The Japanese hiragana system shown here is a pure syllabary, with a separate glyph for each of the 45 possible syllables in Japanese (plus one for final -n). The transition to a full writing system occurs when it occurs to someone that the pictures can be borrowed to write words that sound the same but are hard to draw.įield notes: Can be recognized by the great number of symbols, in the thousands. The system begins, conceptually and presumably chronologically, with pictograms but these form only a small fraction of the system. The Sumerian, Maya, and Ancient Egyptian systems workedĪbout the same way. Most characters can be decomposed into two simpler characters, a radical vaguely indicating the meaning plus a phonetic giving the approximate pronunciation. Field notes are provided for recognizing each type in the wild.Ĭhinese characters each represent a single syllable, and in the vast majority of cases a single morpheme.
The samples are arranged by type of writing system, rather than by language family, as in the main list. In some cases, like Japanese, it would be rather strange to write out the numbers this way- the Japanese would use the Chinese or Western symbols, instead. Note that these are the names of the numbers, exactly as they are represented in the numbers list (like "one, two, three"), and not symbols for numbers (like 1, 2, 3). The Numbers in Various Writing Systems The Numbers in Various Writing SystemsĪs a supplement to my list of the numbers from 1 to 10 in over a thousand languages, here are the numbers written in a few native writing systems, plus ASL.
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