On Mon, 26 Nov 2018 at 23:39, Christian Gauger-Cosgrove <captainkirk...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Mon, 26 Nov 2018 at 03:44, Liam Proven via cctalk > <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > If it's in Roman, Cyrillic, or Greek, they're alphabets, so it's a letter. > > > Correct, Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic are alphabets, so each > letter/character can be a consonant or vowel. > > > I can't read Arabic or Hebrew but I believe they're alphabets too. > > > Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Punic, Aramaic, Ugaritic, et cetera are > abjads, meaning that each character represents a consonant sound, > vowel sounds are either derived from context and knowledge of the > language, or can be added in via diacritics. > > Devanagari and Thai (and Tibetan, Khmer, Sudanese, Balinese...) are > abugidas, where each character is a consonant-vowel pair, with the > "base" character being one particular vowel sound, and alternates > being indicated by modifications (example in Devanagari: "क" is "ka", > while "कि" is "ki"; another example using Canadian Aboriginal > Syllabics "ᕓ" is "vai" whereas "ᕗ" is "vu"). > > > I don't know anything about any Asian scripts except a tiny bit of > > Japanese and Chinese, and they get called different things, but > > "character" is probably most common. > > > Japanese actually uses three different scripts. Chinese characters > (the kanji script of Japanese, and the hanja script of Korean) are > logograms. > > Japanese also has two syllabic scripts, katakana and hiragana where > each character represents a specific consonant vowel pair. > > Korean hangul (or if you happen to be from the DPRK, chosŏn'gŭl) is a > mix of alphabet and syllabary, where individual characters consist of > sub parts stacked in a specific pattern. Stealing Wikipedia's example, > "kkulbeol" is written as "꿀벌", not the individual parts "ㄲㅜㄹㅂㅓㄹ". > > > And now for even more fun, Egyptian hieroglyphics and cuneiform (which > started with Sumerian, and then used by the Assyrians/Babylonians and > others) are a delightful mix of logographic, syllabic and alphabetic > characters. Because while China loathes you, Babylon has a truly deep > hatred of you and wishes to revel in your suffering.
Um. Yes. Thank you for that. Very informative, interesting, and I did actually know most of it already but maybe others didn't. The thing is that it's not actually very germane to the question I was addressing, which was "what do you call the individual units in different scripts?" I.e. "letter" vs "glyph" vs "character" vs "ideogram" vs "grapheme", etc... :-) -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
