Semi-syllabary
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A semi-syllabary is a writing system that behaves partly as an alphabet and partly as a syllabary. The main group of semi-syllabic writing are the Paleohispanic scripts of ancient Spain, a group of semi-syllabaries that transform redundant plosive consonants of the Phoenician alphabet into syllabograms.
Out of confusion, the term is sometimes applied to a different alphabetic typology known as abugida, alphasyllabary or neosyllabary, but for the purposes of this article it will be restricted to scripts where some characters are alphabetic and others are syllabic.
Iberian semi-syllabaries
The
The Tartessian or Southwestern script had a special behaviour: although the letter used to write a stop consonant was determined by the following vowel, the following vowel was also written. Some scholars treat Tartessian as a redundant semi-syllabary, others treat it as a redundant alphabet. Notably,
- Tartessian or Southwestern script – Tartessian or Southwestern language
- Southeastern Iberian script – Iberian language
- Northeastern Iberian script – Iberian language
- Celtiberian script – Celtiberian language
Other semi-syllabaries
Other scripts combine attributes of alphabet and syllabary. One of these is
Old Persian cuneiform was somewhat similar to the Tartessian script, in that some consonant letters were unique to a particular vowel, some were partially conflated, and some simple consonants, but all vowels were written regardless of whether or not they were redundant.
The practice of plene writing in Hittite cuneiform resembles the Old Persian situation somewhat and may be interpreted such that Hittite cuneiform was already evolving towards a quasi-alphabetic direction as well.
The modern Bamum script is essentially CV-syllabic, but does not have enough glyphs for all the CV syllables of the language. The rest are written by combining CV and V glyphs, making these effectively alphabetic.
The Japanese kana syllabary occasionally acts as a semi-syllabary, for example when spelling syllables that do not exist in the standard set, like トゥ, tu, or ヴァ, va. In such cases, the first character functions as the consonant and the second as the vowel.
Further reading
- Correa, José Antonio (2005): «Del alfabeto fenicio al semisilabario paleohispánico», Palaeohispanica 5, pp. 137–154.
- Ferrer i Jané, Joan (2005): «Novetats sobre el sistema dual de diferenciació gràfica de les oclusives sordes i sonores», Palaeohispanica 5, pp. 957–982.
- Rodríguez Ramos, Jesús (2000): «La lectura de las inscripciones sudlusitano-tartesias»[permanent dead link], Faventia 22/1, pp. 21–48.