Logographic, Syllabic, and Alphabetic Languages
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I want to talk a bit about three categories of written language: logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic.
- Logographic languages have characters which are meant to visually represent a word, think of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.
- The characters in syllabic languages represent single syllables. Languages such as Korean have this property.
- I suppose anyone reading this article is familiar with alphabetic languages, as English is one. They have alphabets containing characters that represent the phonemes1 for that language.
Let's start with alphabets. In theory, an alphabet is the most character-efficient way to build a language, meaning you need less characters to exist in order to encode every possible word. That's great but alphabets can also get themselves into quite the mess. Take English for example: English was unstandardized for most of its existence and it was never really properly standardized. As such, you commonly find multiple correct spellings of the same word, redundant characters (I'm looking at you K / C), and possibly the worst of it all: ambiguous phonology. Is it analogue or analog? Tonne or ton? neighbour or neighbor? Why do we need both C and K in the word lock? It's pronounced no differently than the word loc (if you're Scottish then there's probably a bone to pick here but as far as the bastardized English word loc goes, it's the same as lock). And when I type read and read, you have no idea whether it's two of the same word, or two different words and in what order. Of course context works its magic most of the time, but if you've spoken enough English you know there's too much ambiguity.
This is unrelated to the discussion of alphabets, but English grammar also has it's pitfalls. Just for fun have a look at the following sentence, how do you interpret it at first and how many meanings can you deduce?
I saw a man on a hill with a telescope.
Anyhow, you could certainly overhaul English or any alphabetical language to invalidate my gripes, but who says we need less characters in the first place? This is where syllabic languages come in. If you're willing to learn a few more characters, you can lower the number of characters needed to write a word rather than the number of characters that exist. Syllabic languages take this approach, but in a less extreme manner compared to logographic languages.
In my opinion, Korean is a good example of well-designed syllabic language. I'm not an expert but I once put the time into learning all the characters and it only took a few days to read words whose meaning I was otherwise oblivious to. But hey, at least I could pronounce them (poorly)! I've since forgotten most of that knowledge but I'm confident it wouldn't be hard to relearn. The reason Korean is so easy to read is that it has a relatively new writing system that some folks actually sat down and thought about all at once called Hangeul! Before the completion of Hangeul circa 1443-1444, Koreans used classical Chinese alongside some phonetic writing systems–kind of like Japan now (with Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji), but Kanji, derived from Chinese, deviates enough to be considered a Japanese script at this point. Hangeul makes Korean interesting because it's technically an alphabet. It uses the alphabetical consonant and vowel sounds to construct syllabograms2 that are phonemically consistent. I think an example is better than a description here:
The word "water" in Korean uses a single syllabogram, 물 (mul). 물 is comprised of the consonant ㅁ (m), vowel ㅜ (u), and final consonant ㄹ (l).
With this system you get nice, dense, syllabically-composed words and the pronunciation fidelity of an alphabet with the added bonus that memorizing all the characters is as easy as knowing the components.
If you want to take on a whole lot of characters in exchange for the benefit of super compact words, then logographic languages are the way to go! Consider written Chinese; many people don't know is that Chinese is actually logographic. Because Chinese is a bit of a complicated topic, let me restrict what I'm talking about to what is called "Traditional Chinese", e.g. the script you'd see walking down the streets of Taiwan or Hong Kong, but not in China where you'd see "Simplified Chinese". Each Chinese logogram3 is composed of radicals that present an at least somewhat visually intelligible concept. Here I show you three characters that are visually and meaningfully tied together. You can see what I mean by "somewhat visually intelligible" in noticing the first character looks vaguely like a gate (and quite like a saloon door):
This character 門 means "gate" or "door", you can see it's closely related to the characters 開 for "open" and 關 for "closed". The pronunciation for these characters depends on what spoken Chinese language or dialect you choose, so I'll omit any romanization.
Historically, ancient Chinese was more true to life than it is now; the symbols reflected the way things really look a little more. But as language evolves, so does its written form, and now the character for "sun" looks like 日 instead of 🌞. I believe it was at the Hong Kong Museum of History where I was able to see a fascinating cascade of Chinese characters as they had incrementally changed over the centuries. I don't have a photo to share but Chinese would certainly make more sense to you if you'd seen it for yourself.
Alright there's a brief glimpse at a few languages with different writing systems! Mentioning the character-efficiency and whatnot is just a fun way to incorporate a metric for comparison into my discussion–I don't really think it means much. As far as I can tell there is no clear theorectical best system. But I have to say I can think of at least one language due for a modern overhaul. We can directly observe the result of a thoughtfully produced writing system in Korea right now and I'm really fond of it. I hope I was able to provide an appetizing taste of each of these writing systems. Maybe you're inspired to do a little extra reading or even learn a language with a different writing system than your own. I'm working on Cantonese myself and I've been told many times I'm a masochist due to its difficulty… Whatever the case may be, I think it's rewarding to know a bit more about language!