文字

「字」跳轉到呢度。要睇時間單位，請去字 (時間)。

文字就係符號嘅一種，用嚟表示概念、記綠口語、事、物，用作人同人溝通嘅一種媒介。

史

有章法書寫之前，有原始書寫。多數有圖示符或速記符。

下面段文未譯好，歡迎你幫手。

• Jiahu Script Symbols on tortoise shells in Jiahu, ca. 6600 BC
• Vinca script (Tărtăria tablets), ca. 4500 BC
• Early Indus script, ca. 3500 BC

The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late Neolithic of the late 4th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from ca. 3200 BC with earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BC.

The Chinese script may have developed independently of the Middle Eastern scripts, around 1600 BC.

The pre-Columbian Mesoamerican writing systems (including among others Olmec and Maya scripts) are also generally believed to have had independent origins.

It is thought that the first true alphabetic writing appeared around 2000 BC, as a representation of language developed by Semitic workers in Egypt (see History of the alphabet). Most other alphabets in the world today either descended from this one innovation, many via the Phoenician alphabet, or were directly inspired by its design.

書寫系統嘅種類

傅儀學英文字母嘅教科書。啲英文字母都係從左寫到右，而漢字解釋就好似傳統中文噉由上便寫到下便。

最古老嘅文字主要都係基於象形符號同埋表意符號呢啲元素嘅自然語標。大部分書寫系統都可以廣泛噉歸為三個類別：語標、 音節 同埋 字母 （亦或係 segmental）；之但係，各種變化性好大嘅書寫系統入便是但揀出嘅任何一種，呢三種類別通通都可以喺其中搵倒。噉樣就通常就好難單一分類某一種書寫系統。嗰啲語標、音節同埋字母三者相混，好難分類嘅系統就經常用複雜系統嚟描述。

文字嘅種類	每個符號代表	例
意音文字	語素	漢字
音節文字	音節	日文假名
字母	音素（子音或母音）	拉丁字母
Abugida	音素（子音+母音）	印度天城文
輔音字母	音素（子音）	阿拉伯字母
特征字母	語音特征	韓國嘅諺文

意音文字

內文： 意音文字

Early Chinese character for sun (ri), 1200 B.C.

Modern Chinese character for sun (ri)

語標 係一個單獨寫出來嘅符號, 代表住一個文法上嘅字. 大部分中文字 都係語標.

每個符號代表一個字，準確啲係代表一個語素，

下面段文未譯好，歡迎你幫手。

many logograms are required to write all the words of language. The vast array of logograms and the memorization of what they mean are the major disadvantage of the logographic systems over alphabetic systems. However, since the meaning is inherent to the symbol, the same logographic system can theoretically be used to represent different languages. In practice, this is only true for closely related languages, like the Chinese languages, as syntactical constraints reduce the portability of a given logographic system. Japanese use Chinese logograms extensively in its writing systems, with most of the symbols carrying the same or similar meanings. However, the semantics, and especially the grammar, are different enough that a long Chinese text is not readily understandable to a Japanese reader without any knowledge of basic Chinese grammar, though short and concise phrases such as those on signs and newspaper headlines are much easier to comprehend.

While most languages do not use wholly logographic writing systems many languages use some logograms. A good example of modern western logograms are the Hindu-Arabic numerals — everyone who uses those symbols understands what 1 means whether he or she calls it one, eins, uno, yi, ichi or ehad. Other western logograms include the ampersand &, used for and, the at sign @, used in many contexts for at, the percent sign % and the many signs representing units of currency ($, ¢, €, £, ¥ and so on.)

Logograms are sometimes called ideograms, a word that refers to symbols which graphically represent abstract ideas, but linguists avoid this use, as Chinese characters are often semantic–phonetic compounds, symbols which include an element that represents the meaning and element that represents the pronunciation. Some nonlinguists distinguish between lexigraphy and ideography, where symbols in lexigraphies represent words, and symbols in ideographies represent words or morphemes.

