Do all non-syllabic, non-logographic scripts have pronounceable names for their letters for spelling?

Question

If you ask an English speaker to spell a word, there are specific, widely-known names for all the letters to fill this need. The same appears to be true for all Phoenician-derived alphabets that I can think of, incl. Arabic, Hebrew, etc. (Although I don’t actually know whether they commonly use those names when spelling words since those names are longer than English’s — perhaps someone can enlighten me here?)

I think we can disregard syllabaries because the names for the letters here are obvious. Similarly for other scripts in which each lexeme constitutes a syllable (such as Han). Nevertheless, feel free to include interesting tidbits about this if you have any.

But what about other alphabetic/abjad scripts that are unrelated to Phoenician? What about the Brahmi scripts (Devanagari etc.)? Unfortunately I don’t know about many other scripts, but according to Unicode there must be loads. :) Can letter names for spelling be regarded as universal, or do some cultures really have no means of spelling out a word?

Answer 1

The alphabet has only been invented a few times, so this is easier to describe than you'd think.

The first lineage of alphabets is the Phoenician lineage, which includes the modern Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabets, as well as a number of less prominent scripts both living and dead. While I haven't checked every one of these scripts, the Phoenicians themselves named their letters, and the tradition of naming letters was passed down to every derived script that I know of. Some of them kept or adapted the Phoenician names (Hebrew, Greek, Arabic), while others created a simplified naming scheme of their own (Latin, Cyrillic), but they all have names.

The second major lineage of alphabets is the Brahmic lineage, which includes Devanagari as its most prominent member, but includes all of the myriad scripts of India and Southeast Asia in its family tree. Here, too, the original script had named letters, and the tradition of named letters seems to have been kept in all of the daughter scripts.

That covers all of the unambiguous alphabets in the world. There is a third, somewhat contentious example, however.

Korean hangul are usually presented as a syllabary, but unlike most syllabaries every hangul syllabic glyph can be fully decomposed into a set of strokes that consistently and predictably represent individual segments in the syllable, with well-defined rules for placement. Therefore hangul arguably represents an alphabet with an unusual, syllabic arrangement system, in contrast with the simple linear arrangement used in the other major alphabets. And to the best of my knowledge the individual strokes that make up a hangul glyph do not have names--or if they do, their names are somewhat specialized terms that aren't commonly used by people describing how to spell something. This is as close as I think you're going to get to an alphabet without names for its letters.

Update: Hangul does have names for its letters, as pointed out in the comments.

Answer 2

I don't think there's an alphabet without names for the characters because if there wasn't, how can they spell the words? In certain circumstances spelling is neccessary. Even logographic scripts like Chinese have "names" for the strokes and "names"/pronunciations for the radicals.

The strangest I've ever seen is the character ん/ン(n) in Japanese. To spell it we only produce a nasal sound inside the throat without a vowel because in Japanese that character represents the coda and is the only one that cannot produce a complete syllable alone. So IMO it's hardly called a "pronounceable name" although we can still spell the words.