporating a phonographic element into the script. Hence logographic scripts must always be logophonic, or more precisely morphophonic (morphemic + phonetic signs) (DeFrancis 1989:58;Hill 1967) ones.…”