The most important (and, to a degree, the only surviving) modern logographic writing system is the Chinese one, whose characters are used, with varying degrees of modification, in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and other east Asian languages. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Mayan writing system are also systems with certain logographic features, although they have marked phonetic features as well, and are no longer in current use.

See List of writing systems for a list of predominantly-logographic writing systems.

音節文字

內文： 音節文字

下面段文未譯好，歡迎你幫手。

As logographic writing systems use a single symbol for an entire word, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate) syllables, which make up words. A symbol in a syllabary typically represents a consonant sound followed by a vowel sound, or just a vowel alone. In a true syllabary there is no systematic graphic similarity between phonetically related characters (though some do have graphic similarity for the vowels). That is, the characters for "ke", "ka", and "ko" have no similarity to indicate their common "k"-ness. Compare abugida, where each grapheme typically represents a syllable but where characters representing related sounds are similar graphically (typically, a common consonantal base is annotated in a more or less consistent manner to represent the vowel in the syllable).

Other languages that use syllabic writing include Mycenaean Greek (Linear B) and Native American languages such as Cherokee. Several languages of the Ancient Near East used forms of cuneiform, which is a syllabary with some non-syllabic elements.

See List of writing systems for a list of syllabaries.

字母

內文： 字母

下面段文未譯好，歡迎你幫手。

An alphabet is a small set of letters — basic written symbols — each of which roughly represents or represented historically a phoneme of a spoken language. The word alphabet is derived from alpha and beta, the first two symbols of the Greek alphabet.

In a perfectly phonemic alphabet, the phonemes and letters would correspond perfectly in two directions: a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a speaker could predict the pronunciation of a word given its spelling. Each language has general rules that govern the association between letters and phonemes, but, depending on the language, these rules may or may not be consistently followed.

Perfectly phonemic alphabets are very easy to use and learn, and languages that have them (for example Serbian or Finnish) have much lower barriers to literacy than languages such as English, which has a very complex and irregular spelling system. As languages often evolve independently of their writing systems, and writing systems have been borrowed for languages they were not designed for, the degree to which letters of an alphabet correspond to phonemes of a language varies greatly from one language to another and even within a single language. In modern times, when linguists invent a writing system for a language that didn't previously have one, the goal is usually to develop a phonemic alphabet. It should be noted that a truly phonetic alphabet for a natural spoken language would be very cumbersome, as it would have to a huge variety of phonetic variation. An example of such a writing system is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

See alphabet for more information about alphabets. See List of writing systems for a list of alphabetic writing systems.

Abugida

內文： Abugida

An abugida is an alphabetic writing system whose basic signs denote consonants with an inherent vowel and where consistent modifications of the basic sign indicate other following vowels than the inherent one.

Thus, in an abugida there is no sign for "k", but instead one for "ka" (if "a" is the inherent vowel), and "ke" is written by modifying the "ka" sign in a way that is consistent with how one would modify "la" to get "le". In many abugidas the modification is the addition of a vowel sign, but other possibilities are imaginable (and used), such as rotation of the basic sign, addition of diacritical marks, and so on.

The obvious contrast is with syllabaries, which have one distinct symbol per possible syllable, and the signs for each syllable have no systematic graphic similarity. The graphic similarity comes from the fact that most abugidas are derived from abjads, and the consonants make up the symbols with the inherent vowel, and the new vowel symbols are markings added on to the base symbol.

The Ethiopic script is an abugida, although the vowel modifications in Ethiopic are not entirely systematic. Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics can be considered abugidas, although they are rarely thought of in those terms. The largest single group of abugidas is the Brahmic family of scripts, however, which includes nearly all the scripts used in India and Southeast Asia.

The name abugida is derived from the first four characters of an order of the Ge'ez script used in some religious contexts. The term was coined by Peter T. Daniels.

See List of writing systems for a list of abugida-based writing systems.

