Script
From KneeQuickie
A script is a writing system. Generally, it consists of permanent marks on a surface that are arranged into patterns to represent spoken language. These marks, or characters, may represent anything from entire morphemes to phonemic features.
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Type
Existing scripts fall into one of several categories, though many contain elements of scripts outside their group.
Logographic
Logographic scripts generally write morphemes and words as single units (so "big" would be one character, "understand" would be two, asf) using what is called a logogram. Since most languages have thousands of roots, words, and morphemes, logographic scripts tend to be equally huge, possessing several thousand characters at least. Naturally, this makes such scripts both extremely difficult to learn and to create, and thus fairly rare among conlangers.
Although we often assume that logographic writing consists entirely of pictograms and ideograms, many such scripts also incorporate phonemic elements as well. Chinese characters often consist of two parts, one providing a clue to the phonemic reading and another hinting at the meaning.
Complex
In practice, many if not most logographic systems use more than just logograms. Mayan and Egyptian, for example, wrote both morphemes and phonemes depending on various factors and Japanese uses both logograms (the kanji) and syllabic characters (the kana). Ancient Egyptian combined logographic determiner characters for meaning with abjad-like letters to indicate sounds. Such scripts may take on a polyfunctional quality in some cases when a given character gains multiple uses.
Syllabary
The syllabary uses characters that represent syllables like /ka/ or /pi/, making it a phonemic rather than morphemic system. As a result, this kind of script requires far fewer characters than a logography, between 50 to several hundred generally speaking. A syllabary may exist as an independent script (as happens in Cherokee) or it may supplement a logography the way Mayan or Japanese syllable characters do. Due to their ease of construction in comparison to logographies, they have gained much more currency among conlangers.
Abugida
The abugida resembles the syllabary, and uses a set of characters denoting a consonant and an inherent vowel such as /a/. Using diacritics, the script alters this vowel or suppresses it entirely to create different syllables. Despite the resemblance to the syllabary system, this approach requires far fewer characters since it does not require separate characters for each consonant + vowel combination. The abugida appears primarily in India and south-east Asia, though the Old Persian syllabary bares some similarities to the concept.
Alphabet
The alphabet writes individual phonemes rather than whole syllables or morphemes. Thus, as with the abugida, they require only a few dozen characters to represent the entire phoneme set of a language. Though many assume them to be easier than logographic scripts, alphabets may nonetheless contain their share of irregularities (as with English).
Abjad
The abjad writes consonants but not vowels, or "Th 'bjd wrts cnsnnts bt nt vwls", leading some linguists to refer to it as a "consonantal alphabet". This system includes many Middle Eastern scripts like that of Arabic and has close ties to the Semitic languages due to their unique morphology. In practice, many abjads have means for indicating vowels partially or entirely, potentially bringing them close to abugidas or syllabaries.
Featural
This script writes phonemic features rather than phonemes. For example, in a featural system, the character for /d/ would likely be formed from the character for /t/. Given the degree of phonetic analysis required, naturally occurring featural scripts are exceedingly rare, with examples limited primarily to the hangeul alphabet in Korean. Featural elements may appear in scripts that otherwise don't follow this model, however. Many variants of the Latin script use diacritics to indicate regular modifications of sounds (such as length or nasalization) as do the Japanese syllabaries to create voiced kana.
Avant Garde
For the most part, conlangers have stuck to established forms of writing in their works due to familiarity and ease of working out mechanics. A few intrepid, or whimsical, ones have delved into more radical ideas, however.
Dynamic
Scripts based on the dynamic model indicate meanings or pronunciations by relationships between graphemes or their basic properties rather than by the specific shapes of the graphemes themselves. In such a script, a given sound or meaning could potentially have an infinite number of ways it could be written.
Sentence-writing
A mostly tongue-in-cheek idea, though one might call some pictographic systems a form of this.
Direction
Some writing systems can be written in a number of different directions, others were originally written in various directions but eventually settled on one direction. Why some writing systems are written in one direction, and others in other directions is a bit of a mystery. It might have something to do with the writing surfaces and implements originally used, fashion, the handedness of the creators of the writing systems, or other factors.
Examples of various writing directions:
Left to right, horizontal
Right to left, horizontal
Left to right, vertical
Right to left, vertical
Written in horizontal lines running alternatively from right to left then left to right.
Nonlinear
Scripts of this type do not use any of the standard directions but instead branch and bend in various ways.
