1453: Languages and their Writing Systems Dec 3, 2018

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When discussing the status of a writing system, it cannot be spoken about only as the system for characters and also has a lot to do with the language used to write it. This can be illustrated by taking a look at the writing of Hebrew. Hebrew is not the only language to utilize the Assyrian writing system, though it may be the most prominent of those today. This writing system is also used for Yiddish, Ladino, and other Jewish languages over the years, except while Hebrew did not represent all of its vowels as also occurs with the Arabic and Ge’ez script, but even using all of the same characters Yiddish and Ladino do. This means that for the former it is an abjad whereas for the latter two the same system of characters is an alphabet. And indeed, when Hebrew is transliterated into Latin characters—while there is no standardization for this—it almost always will be vocalic. In this way, a writing system only really can be assessed as it applies to an individual language. There will be more about this tomorrow.

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