for Taiwanese Hokkien and Hakka, and Suzhou Phonetic Symbols for Wu Chinese. Bopomofo is not divided into consonants and vowels, but into onsets and rimes. Initial consonants and "medials" are alphabetic, but the nucleus and coda are combined as in syllabaries. That is, a syllable like kan is written k-an, and kwan is written k-u-an; the vowel is not written distinct from a final consonant. Pahawh Hmong is somewhat similar, but the rime is written before the initial; there are two letters for each rime, depending on which tone diacritic is used; and the rime /āu/ and the initial /k/ are not written except in disambiguation. Old Persian cuneiform was somewhat similar to the Tartessian script, in that some consonant letters were unique to a particular vowel, some were partially conflated, and some simple consonants, but all vowels were written regardless of whether or not they were redundant. The practice of plene writing in Hittite cuneiform resembles the Old Persian situation somewhat and may be interpreted such that Hittite cuneiform was already evolving towards a quasi-alphabetic direction as well. The modern Bamum script is essentially CV-syllabic, but doesn't have enough glyphs for all the CV syllables of the language. The rest are written by combining CV and V glyphs, making these effectively alphabetic. The Japanese kana syllabary occasionally acts as a semi-syllabary, for example when spelling syllables that do not exist in the standard set, like トゥ, tu, or ヴァ, va. In such cases, the first character functions as the consonant and the second as the vowel. Further reading Correa, José Antonio (2005): «Del alfabeto fenicio al semisilabario paleohispánico», Palaeohispanica 5, pp. 137–154. Ferrer i Jané, Joan (2005): «Novetats sobre el sistema dual de diferenciació gràfica de les oclusives sordes i sonores», Palaeohispanica 5, pp. 957–982. Rodríguez Ramos, Jesús (2000): «La lectura de las inscripciones sudlusitano-tartesias», Faventia 22/1, pp. 21–48. References External links Iberian Epigraphy – Jesús Rodríguez Ramos Types of writing systems