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The Shwa Gaits | Contents |
On the Principles page, I mentioned that Shwa can be written in several different Gaits. The underlying word - the 1D form - is the same, but the visible 2D form is different. In particular, the gaits differ on
All gaits are written from left to right in a row, with rows following each other down the page, and subsequent pages to the right or behind the current page. Visual details like the height and width of letters, the ratio of the height of tall letters to short ones, the width of spaces and the width of the strokes are left to individual fonts.
Gaits do not differ between languages : the same word in the same gait will look the same in different languages. But each language is written in a single gait; for example, English is always written in Alphabetic gait, and Chinese in Syllabary gait, even when an English name is embedded in a Chinese text.
The Home page of this site is a good place to see examples or all four gaits : the names of the languages. The name of the Arabic language in Arabic, al 'arabîyya, is written in the Abjad gait, the names of Chinese, Thai, Korean and Vietnamese in Syllabary gait, and the names of Japanese and Malay are written in Abugida gait. All the others are in Alphabet gait.
Before talking about the individual gaits, let's discuss why gaits are useful. All languages are a sequence of sounds, but those sounds are grouped together into larger units in different ways: words, syllables, mora (consonant + vowel) or sequences of consonants. That's why the scripts of the world are of different types: alphabets, abjads, abugidas and syllabaries. The various Shwa gaits focus readers on those units, highlighting what's important in each language.
For example, there are many languages in East Asia whose syllables fit a fixed pattern : each syllable has its own meaning, even when combined into a longer word, and has at most five elements (initial, semivowel, tone, vowel and coda) drawn from limited sets. In this system, it's important to delimit each syllable so that they can be recognized as a unit, and it's not so important to separate words. In fact, written Chinese and Korean don't need word spacing, while Vietnamese, written in the Latin alphabet, does. The Syllabary gait also makes similar syllables more different, helping us recognize them more easily.
In contrast, English words have complicated syllables, with varying lengths, clusters of both consonants and vowels, and many choices at each position. The division into words is very important, while the division into syllables isn't (is the first syllable of learning really lear?). For English, an alphabet enables us to build up words sound by sound, using spaces to separate each word from the next. And the Alphabet gait even allows us to indicate word stress - very important in English - without using accent marks. Most of these traits are shared by most other Indo-European languages, and they use Alphabet gait, too.
But there are many languages, from all over the world, whose syllables are restricted to consonant+vowel, and they often don't have many of either. In this category fit almost all the Austronesian and Niger-Congo languages (two of the largest language families in the world), in addition to many of the world's less-studied languages and even Japanese. For these languages, an abugida is the best choice, since an alphabet would be too short - there are too few symbols to make words as different as they should be. For example, Hawai'ian has only 8 consonants and 5 vowels, and an alphabet makes many words look alike. I'm srue yuo've seen thsoe snetneces yuo can raed eevn wehn teh leterts aer jmbeuld. But the Hawai'ian abugida has 40 kana, three times as many distinct symbols.
The Arabic script is an abjad whose short vowels are normally not written. That makes sense in Arabic and the other Afro-Asiatic languages, where the vowels are grammatical and can be inferred (just as stress can be inferred in many languages). It makes less sense in Farsi and Urdu, also now written in the Arabic script. Shwa writes Farsi and Urdu in Alphabet gait, but writes the Afro-Asiatic languages in the Abjad gait with vowels, albeit in a secondary role above and below the cursive skeleton of a word. This makes Arabic legible to foreigners while keeping the consonantal skeleton of words constant as they are inflected.
We're not using the gait names in their scholarly sense. Scholars consider that a syllabary can't be featural, but since all Shwa gaits are featural, we won't make that distinction. Scholars consider that a pure abjad has no written vowels, and that an abugida must have an unmarked inherent vowel, but Shwa writes all vowels in all gaits. We've just chosen names for the gaits that describe what level they focus on, not the details of how they work. In all cases, using the appropriate Shwa gait focuses the reader on the salient scale of the text, whether that be words, syllables, mora or consonantal roots.
Most of the Shwa you've seen so far has been in the Alphabet gait. It works like the Latin-based alphabet we use to write English and most European languages : each letter is written separately, in its own space, and words are separated from each other by a space as big as the other letters. Vowels are just as wide as consonants, but they're only half the height, so they can be written either high or low.
The Alphabet gait is used for most languages that currently use a real alphabet, not an abjad or abugida (whose vowels are not separate letters). In addition, it's used for the Indo-Iranian and Dravidian languages, whose phonetics resemble other Indo-European languages. However, many languages that were first given written forms in the last century or so, usually by scholars, missionaries or colonists from alphabet-using languages, should choose whichever gait is most appropriate. In those cases, which gait to use depends on the phonology of the language. In general, Alphabet gait is used for languages with consonant clusters, diphthongs, and a wide variety of syllable lengths and formulas.
The Abjad gait is used for Afro-Asiatic languages, in which a word is built around a trio of consonants. This root is the skeleton on which words are built by adding vowels to show inflection and derivation. In the current Arabic and Hebrew scripts, short vowels are usually not written, since readers can infer them (jst as yu cn infr thm in Englsh). But in the Shwa script, vowels are always written.
