Comment on Are you able to tell which language is which by looking?
palordrolap@fedia.io 15 hours agoThe kana aren't alphabets either. They're syllabaries. The closest they get to alphabetic are the characters that represent the single vowel sounds, A, I, O, E, U... aaand N for some reason, but those are very restricted in how and where they're allowed to be used.
grillgamesh@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 hours ago
huh, the more you know.
I’ve always called them alphabets because of their phentic similarity to abcde/etc as each character represents one sound.
palordrolap@fedia.io 5 hours ago
Alphabets are finer grained. Every alphabetic letter is either a consonant or vowel. Sometimes a letter can be one or the other depending on the specific language and context, but nonetheless, consonant or vowel.
Syllabaries pack two or more of these into a single character. Most of the kana are consonant-vowel pairings, with the exception of the six I mentioned previously, and as a result you can end up with a lot more symbols than a pure alphabet would need.
You can also go the other way into abjads, which generally only write consonants. Vowels take the form of optional marks on those consonants. Hebrew and Arabic are the best known examples of these. And you'd be less inaccurate to call those alphabets to be fair.