Predominant national and selected regional or minority scripts

Alphabetic
[L]ogographic
and [S]yllabic
Abjad Abugida
Latin
Cyrillic
Cyrillic and Latin
Greek
Georgian
Armenian
Hanzi [L]
Kana [S] / Kanji [L]
Hangul [S]
a
Hanja
b
[L]
Arabic
Arabic and Latin
Hebrew
North Indic
South Indic
Ethiopic
Thaana
Canadian syllabic
a
Featural-alphabetic.
b
Limited.
Writing system
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Writing systems)
A writing system is an
organized, regular method
(typically standardized) of
information storage and transfer
for the communication of
messages (expressing thoughts or
ideas) in a language by visually
(or possibly tactilely) encoding
and decoding (known as writing
and reading) with a set of signs
or symbols, both known
generally as characters (with the
set collectively referred to as a
'script').
[1]
These characters,
often including letters and
numbers, are usually recorded
onto a durable medium such as
paper or electronic
storage/display, although non-
durable methods may also be
used, such as writing in sand or
skywriting.
The general attributes of writing
systems can be placed into
broad categories such as
alphabets, syllabaries, or
logographies. Any particular system can have attributes of more than one category. In the alphabetic category, there
is a standard set of letters (basic written symbols or graphemes) of consonants and vowels that encode based on
the general principle that the letters (or letter pair/groups) represent phonemes (basic significant sounds) of the
spoken language. A syllabary typically correlates a symbol to a syllable (which can be a pairing or group of
phonemes, and are considered the building blocks of words). In a logography, each character represents a word,
morpheme or semantic unit (which themselves can be pairings or groups of syllables). Other categories include
abjads (which is an alphabet where vowels are not indicated at all) and abugidas, also called alphasyllabaries
(where vowels are shown by diacritics or other modification of consonants). A system's category can often be
determined just by identifying the number of symbols used within the system. Alphabets typically use a set of 20-to-
35 symbols to fully express a language, whereas syllabaries can have 80-to-100, and logographies can have several
hundreds of symbols.
Most systems will typically have an ordering of its symbol elements so that groups of them can be coded into larger
clusters like words or acronyms (generally lexemes), giving rise to many more possibilities (permutations) in
meanings than the symbols can convey by themselves. Systems will also enable the concatenation (a "stringing
together") of these smaller groupings (sometimes referred to by the generic term 'character strings') in order to