LING 15 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Kana, Persian Language, Devanagari
Document Summary
Usually the number of consonants > number of vowels. Throughout muslim middle east & africa: lebanon, palestine, syria, Jordan, iraq, s arabia, gulf states, morocco, libya, egypt. Vowel symbols are secondary (combined with consonants as ligature) Devanagari: hindi, nepali, sindhi, marathi, thai, khmer, lao. Vowels added as diacritics (one part of glyph represent vowel, other part represents consonant, visually) Glyphs represent sound patterns rather than words. Some glyphs recur but with diff sounds. Japanese kana glyphs: adapted from kanji (logographic) Logogram: symbol representing words ancient systems- cuneiform, hieroglyphics. Chinese: symbols combine semantic & phonological components. Kanji: borrowed from chinese but used for japanese words, sometimes in combination with hiragana for suffixes. Homophones: english- right and write, left and left; chinese- symbol that stands for scorpion also stands for ten thousand bc it sounds the same. East: a(cid:374)(cid:272)ie(cid:374)t logogra(cid:373)s se(cid:373)i-phonological characters & syllabaries. Source of aramaic, arabic, hebrew, greek, brahmi scripts: ara(cid:271)i(cid:272) a(cid:271)jad farsi, urdu alpha(cid:271)ets.
