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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CrazyMage" data-source="post: 588870" data-attributes="member: 565">I second this as a great book.  Huge variety of scripts sampled for you.  Another great one is The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems by Florian Coulmas.  If one wants to talk about writing down sounds/meaning, it's better to speak about "writing systems" than "alphabets" since the latter term is used to refer to a limited set of characters that roughly correspond one for one with a particular sound.There's some variation, but a syllabary will have a sign for "ta" and a separate one for "te", and another one for "da" and so forth.  Katakana/hiragana of Japanese is one example of this, as is Amharic of Ethiopia.Hey, don't forget hieratic, Agback<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> It's a little tricky to describe how cuneiform was used because its use spanned 3000 years and many different languages.  When used for Sumerian, there are some conceptual  and functional similarities with Chinese (actually, the parallel goes to the next generation--Assyrian and Babylonian used Sumerian signs with Sumerian values but then also gave the same signs new values in their own language, somewhat like Japanese using an old Chinese value or a new Japanese value for various kanji) but cuneiform was even used in Ugarit for writing an alphabetic script.  So, very similar outward form, but rather different uses.</blockquote>

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