name of Canadian Aboriginal syllabics (also an abugida). In a true syllabary there may be graphic similarity between characters that share a common consonant or vowel sound, but it is not systematic or at all regular. For example, the characters for 'ke', 'ka', and 'ko' in Japanese hiragana have no similarity to indicate their common "k" sound (these being: け, か and こ). Compare this with Devanagari, an abugida, where the characters for 'ke', 'ka' and 'ko' are के, का and को respectively, with क indicating their common "k" sound. Comparison to alphabets English, along with many other Indo-European languages like German and Russian, allows for complex syllable structures, making it cumbersome to write English words with a syllabary. A "pure" syllabary based on English would require a separate glyph for every possible syllable. Thus one would need separate symbols for "bag", "beg", "big", "bog", "bug", "bad", "bed", "bid", "bod", "bud", "bead", "bide", "bode", etc. Since English has well over 10,000 different possibilities for individual syllables, a syllabary would be poorly suited to represent the English language. However, such pure systems are rare. A workaround to this problem, common to several syllabaries around the world (including English loanwords in Japanese), is to write an echo vowel, as if the syllable coda were a second syllable: ba-gu for "bag", etc. See also List of syllabaries References