What do you call a language that doesn't use the European alphabet (abcd…), like Mandarin and Japanese?
Is there a word for it, or maybe an adjective that characterizes as being "non-alphabetic"?
I really can't think of a word.
Learn English – What do you call a language that doesn’t use the European alphabet
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Best Answer
Chinese uses ideograms. It has an ideographic character set. Each character represents an idea.
Ancient Egyptian used hieroglyphs. It had a hieroglyphic character set. Each character was a more-or-less recognizable picture of something.
Most Slavic languages use Cyrillic alphabets. Their characters are letters. Saint Cyril developed the first such alphabet as part of his work converting the Moravians.
Arabic and Hebrew are written in scripts that are named for their languages. They have letters for their consonants. Since medieval times, Hebrew has had diacritic marks for its vowels. Some Arabic vowel sounds are represented by letters; others are optionally represented by diacritic marks.