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Writing Systems & Families

Alphabets, écritures et familles de langues : du cunéiforme et des hiéroglyphes au hangul, et comment les langues du monde se rapportent.

An alphabet represents individual sounds using a set of letters.
The Latin alphabet is the most widely used writing system in the world.
Logographic systems use symbols to represent whole words or ideas.
Chinese is written using thousands of logographic characters.
The Cyrillic alphabet is used for Russian and several other languages.
Arabic and Hebrew are written from right to left.
The Indo-European language family includes English, Hindi, and Spanish.
Japanese uses three scripts: hiragana, katakana, and kanji.
A syllabary is a writing system where symbols represent syllables.
The Greek alphabet was the first to include separate vowel letters.
Romance languages like French and Italian descended from Latin.
The Rosetta Stone helped scholars decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs.
English belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family.
The Devanagari script is used to write Hindi and Sanskrit.
Braille is a tactile writing system read by touch using raised dots.
Spanish and Portuguese are closely related and mutually somewhat intelligible.
Cuneiform was one of the earliest writing systems, developed by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia.
Cuneiform script was written by pressing a reed stylus into wet clay tablets.
Egyptian hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic elements in one system.
An abjad is a writing system in which symbols mainly represent consonants.
Arabic and Hebrew scripts are classic examples of consonant-based abjads.
An abugida represents consonants with vowels indicated by diacritics or modifications.
Devanagari is an abugida in which each consonant carries an inherent vowel.
The Phoenician alphabet was the ancestor of many later alphabetic writing systems.
The Greek alphabet was adapted from the Phoenician script around the ninth century BCE.
The Latin alphabet developed from the Etruscan alphabet in ancient Italy.
The Etruscan alphabet was itself derived from an early Greek alphabet.
The Cyrillic script was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the ninth century.
Cyrillic is traditionally attributed to the followers of Saints Cyril and Methodius.
The Glagolitic alphabet was the oldest known Slavic alphabet of medieval Europe.
Hangul is the writing system used for the Korean language.
Hangul was created under King Sejong the Great in the fifteenth century.
Hangul groups its letters into syllabic blocks representing each spoken syllable.
Hangul is often praised for its systematic and phonetic design.
Japanese hiragana and katakana are both syllabaries derived from Chinese characters.
Katakana is mainly used in Japanese for foreign loanwords and emphasis.
Kanji are Chinese characters borrowed into the Japanese writing system.
Chinese characters are called hanzi in the Mandarin Chinese language.
Simplified Chinese characters were introduced in mainland China in the twentieth century.
Traditional Chinese characters remain in everyday use in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
The Cherokee syllabary was invented by Sequoyah in the early nineteenth century.
Sequoyah's syllabary enabled widespread literacy among the Cherokee people.
Linear B was an early script used to write the Mycenaean Greek language.
Linear B was famously deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952.
Linear A, an older Minoan script, remains undeciphered to this day.
The ancient Indus Valley script has not been conclusively deciphered.
Maya hieroglyphic writing was a logosyllabic script of ancient Mesoamerica.
The Maya script combined logograms with phonetic syllable signs.
Ogham was an early medieval alphabet used to write the Irish language.
Ogham letters were formed by lines carved across or along a central stemline.
Runic alphabets, called futharks, were used by the early Germanic peoples.
The Elder Futhark was the oldest form of the runic alphabet.
Runes were often carved into stone, wood, or metal objects.
The Brahmi script was the ancestor of most scripts of South and Southeast Asia.
Many Indian scripts descend from the ancient Brahmi writing system.
Tamil is written in its own distinctive script descended from Brahmi.
The Ge'ez script is an abugida used for several Ethiopian languages.
Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia, is written in the Ge'ez script.
The Armenian alphabet was created by Mesrop Mashtots around 405 CE.
The Thai script is an abugida derived from the older Khmer script.
The Khmer script is used to write the Cambodian national language.
The Tibetan script is an abugida derived from an Indian Brahmic source.
The traditional Mongolian script is written vertically from top to bottom.
