Abstract
There are two principal categories of writing systems; those representing words, images, or ideas contained in language, and those representing the sound of the languages. Among the latter, there are two main types, those representing so-called “concrete” sounds (Havelock, 1976, 1982), called syllabaries because each sign represents a fully pronounceable syllable, and those that represent phonemes, i.e., parts or segments of sounds, namely the alphabets. There are two kinds of alphabets: those like Hebrew and Arabic which use consonants alone to indicate the radicals of the words, and those like Latin or Greek which use a combination of consonants and vowels to represent fully the sequence of syllables that form the words. (Some syllabaries, such as the Indic Nagari and its derivates, and also the Ethiopian script and the Korean Hangul, are in fact very sophisticated systems of phonemic articulation that include the phonemic analysis within the syllabic character. They present a different situation which must be investigated on its own terms.)
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de Kerckhove, D. (1988). Logical Principles Underlying the Layout of Greek Orthography. In: de Kerckhove, D., Lumsden, C.J. (eds) The Alphabet and the Brain. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-01093-8_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-01093-8_10
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