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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 and CV-tone are also found in syllabaries. == Types == 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 ( ⇒ /C1VC2/) silent vowels ( ⇒ /C1V1C2/) or echo vowels ( ⇒ /C1V1C2/). This loosely corresponds to ''shallow'' orthographies in alphabetic writing systems. ''True'' syllabograms are those that encompass all parts of a syllable, i.e. initial onset, medial nucleus and final coda, but since onset and coda are optional in at least some languages, there are ''middle'' (nucleus), ''start'' (onset-nucleus), ''end'' (nucleus-coda) and ''full'' (onset-nucleus-coda) true syllabograms. Most syllabaries only feature one or two kinds of syllabograms and form other syllables by graphemic rules. Syllabograms, hence syllabaries, are ''pure'', ''analytic'' or ''arbitrary'' if they do not share graphic similarities that correspond to phonic similarities, i.e. the symbol for ''ka'' does not resemble in any predictable way the symbol for ''ki'', nor the symbol for ''a''. Otherwise they are ''synthetic'', if they vary by onset, rime, nucleus ''or'' coda, or ''systematic'', if they vary by all of them. Some scholars, e.g. Daniels,〔Peter Daniels, 1996. "The Study of Writing Systems", p. 4. In: Daniels & Bright, ''The World's Writing Systems''.〕 reserve the general term for analytic syllabaries and invent other terms (abugida, abjad) as necessary. ==Languages using syllabaries== Languages that use syllabic writing include Mycenaean Greek (Linear B), the North American language Cherokee, the African language Vai, the English-based creole Ndyuka written with the Afaka script, Yi language and formerly Nü Shu for the language of Xiangnan Tuhua in China. In addition, the undecoded Cretan Linear A is also believed by some to be a syllabic script, though this is not proven. The Chinese, Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform, and Maya scripts are largely syllabic in nature, although based on logograms. They are therefore sometimes referred to as ''logosyllabic''. The contemporary Japanese language uses two syllabaries together called kana, namely hiragana and katakana (developed around AD 700). They are mainly used to write some native words and grammatical elements, as well as foreign words, e.g. ''hotel'' is written with three kana, ホテル (''ho-te-ru''). Because Japanese uses many CV (consonant + vowel) syllables, a syllabary is well suited to write the language. As in many syllabaries, however, vowel sequences and final consonants are written with separate glyphs, so that both ''atta'' and ''kaita'' are written with three kana: あった (''a-t-ta'') and かいた (''ka-i-ta''). It is therefore sometimes called a ''moraic'' writing system. Languages that use syllabaries today tend to have simple phonotactics, with a predominance of monomoraic (CV) syllables. For example, the modern Yi script is used to write a language that has no diphthongs or syllable codas; unusually among syllabaries, there is a separate glyph for every consonant-vowel-tone combination (CVT) in the language (apart from one tone which is indicated with a diacritic). Few syllabaries have glyphs for syllables that are not monomoraic, and those that once did have simplified over time to eliminate that complexity. For example, the Vai syllabary originally had separate glyphs for syllables ending in a coda ''(doŋ),'' a long vowel ''(soo),'' or a diphthong ''(bai),'' though not enough glyphs to distinguish all CV combinations (some distinctions were ignored). The modern script has been expanded to cover all moras, but at the same time reduced to exclude all other syllables. Bimoraic syllables are now written with two letters, as in Japanese: diphthongs are written with the help of V or ''h''V glyphs, and the nasal coda is written with the glyph for ''ŋ'', which can form a syllable of its own in Vai. In Linear B, which was used to transcribe Greek, a language with complex syllables, complex consonant onsets were either written with two glyphs or simplified to one, while codas were generally ignored, e.g. ''ko-no-so'' for ''Knōsos'', ''pe-ma'' for ''sperma.'' The Cherokee syllabary generally uses dummy vowels for coda consonants, but also has a segmental grapheme for /s/, which can be used both as a coda and in an initial /sC/ consonant cluster. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Syllabary」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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