A few extracts will serve to show the nature of the ethical teaching given to Japanese children in medieval days: *A syllabary of moral precepts like the ethical copy-books of Occidentals.
Either the sounds of the Japanese words must be changed to those of the Chinese ideographs; or the sounds of the Chinese ideographs must alone be taken (irrespective of their meaning), and with them a phonetic syllabary must be formed.
With the Heian epoch is connected the wide use of the phonetic script known as kana, which may be described as a syllabary of forty-seven symbols formed from abbreviated Chinese ideographs.
The pupil, therefore, who wished to learn the cuneiform syllabary at all thoroughly was compelled to know something of the old Sumerian language of Chaldaea.
The language was that of Babylonia, the script was the cuneiform syllabary of the same country.
Naturally the study of the foreign syllabary and language was facilitated in every possible way.
The fact, then, that the cuneiform syllabary was studied and used from the banks of the Euphrates to those of the Nile, brings with it the further fact that throughout this area there must have been numerous schools and teachers.
The original picture-writing out of which the cuneiform syllabary developed, had been invented by the primitive non-Semitic population of Chaldaea, from whom it had been afterwards adopted and adapted by their Semitic successors.
It is believed by Professor Sayce and others that the hieroglyphic syllabary found on the monuments of Cyprus is based on this Hittite system of hieroglyphics, and not upon those of Egypt and Mesopotamia.
This alphabet was founded upon or adapted from the syllabary of the Babylonians.
But whether the foundation upon which they built it was the hieroglyphic or hieratic script of the Egyptians, or the elaborate cuneiform syllabary of Mesopotamia, is not even now clearly established.
This lasted for several centuries, until the Japanese finally gave up and created a simplified system which included their own syllabary or alphabet.
The Ethiopic system is thus rather a syllabary than an alphabet.
The kana[13] is a syllabary of forty-seven letters, which by diacritical marks, may be increased to seventy.
The characters in this syllabary were called katakana, i.
This syllabaryenabled the Japanese to express the sounds of their vernacular without difficulty.
The people of Annam have adopted the Chinese characters without making a syllabary or alphabet to express their own vernacular.
The sounds and meanings of Chinese characters are expressed in this syllabary in the duoglott works prepared by the Coreans for learning Chinese; while it is used by itself in works intended for the natives.
This syllabary and that invented for the Cherokees by Guess, are the only two in the world.
The characters of this syllabary were formed by taking Chinese characters, either in whole or in part, and using them phonetically, but as indivisible syllables.
When the Semites adopted the old Accadian syllabary they used these signs quite as often to express the Semitic sounds of the original ideographs as for syllabic signs.
In the formation of this syllabary the ideographic characters of the Chinese system were found unnecessary and were rejected.
The language chiefly used in these documents was the Semitic Babylonian, in the syllabary of the older Turanian form.
This had arisen in the attempts to adapt a syllabaryand characters expressing an agglutinative speech to the uses of a Semitic language.
THE Semitic Assyrians and the Semitic people of other portions of Mesopotamia, had adopted the cuneiform script and the Turanian syllabary as early as the days of Sargon.
The Assyrian syllabarycould only be explained as a foreign importation, not as an evolution from a Semitic speech.
That they were not entirely depended upon by many intelligent nations that possessed a syllabary is one of the curiosities in the history of written speech.
Now in applying the syllabary of one language to the uses of another, it might be expected that the signs expressing a certain syllabic sound in one language would be used to express the syllabic sounds in the other.
Those who cling to the theory of a non-Semitic origin of the cuneiform syllabary will, of course, be ready to answer in the affirmative.
The sign which represents this bird in the cuneiform syllabary also signifies 'fate.
See a syllabarygiving lists of gods, Rawlinson, ii.
The cuneiform syllabary is largely Semitic in character.
A syllabary describes the god as a 'raging' deity, a description that suggests solar functions.
It seems likely, therefore, that the Hittite characters became a syllabary in which each character represented a separate syllable, and survived in this form to a late age.
There is reason to think that the curious syllabary which continued to be used in Cyprus as late as the age of Alexander the Great was derived from the Hittite hieroglyphs.
These hieroglyphics were the still undeciphered writing of the Hittite tribes and if, as seems possible, the Cypriote syllabary were derived from them, they would be a testimony to the western spread of Hittite influence at a very early epoch.
We may well ask if they had also borrowed the cuneiform syllabary for the purposes of their official correspondence,* and if the professional scribe with his stylus and clay tablet was to be found in their cities.
Another disadvantage due to the hieroglyphic origin of the Assyrian syllabary is the number of different phonetic values the same character may bear.
The broken clay tablets belonging to this library not only furnished the student with an immense mass of literary matter, but also with direct aids towards a knowledge of the Assyrian syllabary and language.
Only it is becoming every day more probable that the hieroglyphics in which the inscriptions are written were the origin of a curious syllabary once used throughout Asia Minor, which survived in Cyprus into historical times.
Though the syllabary is essentially of Sumerian origin there is much in it which is traceable to a Semitic source.
Yet two more languages written in the cuneiform syllabary have lately been revealed by the cuneiform tablets found at Tel el-Amarna in Upper Egypt.
The pictorial origin of the syllabary has proved of important assistance in reading the texts.
Large use was further made of the vowels, the syllable ba, for example, being written ba-a, so that the syllabary tended to become an alphabet.
Finally, it is quite possible that sabitum is actually the Akkadian equivalent of the Sumerian Sal Gestinna, though naturally until this equation is confirmed by a syllabary or by other direct evidence, it remains a conjecture.
This is confirmed by the writing En-gi-dú in the syllabary CT XVIII, 30, 10.
When the cuneiform syllabary was superseded in Palestine by the so-called Phoenician alphabet we do not know.
For a while the hieroglyphic writing of Egypt had taken the place formerly occupied by the cuneiformsyllabary of Babylonia, and Egyptian culture had succeeded in supplanting that which had come from the East.
Such an introduction, however, implies that the new alphabet had already taken deep root among the merchants of Canaan, and driven out before it the cumbrous syllabary of Chaldæa.
It was probably at the court of Sargon of Akkad that what we may term the final revision of the syllabary took place.
The text in question is the exceedingly important syllabary designated by Prof.
Poebel, is explained in a later syllabary as the equivalent of the Semitic-Babylonian word abûbu (cf.
For not only are the first two elements of the Sumerian name identical with those of the Semitic Ut-napishtim, but the names themselves are equated in a later Babylonian syllabaryor explanatory list of words.
Their system remained a syllabary interspersed with ideograms, but excluded an alphabet.
Conder's decipherment was based on a comparison of the Hittite characters with the Sumerian pictographs on the one hand and the syllabary which was used by Greeks in Cyprus, Caria, and Lydia on the other.
Such a syllabary having been introduced, its obvious utility led presently to its application, not merely to the spelling of proper names, but to general purposes of writing.
The primitive characters are few in number--about fifteen--and are joined with one another to form a syllabary that is both ideographic and phonetic.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "syllabary" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
