Have you ever wondered how many alphabets and other writing systems are used regularly?
I show this in the writing system indices on Omniglot, although it isn’t always easy for less well-known writing systems to be sure how much they are used.
Also, how many different writing systems can you recognise?
This video explains how to recognise all the writing systems in regular use:
It covers the following scripts:
Alphabets
Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian Georgian and Mongolian
Abugidas
Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Tibetan, Odia, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Sinhala, Burmese, Khmer, Lao, Thai and Thaana
East-Asian scripts
Chinese, Japanese and Korean
Rare scripts
Tifinagh, N’Ko, Samaritan, Syriac, Inuktitut/Cree, Cherokee, Yi, Ol Chiki, Fraser and Tai Le
Why is Mongolian listed as an abjad?
That is how Josiah, who made the video classifies it.
And why does the ‘Mongolian’ link take you to ‘Latin Alphabets’?
That was a mistake – now corrected.
Hi Emanuel, someone else has also recently pointed that out, thank you. I will add an annotation to the video soon.
Even though it developed from the same source as Hebrew and Arabic, since Mongolian has separate letters for vowels it should indeed be classified as an alphabet rather than an abjad. This is also true for most modified Arabic scripts used for other non-Arabic languages, such as Uyghur.