List of writing systems


s are used to record human language, and may be classified according to certain common features.

Proto-writing and ideographic systems

Ideographic scripts and pictographic scripts are not thought to be able to express all that can be communicated by language, as argued by the linguists John DeFrancis and J. Marshall Unger. Essentially, they postulate that no true writing system can be completely pictographic or ideographic; it must be able to refer directly to a language in order to have the full expressive capacity of a language. Unger disputes claims made on behalf of Blissymbols in his 2004 book Ideogram.
Although a few pictographic or ideographic scripts exist today, there is no single way to read them because there is no one-to-one correspondence between symbol and language. Hieroglyphs were commonly thought to be ideographic before they were translated, and to this day, Chinese is often erroneously said to be ideographic. In some cases of ideographic scripts, only the author of a text can read it with any certainty, and it may be said that they are interpreted rather than read. Such scripts often work best as mnemonic aids for oral texts or as outlines that will be fleshed out in speech.
NameLanguageNotes-
Adinkra
Akan		-
Birch-bark glyphsAnishinaabemowin-
DongbaNaxiOften supplemented with syllabic Geba script.-
Ersu Shaba scriptErsu-
Kaidā glyphs-
Lusona--
LukasaLuba
NsibidiEkoi, Efik, Igbo-
Siglas poveiras-
Testerianused for missionary work in Mexico-

There are also symbol systems used to represent things other than language:
NameNotes
EmojisUsed as expressive icons in modern media
BlissymbolsA constructed ideographic script used primarily in Augmentative and Alternative Communication
iConjiA constructed ideographic script used primarily in social networking
Isotype
LoCoS-
A wide variety of notation systems

Logographic systems

In logographic writing systems, glyphs represent words or morphemes rather than phonetic elements.
No logographic script is composed solely of logograms; all contain graphemes that represent phonetic elements as well. These phonetic elements may be used on their own, or may serve as phonetic complements to a logogram. In the case of Chinese, the phonetic element is built into the logogram itself; in Egyptian and Mayan, many glyphs are purely phonetic, whereas others function as either logograms or phonetic elements, depending on context. For this reason, many such scripts may be more properly referred to as logosyllabic or complex scripts; the terminology used is largely a product of custom in the field, and is to an extent arbitrary.

Consonant-based logographies

In a syllabary, graphemes represent syllables or moras.
In most of these systems, some consonant-vowel combinations are written as syllables, but others are written as consonant plus vowel. In the case of Old Persian, all vowels were written regardless, so it was effectively a true alphabet despite its syllabic component. In Japanese a similar system plays a minor role in foreign borrowings; for example, is written +, and as +. Paleohispanic semi-syllabaries behaved as a syllabary for the stop consonants and as an alphabet for the rest of consonants and vowels.
The Tartessian or Southwestern script is typologically intermediate between a pure alphabet and the Paleohispanic full semi-syllabaries. Although the letter used to write a stop consonant was determined by the following vowel, as in a full semi-syllabary, the following vowel was also written, as in an alphabet. Some scholars treat Tartessian as a redundant semi-syllabary, others treat it as a redundant alphabet. Other scripts, such as Bopomofo, are semi-syllabic in a different sense: they transcribe half syllables. That is, they have letters for syllable onsets and rimes rather than for consonants and vowels ''.''

Consonant-vowel semi-syllabaries

A segmental script has graphemes which represent the phonemes of a language.
Note that there need not be a one-to-one correspondence between the graphemes of the script and the phonemes of a language. A phoneme may be represented only by some combination or string of graphemes, the same phoneme may be represented by more than one distinct grapheme, the same grapheme may stand for more than one phoneme, or some combination of all of the above.
Segmental scripts may be further divided according to the types of phonemes they typically record:

Abjads

An abjad is a segmental script containing symbols for consonants only, or where vowels are optionally written with diacritics or only written word-initially.
A true alphabet contains separate letters for both consonants and vowels.

Linear nonfeatural alphabets

Linear alphabets are composed of lines on a surface, such as ink on paper.