Although we have learned about alphabets and syllabaries in class, what struck me the most was working to understand how a language might have both. For example, when learning the Russian alphabet, which is written in the Cyrillic alphabet, many things become clear. One such idea was the fact that there were letters in the Russian language which, according to our concepts, would count as a syllable.
For example, there is the letter a, which represents the ‘ah’ sound. This can be combined with others letters like the ‘t’ to create та, but there is also a singular letter to represent the sound of a combination of letters, of y + a, resulting in Я. This ‘ya’ sound is considered only one letter to Russians, but made me think about the other letters in the Russian alphabet which are indeed syllables in their own right, such as Е , Ю , and Ё (ye, yu, and yo, respectively). [For more information about how to pronounce the alphabet, click here.]
This phenomenon also pops up in Latin-based alphabets which sport letters which, using an English alphabet, would take two letters to create and be considered a syllable. In Czech, for example, the alphabet sports the following letters, which might seem familiar but whose sounds are completely altered by the diacritic mark ( ˇ ). Our standard ‘s’ transforms into a ‘sh‘ sound when written as š, and ‘c’ turns into the ‘ch‘ in ‘church’ when written as č. Czech also sports its own version of the syllable ‘ye’ in one letter, when ‘e’ is written as ě. [For a complete list of the Czech alphabet, click here.]
These changes between alphabets and what we consider one sound, one syllable, or even a letter always interests me and I think that alphabets can be more flexible than we often give them credit for.
