Syllabary

A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) moras which make up words. A symbol in a syllabary, called a syllabogram, typically represents an (optional) consonant sound (simple onset) followed by a vowel sound (nucleus)—that is, a CV or V syllable—but other phonographic mappings such as CVC, CV- tone, and C (normally nasals at the end of syllables) are also found in syllabaries.A writing system using a syllabary is complete when it covers all syllables in the corresponding spoken language without requiring complex orthographic / graphemic rules, like implicit codas (⟨C1V⟩ ⇒ /C1VC2/) silent vowels (⟨C1V1+C2V2⟩ ⇒ /C1V1C2/) or echo vowels (⟨C1V1+C2V1⟩ ⇒ /C1V1C2/). This loosely corresponds to shallow orthographies in alphabetic writing systems.Languages that use syllabic writing include Japanese, Cherokee, Vai, the Yi languages of eastern Asia, the English-based creole language Ndyuka, Shaozhou Tuhua, and the ancient language Mycenaean Greek (Linear B). In addition, the undecoded Cretan Linear A is also believed by some to be a syllabic script, though this is not proven.The languages of India and Southeast Asia, as well as the Ethiopian Semitic languages, have a type of alphabet called an abugida or alphasyllabary. In these scripts, unlike in pure syllabaries, syllables starting with the same consonant are generally expressed with graphemes based in a regular way on a common graphical element. Usually each character representing a syllable consists of several elements which designate the individual sounds of that syllable.English, along with many other Indo-European languages like German and Russian, allows for complex syllable structures, making it cumbersome to write English words with a syllabary. A 'pure' syllabary would require a separate glyph for every syllable in English. Thus one would need separate symbols for 'bag', 'beg', 'big', 'bog', 'bug', 'bad', 'bed', 'bid', 'bod', 'bud', 'bead', 'bide', 'bode', etc. Since English has well over 10,000 different possibilities for individual syllables, a syllabary would be poorly suited to represent the English language. However, such pure systems are rare. A work-around to this problem, common to several syllabaries around the world (including English loanwords in Japanese), is to write an echo vowel, as if the syllable coda were a second syllable: ba-gu for 'bag', etc. Another common approach is to simply ignore the coda, so that 'bag' would be written ba. This obviously would not work well for English, but was done in Mycenaean Greek when the root word was two or three syllables long and the syllable coda was a weak consonant such as n or s (example: χρυσός chrysos written as ku-ru-so).