27 Nov
2018
27 Nov
'18
4:44 a.m.
On Mon, 26 Nov 2018 at 23:39, Christian Gauger-Cosgrove
<captainkirk359 at gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, 26 Nov 2018 at 03:44, Liam Proven via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Um. Yes. Thank you for that. Very informative, interesting, and I did
actually know most of it already but maybe others didn't.
The thing is that it's not actually very germane to the question I was
addressing, which was "what do you call the individual units in
different scripts?" I.e. "letter" vs "glyph" vs
"character" vs
"ideogram" vs "grapheme", etc... :-)
--
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If it's in Roman, Cyrillic, or Greek,
they're alphabets, so it's a letter.
Correct, Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic are alphabets, so each
letter/character can be a consonant or vowel.
I can't read Arabic or Hebrew but I believe
they're alphabets too.
Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Punic, Aramaic, Ugaritic, et cetera are
abjads, meaning that each character represents a consonant sound,
vowel sounds are either derived from context and knowledge of the
language, or can be added in via diacritics.
Devanagari and Thai (and Tibetan, Khmer, Sudanese, Balinese...) are
abugidas, where each character is a consonant-vowel pair, with the
"base" character being one particular vowel sound, and alternates
being indicated by modifications (example in Devanagari: "?" is
"ka",
while "??" is "ki"; another example using Canadian Aboriginal
Syllabics "?" is "vai" whereas "?" is "vu").
I don't know anything about any Asian scripts
except a tiny bit of
Japanese and Chinese, and they get called different things, but
"character" is probably most common.
Japanese actually uses three different scripts. Chinese characters
(the kanji script of Japanese, and the hanja script of Korean) are
logograms.
Japanese also has two syllabic scripts, katakana and hiragana where
each character represents a specific consonant vowel pair.
Korean hangul (or if you happen to be from the DPRK, chos?n'g?l) is a
mix of alphabet and syllabary, where individual characters consist of
sub parts stacked in a specific pattern. Stealing Wikipedia's example,
"kkulbeol" is written as "??", not the individual parts
"??????".
And now for even more fun, Egyptian hieroglyphics and cuneiform (which
started with Sumerian, and then used by the Assyrians/Babylonians and
others) are a delightful mix of logographic, syllabic and alphabetic
characters. Because while China loathes you, Babylon has a truly deep
hatred of you and wishes to revel in your suffering.