Writing Systems: Alphabet Abjad Logographic



World writing systems are classified by common distinguishing features. The useful name of the writing system is given first: alphabetic script, abjad script, or logographic script are the three writing systems discussed today.  Each writing system has distinguishing features.

ALPHABETIC : An alphabetic writing system uses letters, (basic sound units), to  represent sounds only without any reference to meaning.  Languages that fall under the alphabetic writing system have alphabets, which are the letters of a language, arranged in the order fixed by custom. The letters represent a phoneme. The alphabets are a system of characters or symbols representing sounds or things. String together letters (phonemes/sounds) and you make words. Words represent concepts and thoughts.

LOGOGRAPHIC: This writing system uses visual symbols to represent words, rather than phonemes to make up the word.

ABJAD: A writing system where symbols represent consonants, leaving the reader to supply the appropriate vowel. The Abjad writing system is very similar to syllabary (syllabary: sets of syllables have values), in which there is one glyph (symbol or letter) for each consonant or consonant sound unit. Some languages that use abjads are Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Urdu. Abjad writing systems have alphabets where vowels are not indicated at all. The vowels are shown by diacritics (marks or symbols above each letter). All Abjad languages (except one) belong to the Semetic Language Family.

What is the difference between alphabetic and logographic writing system? A word such as cat, is represented by three letters C.A.T, each of these letters represents a sound. The sounds come together to make a word. The logographic writing system does not have a letter for every phoneme. When you think about my previous posts (Chinese alphabet, Japanese alphabet, Korean alphabet), technically speaking, these are not alphabets. Logographic writing systems have visual representations of words rather than phonemic representation of words. When you are looking at a Chinese word, keep in mind that you are looking at an image – you are not looking at sounds. When we learn English as children, one of the first things we are told in elementary school is that if we do not know a word, ‘sound it out.’ This is not the case in logographic writing systems, because the writing is pictures, not sounds. Therefore, in logographic writing, little children cannot ‘sound it out.’

What is the difference between abjad and logographic writing systems? Abjad languages are alphabetic. The markings represent sounds. This is different from logographic writing systems where the words are symbols and not a collection of sounds.

What is the difference between alphabetic writing and abjad writing? For one, alphabetic writing represents vowels in the form of letters. Each letter represents a sound. Abjad alphabets are consonants only. The vowels do not have their own letters, rather, the vowels are represented in markings above the letter. 

Learning Pinyin - 拼音

Listened to more Chinese lessons today. I am starting to understand more, but it is really going very slowly. Chinese is so different to any other language that I have known or studied. I am still taking teeny, tiny baby steps.

I did have a bump in the road. When I synced up my I-pod, all of my language content vanished. I am now going through the tedious process of getting all the content again, and re-installing it on my device again.

In the meantime, I decided to get my listen in with some basic YouTube videos. NinHaoChina produces many Chinese tutorial videos. Unfortunately  it appears they are not uploading any new Chinese language material. (understandable, languages change at a glacial pace) Embedded below is a video I watched this morning. The video is about Pinyin, a very basic system to learn the four Chinese tones.



When you fall off language learning?

Unfortunately it happens to the best of us. Sometimes we go into our new language full throttle, then just get burnt out. One of my favorite language lovers of all time is Moses. I thought his Question of the Week was something that we should answer, or at least analyse in this blog post.

I think one of the answers to this problem, is to remind ourselves why we started learning the language in the first place.



quốc ngữ việt nam

Did you know that the Vietnamese alphabet is based on the Portuguese alphabet? It is true.


Chữ Quốc ngữ, còn được gọi tắt là Quốc ngữ, là hệ thống chữ viết chính thức hiện nay của tiếng Việt. Hệ thống này được xây dựng dựa trên chữ cái Latinh(cụ thể là trực tiếp từ chữ cái Bồ Đào Nha) thêm các chữ ghép và 9 dấu phụ — 4 dấu tạo ra các âm mới, và năm dấu còn lại dành cho thể hiện thanh điệu của từ. Hai loại dấu phụ có thể được viết cùng trên một chữ cái nguyên âm.

Bảng chữ cái

Bảng chữ cái tiếng Việt có 29 chữ cái, theo thứ tự:

Are some languages spoke faster than others?

A common complaint among students taking a foreign language, is that the professor speaks too fast.  It is almost a universal complaint. Many students feel like there is an avalanche of speech coming their way.

But - is the foreign speaker really speaking faster than normal?

No* - they are not speaking faster. This essay will explain the in's and out's as to why we think foreigners are speaking faster.


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