The traditional Mongolian script was adapted from the Old Uyghur alphabet.
Vietnamese is now written with a Latin-based alphabet called chu Quoc ngu.
Vietnamese was formerly written with Chinese-derived characters known as chu Nom.
The International Phonetic Alphabet represents the distinct sounds of spoken language.
The International Phonetic Alphabet was first published in the late nineteenth century.
A grapheme is the smallest distinct unit in a writing system.
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that distinguishes meaning in speech.
Orthography refers to the conventional spelling system of a language.
A digraph is a pair of letters representing a single sound.
In English, the letters s and h form a digraph representing one sound.
A diacritic is a mark added to a letter to alter its pronunciation.
The acute accent and the umlaut are common examples of diacritical marks.
Boustrophedon is writing that alternates direction from one line to the next.
Some early Greek inscriptions were written in the boustrophedon style.
Most modern alphabets are written from left to right across the page.
The Maldivian Thaana script is written from right to left.
Pictograms convey meaning through pictorial resemblance to real objects.
Ideograms represent ideas or concepts rather than specific words or sounds.
A logogram is a single written character that represents a whole word.
The ampersand is a logogram standing for the English word and.
Numerals such as the digit seven function as logograms across many languages.
The Rongorongo script of Easter Island remains undeciphered by scholars.
The Proto-Sinaitic script is among the earliest known forms of alphabetic writing.
Proto-Sinaitic letters were derived from earlier Egyptian hieroglyphic signs.
The word alphabet comes from the Greek letters alpha and beta.
The Greek alphabet gave rise to both the Latin and Cyrillic scripts.
A scriptio continua text is written without spaces between the words.
Ancient Latin and Greek were often written in scriptio continua.
Word spacing in European writing became common in the early Middle Ages.
The printing press with movable type was developed in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg.
Gutenberg printed his famous Bible in Mainz during the 1450s.
Movable type printing existed in East Asia centuries before Gutenberg.
Bi Sheng invented movable type using baked clay in eleventh-century China.
A serif is a small stroke at the end of a letter's main strokes.
Sans-serif typefaces lack the small finishing strokes called serifs.
Calligraphy is the art of decorative or beautiful handwriting.
Arabic calligraphy is a highly developed and respected traditional art form.
A ligature joins two or more letters into a single combined glyph.
The letters f and i are often joined into a single ligature.
Capital letters are also called uppercase or majuscule letters.
Small letters are also called lowercase or minuscule letters.
Carolingian minuscule was a standardized script of early medieval Europe.
Carolingian minuscule developed during the reign of Charlemagne.
The Indo-European family is the world's most widely spoken language family.
The Sino-Tibetan family includes Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman languages.
The Afroasiatic family includes Arabic, Hebrew, and the ancient Egyptian language.
The Niger-Congo family is the largest language family of the African continent.
Swahili belongs to the Bantu group of the Niger-Congo family.
The Austronesian family spans from Madagascar across to the Pacific islands.
Malay and Tagalog are members of the broad Austronesian language family.
The Dravidian family includes Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam.
Dravidian languages are spoken mainly in southern India and parts of Sri Lanka.
The Uralic family includes Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian.
The Turkic family includes Turkish, Azerbaijani, and Uzbek.
The Japonic family includes Japanese and the Ryukyuan languages.
A language isolate has no demonstrated relationship to any other language.
Basque is a well-known language isolate spoken in western Europe.
The Slavic branch of Indo-European includes Russian, Polish, and Czech.
The Celtic branch of Indo-European includes Irish, Welsh, and Scottish Gaelic.
The Iranian branch includes Persian, Kurdish, and Pashto.
The Indo-Aryan branch includes Hindi, Bengali, and Punjabi.
Sanskrit is an ancient Indo-Aryan language with an extensive literature.
Latin is the ancestor of the entire Romance branch of Indo-European.
Romanian is a Romance language spoken mainly in southeastern Europe.
The Germanic branch includes German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages.
Comparative linguistics reconstructs ancestral languages from their related descendants.
Proto-Indo-European is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European family.
Sir William Jones noted similarities among Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin in 1786.
