ConceptsSyllabary
Concept · linguistics · in 11 mysteries
Syllabary
A writing system whose signs stand for syllables rather than single sounds.
A script with a sign for each syllable (ka, ke, ki) rather than each consonant or vowel. Syllabaries have more signs than alphabets, usually fifty to a hundred, so counting a script's distinct signs is the first step in telling what kind it is. Linear A, Linear B and Cypro-Minoan are syllabaries; the Indus script's sign count puts it elsewhere.
Where it comes up
Byblos syllabary
The Byblos inscriptions record an archaic West Semitic language older than the split between Canaanite and Arabic, written with a syllabary of consonant and consonant-vowel signs.
Q: How many distinct signs does the script have, and how is it structured?An archaic West Semitic language (Mendenhall, Colless)Egyptian-derived syllabary, ancestor of the alphabet (Hoch, Colless)The intermediates between the Byblos syllabary and the linear alphabets are few and obscure, and the proto-alphabet is…Colless reports that 18 of 22 Phoenician letters have a shape ancestor in the syllabary and that his own values…Byblos syllabary sign table after Dunand (van Deukeren 2007, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Voynich Manuscript
The text is a natural language written phonetically in an invented alphabet or syllabary.
Eteocretan and Eteocypriot
The Cypriot syllabary descends from Cypro-Minoan on the same island, and Duhoux finds Eteocypriot endings comparable with Cypro-Minoan 1 sequences; Janko reads the Enkomi cylinder as an account possibly in Eteocypriot.
Q: What language do the Eteocypriot inscriptions of Amathus record?The Cypriot syllabary descends from Cypro-Minoan on the same island, and Duhoux finds Eteocypriot endings comparable…The Cypriot syllabary reads Greek texts into a full grammatical dialect, yet the same sign values applied to the…Unicode Cypriot Syllabary block (U+10800 to U+1083F)
Proto-Sinaitic and Wadi el-Hol: the first alphabet
The alphabet was not invented from hieroglyphs at all but simplified from the Byblos syllabary, a West Semitic script already in use on the Lebanese coast.
Glozel: the inscribed tablets of the Fradin field
The signs are a genuine script of a language not yet identified, possibly a syllabary or a magical or non-linguistic notation.
Dhofari script
The inscriptions are alphabetic: the sign count is too small for a syllabary, and three texts list more than 20 distinct letters each without repetition .
Linear A
SigLA, built by Ester Salgarella and Simon Castellan, redraws the signs of every inscription in GORILA and later additions, with sign-by-sign metadata, under a CC BY-NC-SA licence . ::: artifact A-HT-TABLETS3…
Proto-Elamite and Linear Elamite
The Bern group, whose OCLEI corpus and earlier syllabary work were independent of Desset, lists a forthcoming paper offering "external and semi-external sound value confirmations" of the 2022 values, which is the…
Phaistos Disc
Forty-five signs is too many for an alphabet and too few for a logographic system, and the word lengths, two to seven signs, fit a syllabary .
Cite it
Mysteries Department. (2026). Syllabary [Concept CPT0DECW02C55EK]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/CPT0DECW02C55EK
@misc{mysteriesdept_cpt0decw02c55ek,
title = {Syllabary},
author = {{Mysteries Department}},
year = {2026},
note = {Concept, catalog key CPT0DECW02C55EK},
url = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/CPT0DECW02C55EK}
}