輔音字母

內文： 輔音字母

下面段文未譯好，歡迎你幫手。

The first type of alphabet that was developed was the abjad. An abjad is an alphabetic writing system where there is one symbol per consonant. Abjads differ from regular alphabets in that they only have characters for consonantal sounds. Vowels are not usually marked in abjad.

All known abjads (except maybe Tifinagh) belong to the Semitic family of scripts, and derive from the original Northern Linear Abjad. The reason for this is that Semitic languages and the related Berber languages have a morphemic structure which makes the denotation of vowels redundant in most cases.

Some abjads (like Arabic and Hebrew) have markings for vowels as well, but only use them in special contexts, such as for teaching. Many scripts derived from abjads have been extended with vowel symbols to become full alphabets, the most famous case being the derivation of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician abjad. This has mostly happened when the script was adapted to a non-Semitic language.

The term abjad takes its name from the old order of the Arabic alphabet's consonants Alif, Bá, Jim, Dál, though the word may have earlier roots in Phoenician or Ugaritic.

Abjad is still the word for alphabet in Arabic, Malay, and Indonesian.

See List of writing systems for a list of abjad-based writing systems.

特征字母

A featural script represents finer detail than an alphabet. Here symbols do not represent whole phonemes, but rather the elements (features) that make up the phonemes, such as voicing or its place of articulation. Theoretically, each feature could be written with a separate letter; and abjads or abugidas, or indeed syllabaries, could be featural, but the only prominent system of this sort is Korean Hangul. In Hangul, the featural symbols are combined into alphabetic letters, and these letters are in turn joined into syllabic blocks, so that the system combines three levels of phonological representation.

寫字方向

Different scripts are written in different directions. The early alphabet could be written in any direction: either horizontal (left-to-right or right-to-left) or vertical (up or down). It could also be written boustrophedon: starting horizontally in one direction, then turning at the end of the line and reversing direction. Egyptian hieroglyph is one such script, where the beginning of a line written horizontally was to be indicated by the direction in which animal and human ideograms are looking.

The Greek alphabet and its successors settled on a left-to-right pattern, from the top to the bottom of the page. Other scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew, came to be written right-to-left. Scripts that incorporate Chinese characters have traditionally been written vertically (top-to-bottom), from the right to the left of the page, but nowadays are frequently written left-to-right, top-to-bottom, due to Western influences, a growing need to accommodate terms in the Roman alphabet, and technical limitations in popular electronic document formats. The Mongolian alphabet is unique in being the only script written top-to-bottom, left-to-right; this direction originated from an ancestral Semitic direction by rotating the page 90° counter-clockwise to conform to the appearance of Chinese writing. Scripts with lines written away from the writer, from bottom to top, also exist, such as several used in the Philippines and Indonesia.

參考

• Coulmas, Florian. 1996. The Blackwell encyclopedia of writing systems. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Daniels, Peter T., and William Bright, eds. 1996. The world's writing systems. Place: Name. ISBN 0-19-507993-0.
• DeFrancis, John. 1990. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1068-6
• Hannas, William. C. 1997. Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1892-X (paperback); ISBN 0-8248-1842-3 (hardcover)
• Rogers, Henry. 2005. Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-23463-2 (hardcover); ISBN 0-631-23464-0 (paperback)
• Sampson, Geoffrey. 1985. Writing Systems. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-1756-7 (paper), ISBN 0-8047-1254-9 (cloth).
• Smalley, W. A. (ed.) 1964. Orthography studies: articles on new writing systems. London: United Bible Society.

出面網頁

• decodeunicode 50,000 glyphs, Unicode Wiki
• About African writing systems by the John Henrik Clarke Africana Library at Cornell University:
  • http://www.library.cornell.edu/africana/Writing_Systems/Welcome.html
• General about writing systems
  • Omniglot

• Alphabetic Writing Systems
• Michael Everson's Alphabets of Europe
• The Unicode Consortium