The Abjad gait is also both cursive and calligraphic. Cursive means the letters of a word flow together, while calligraphic means artistically expressed : a piece of Abjad text should be beautiful. In Abjad gait, the bottom of each consonant is connected to the top of the next consonant in the same word, while the vowels are written above and below the cursive line of consonants.
Consider the following diagram :
This shows the skeleton of an Abjad word. The first consonant starts at upper left and descends to lower right, and then there is a return stroke up and to the right to meet the next letter. The last letter ends at lower right with no return. High vowels are written above the bottom of the preceding consonant, while low vowels are written below the top of the preceding consonant. The results will look best if you vary the horizontal distance between letters to keep the spacing even - Abjad gait is Shwa's only proportional width gait.
What distinguishes one letter from another are the little dances that the pen does at the top and bottom of each stroke. Here's what the tops of common Shwa letters look like :
And here are the common bottoms :
When a vowel appears without a consonant, a Break is added as a "chair" (but Arabic uses a Catch). Ligatures are written by omitting the top of the suffix entirely - the ligature has two bottoms in a row. The Long mark is used both with vowels and with consonants. When used with consonants, it's written as an "echo" of the stem of the letter.
Let's look at an example, the name of the famous Caliph of Baghdad, Hārūn 'ar-Rashīd bin
Muḥammad bin 'al-Manṣūr, the hero of the Arabian Nights. First, here is his name in
traditional Arabic script :
هَارُون
الرَشِيد بِن
مُحَمَّد بِن
المَنصُور
Here is the same name in Shwa Alphabetic gait:
And here is the same name in Shwa Abjad gait:
The Abugida gait is used for languages whose words are a series of open syllables, like Japanese, Hawai'ian, and the Bantu languages. Each syllable consists of one consonant with a vowel attached to it (called a mora), combined into a square symbol called a kana. A high vowel is marked by a dot in the empty quarter, and that's where accents go, too (with a dot above if it's a high accent).
The kana are formed by extending the bottom of the consonant to form the vowel, in the same style as the semivowels. The vowels can be reflected left↔right to connect most easily, and are all written without lifting the pen, although in the cases of ae and a the pen has to retrace a stroke.
The bottoms of labial and hissing consonants don't curl upwards - they just point to the left. If the consonant has a pointy bottom, as do the coronal consonants, the vowel is attached to it directly, on the side opposite the top. Here is the o vowel attached to several different consonants :
A vowel with no preceding consonant is written with the Break :
But the Nasal suffix is written alone at double size.
Consonants without a following vowel, for instance the first consonant of a cluster, the prenasal prefix, an off- glide or a final consonant, are written with a "null vowel", a simple line. This null vowel is not a letter, and not encoded : it's simply a graphic device.
However, on-glides and suffixes are written as part of the kana, like ligatures :
Perhaps you already knew that a fluent Chinese reader can read faster than a fluent English reader, presumably because Chinese words look more different from each other than English words. It's common knowledge that we don't read by sounding out each letter, but by comprehending the entire "word picture" in a glance. That's why typography is so important, and why weird fonts are so hard to read.
The Syllabary Gait is the Shwa version of Chinese characters - it's a way to compress all the letters of a word into a small space, to show the boundaries of each word more clearly, and still to make words look as different as possible from each other within the constraints of a phonetic script (which Chinese writing is not). In other words, we're trying to keep all the advantages of Chinese writing with none of the disadvantages.
The Syllabary gait is used for languages which share most of the following criteria :
The list of languages that fit these criteria is dominated by east Asia :
The goal of Syllabary gait is to make each syllable look as distinctive as possible, despite being composed of the same shapes in the same square. Here's how it works: each block is written in a square that measures 3x3 "cells" the size of a Shwa vowel. In this square are arranged the following elements :
The position of these four elements depends on the tone:
The initial consonant always fills the lefthand column. This helps to establish the rhythm of characters. If there is no initial consonant, use the Break (but Chinese uses the yh semivowel).
If the syllable has no tone (or the language is not tonal, for example Korean), then the vowel and final are stacked on the right side. If the vowel is high, then it's written above the final:
For example, here is the name of the Korean alphabet, Hangul :
If there's no final, then the vowel and tone are stacked on the right. If there's no tone, replace it with a space. Again, if the vowel is high, then it's written above the tone:
This helps to make every block easy to recognize. Here are some examples of Syllabary gait (from Chinese) :
In the first block of Guǎngdōng, the tone mark is low falling, but the position is for low running. When tone sandhi change a tone, as in this case, we change the mark but not the position. That helps us recognize the character even after the change.
In many of these languages, there are also a few words that merit special attention, for instance er in Chinese (Beijing dialect) and m in Cantonese. But they're written in the same style.
And here is the Cantonese particle a, used to soften questions. It has no initial, no semivowel (there are no semivowels in Cantonese), no tone sign (mid tone) and no final!
As you can see, Shwa Syllabary gait doesn't have as much variety of design as Chinese characters do, but Shwa compensates with more variety of stroke - curves, triangles - and with more varied use of empty space. I hope it will turn out to be as legible.
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