Grimm's Law describes regular sound changes in the Germanic languages.
Jacob Grimm helped formulate the sound shift now bearing his name.
A cognate is a word descended from the same ancestral form as another.
The English word mother and the German word Mutter are cognates.
A loanword is a word borrowed from one language into another.
English has borrowed many loanwords from both French and Latin.
A language family is a group of languages descended from a common ancestor.
A protolanguage is the reconstructed common ancestor of related languages.
Dialects are regional or social varieties of a single language.
Mutual intelligibility helps distinguish dialects from separate languages.
A pidgin is a simplified language arising from contact between different groups.
A creole is a stable language that develops from an earlier pidgin.
Haitian Creole developed largely from a French vocabulary base.
A lingua franca is a language used for communication between different groups.
English serves as a global lingua franca in many fields today.
Esperanto is a constructed international auxiliary language created for easy learning.
Esperanto was created by L. L. Zamenhof in the late nineteenth century.
A syllable is a unit of pronunciation built around a vowel sound.
Tone languages use differences in pitch to distinguish word meanings.
Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language with several distinct tones.
Vowels and consonants are the two basic categories of speech sounds.
The Coptic alphabet was used to write the later stages of Egyptian.
The Coptic script was based mainly on the Greek alphabet.
The Gothic alphabet was devised by Bishop Ulfilas to translate the Bible.
The Aramaic script was ancestral to many Middle Eastern alphabets.
The Hebrew square script developed from the older Aramaic alphabet.
The Syriac script was used by various Christian communities of the Near East.
The Nabataean script contributed to the development of the Arabic alphabet.
The Arabic script is written cursively with most of its letters joined.
Arabic letters change shape depending on their position within a word.
The Avestan alphabet was created to record the Zoroastrian scriptures.
Old Persian cuneiform was used in the royal inscriptions of the Achaemenids.
Hieratic was a cursive form of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing.
Demotic was a later cursive Egyptian script used for everyday documents.
The Rosetta Stone bears the same decree in hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Greek.
Jean-Francois Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs in the 1820s.
Champollion used the Rosetta Stone to break the hieroglyphic code.
The Behistun Inscription helped scholars decipher ancient cuneiform writing.
Henry Rawlinson played a key role in decoding Old Persian cuneiform.
A scribe was a professional trained to read and write in ancient societies.
Literacy was historically limited to small specialized groups of people.
Papyrus was a writing material made from a reed plant in ancient Egypt.
Parchment was a writing surface made from treated animal skin.
Vellum is a fine grade of parchment made from calf skin.
Paper was invented in China and later spread westward to other regions.
Cai Lun is traditionally credited with improving papermaking in ancient China.
An inscription is text carved or engraved onto a hard surface.
A manuscript is a document written by hand rather than printed.
An alphabet typically contains a fixed and ordered set of letters.
The English alphabet contains exactly twenty-six distinct letters.
The Hawaiian alphabet uses only about a dozen letters in total.
A featural script encodes phonetic features in the shapes of its symbols.
Hangul is often cited as an example of a featural writing system.
Shorthand systems allow rapid writing using abbreviated symbols.
The Pitman and Gregg systems are well-known forms of English shorthand.
Morse code represents letters using sequences of dots and dashes.
The N'Ko alphabet was created in 1949 for West African Manding languages.
The Vai syllabary was developed in Liberia during the nineteenth century.
Old Church Slavonic was the first literary language of the Slavic peoples.
The Greek language has been written continuously for over three thousand years.
Furigana are small kana printed beside kanji to show their pronunciation.
Pinyin is a Latin-based system for transcribing the sounds of Mandarin Chinese.
Romanization converts text from a non-Latin script into the Latin alphabet.
Transliteration maps characters from one script systematically onto another.
The Wade-Giles system was an older romanization of Mandarin Chinese.
The Cree syllabics were developed for Indigenous languages of Canada.
Inuktitut is written using a syllabic script in parts of northern Canada.
An acronym is a word formed from the initial letters of a phrase.
Punctuation marks help clarify the structure and meaning of written text.

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