Okay so a cool system for classifying writing systems, outside of the alphabetic, abjad, abugida, alphasyllabic, morphographic typology, is one proposed by Voegelin & Voegelin in their 1961 “Typological Classification of Systems with Included, Excluded, & Self-Sufficient Alphabets”! Writing systems, according to them, can be divied up according to how their their systems represent sounds! This groups logographic (called alphabet included) systems under one roof, & pictographic (or alphabet excluded) systems under another, tho the latter is not considered writing as it encodes meaning rather than language directly.
Their phonological writing systems, or self-sufficient alphabets, tho are classified as some combo of the following;
- CVD: symbols that represent CV pairs, & show verbal differences by different appearances
- CVS: as above by uses similarities
- IC: independent consonant symbols
- IV: independent vowel symbols
So for the phonographic systems more commonly used, we can see:
- Alphabet: IC+IV
- Abjad: IC
- Alphasyllabary: CVS+IV
- Syllabary: CVD+IV
Ofc this classificatory system does have its short falls! It seems to have trouble with logosyllabaries like Mayan or forms of Cuneiform! But it does have power over the usual terminology in describing things like Cree Syllabics & Qaniujaaqpait, where alphasyllabary is the closest thing we have to call it! But with self-sufficient alphabets we can call it CVS+IV+IC* (*sortaaaaaaa, there are symbols for sole consonants but I haven’t seen them be truely independent, & tend to just represent codas, the final consonant(s) of a syllable)
It is cool but reading about all this stuff, learning about different theories for how we understand writing is just WAW 🥺 my reading mentions Ugaritic as the sole example of CVD+IC, which sounds FASCINATING! & MAYBE ILL DO MY NEXT POST ON IT!
