Anabjad (/ˈæbdʒæd/ⓘ[1] orabgad[2][3]) is awriting system in which onlyconsonants are represented byletter signs, leaving thevowels to be inferred by the reader (unless represented otherwise, such as bydiacritics). This contrasts withalphabets that providegraphemes for both consonants and vowels. The term was introduced in 1990 byPeter T. Daniels.[4] Other terms for the same concept includepartial phonemic script,segmentally linear defective phonographic script,consonantary,consonant writing, andconsonantal alphabet.[5]
Impure abjads represent vowels with either optionaldiacritics, a limited number of distinct vowel glyphs, or both.
According to the formulations ofPeter T. Daniels,[7] abjads differ fromalphabets in that only consonants, not vowels, are represented among the basicgraphemes. Abjads differ fromabugidas, another category defined by Daniels, in that in abjads, the vowel sound isimplied byphonology, and wherevowel marks exist for the system, such asniqqud forHebrew andḥarakāt forArabic, their use is optional and not the dominant (or literate) form. Abugidas mark all vowels (other than the"inherent" vowel) with adiacritic, a minor attachment to the letter, a standaloneglyph, or (inCanadian Aboriginal syllabics) by rotation of the letter. Some abugidas use a special symbol tosuppress the inherent vowel so that the consonant alone can be properly represented. In asyllabary, a grapheme denotes a complete syllable, that is, either a lone vowel sound or a combination of a vowel sound with one or more consonant sounds.
The contrast of abjad versus alphabet has been rejected by other scholars becauseabjad is also used as a term for the Arabic numeral system. Also, it may be taken as suggesting that consonantal alphabets, in contrast to e.g. theGreek alphabet, were not yet true alphabets.[8]Florian Coulmas, a critic of Daniels and of the abjad terminology, argues that this terminology can confuse alphabets with "transcription systems", and that there is no reason to relegate the Hebrew, Aramaic or Phoenician alphabets to second-class status as an "incomplete alphabet".[9]However, Daniels's terminology has found acceptance in the linguistic community.[10][11][12]
The Phoenician abjad was a radical simplification ofphonetic writing. Unlike other scripts, such asMesopotamiancuneiform (logographic andsyllabic) andEgyptian hieroglyphs (logographic and consonantal), the Phoenician abjad consisted of only a few dozen symbols. Presumably, the relative simplicity of the Phoenician abjad made this script easy to learn, allowed it to gain widespread usage, and influenced how readily it was adopted or adapted into the development of other scripts by non-Phoenicians who encounteredseafaringPhoenician merchants and their script which they brought with them as they traded throughout the ancientMediterranean world during thefirst millennium BCE.
During these exchanges, the Phoenician script gave rise to a number of new writing systems, including the widely usedAramaic abjad and theGreek alphabet. The Greek alphabet was later developed into several alphabets, includingEtruscan,Coptic,Cyrillic, andLatin (via Etruscan), while Aramaic became the ancestor of many abjads and abugidas of Asia, particularly in and around India, Southeast Asia, andOceania.
Al-ʻArabiyya, meaning "Arabic": an example of the Arabic script, which is an impure abjad
Impure abjads have characters for some vowels, optional vowel diacritics, or both. The term pure abjad refers to scripts entirely lacking in vowel indicators.[15] However, most abjads, such asArabic,Hebrew,Aramaic, andPahlavi, are "impure" abjads – that is, they also contain symbols for some of the vowel phonemes, although the said non-diacritic vowel letters are also used to write certain consonants, particularlyapproximants that sound similar to long vowels. A "pure" abjad is exemplified (perhaps) by very early forms of ancientPhoenician, though at some point (at least by the 9th century BC) it and most of the contemporary Semitic abjads had begun to overload a few of the consonant symbols with a secondary function as vowel markers, calledmatres lectionis.[16] This practice was at first rare and limited in scope but became increasingly common and more developed in later times.
In the9th century BC the Greeks adapted the Phoenician script for use in their own language. The phonetic structure of the Greek language created too many ambiguities when vowels went unrepresented, so the script was modified. They did not need letters for theguttural sounds represented byaleph,he,heth orayin, so these symbols were assigned vocalic values. The letterswaw andyod were also adapted into vowel signs; along withhe, these were already used asmatres lectionis in Phoenician. The major innovation of Greek was to dedicate these symbols exclusively and unambiguously to vowel sounds that could be combined arbitrarily with consonants (as opposed to syllabaries such asLinear B which usually have vowel symbols but cannot combine them with consonants to form arbitrary syllables).
Abugidas developed along a slightly different route. The basic consonantal symbol was considered to have an inherent "a" vowel sound. Hooks or short lines attached to various parts of the basic letter modify the vowel. In this way, theSouth Arabian abjad evolved into theGeʽez script of Ethiopia between the 5th century BC and the 5th century AD. Similarly, the Brāhmī abugida of the Indian subcontinent developed around the 3rd century BC (from theAramaic abjad, it has been hypothesized).
The abjad form of writing is well-adapted to themorphological structure of the Semitic languages it was developed to write. This is because words in Semitic languages are formed froma root consisting of (usually) three consonants, the vowels being used to indicate inflectional or derived forms.[17] For instance, according toClassical Arabic andModern Standard Arabic, from the Arabic rootكتبK-T-B (to write) can be derived the formsكَتَبَkataba (he wrote),كَتَبْتَkatabta (you (masculine singular) wrote),يَكْتُبُyaktubu (he writes), andمَكْتَبَةmaktabah (library). In most cases, the absence of full glyphs for vowels makes the common root clearer, allowing readers to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words from familiar roots (especially in conjunction withcontext clues) and improving word recognition[citation needed][dubious –discuss] while reading for practiced readers.
Abugida (syllable-based writing system in which consonants and vowels graphemes are visually combined, particularly prevalent among Indian and Southeast Asian scripts)
Alphabet (set of letters used to write a given language, including distinct graphemes for both consonants and vowels)
Gematria (numerological practice of reading a word or phrase as a number or alphanumeric code, particularly in the context of Jewish mysticism based on the text of the Hebrew Bible, but also in Greek and English versions of the Bible as well as for other significant texts)
Hieroglyph (informal term for aideogram,lexigram,logogram, orpictogram, often referring to a character of the ancient Egyptian writing system, but also used to describe other semi-logographic writing systems, asMaya script)
Logogram (written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme.Chinese characters as used inChinese as well as other languages are logograms, as are Egyptian hieroglyphs and characters incuneiform script)
^Daniels, P. (1990). "Fundamentals of Grammatology".Journal of the American Oriental Society, 110(4), 727-731.doi:10.2307/602899. "We must recognize that the West Semitic scripts constitute a third fundamental type of script, the kind that denotes individual consonants only. It cannot be subsumed under either of the other terms. A suitable name for this type would be "alephbeth", in honor of its Levantine origin, but this term seems too similar to "alphabet" to be practical; so I propose to call this type an "abjad", from the Arabic word for the traditional order [Footnote: I.e., thealif-ba-jim order familiar from earlier Semitic alphabets, from which the modern orderalif-ba-ta-tha is derived by placing together the letters with similar shapes and differing numbers of dots. The abjad is the order in which numerical values are assigned to the letters (as in Hebrew).] of its script, which (unvocalized) of course falls in this category. There is yet a fourth fundamental type of script, a type recognized over forty years ago by James-Germain Fevrier, called by him the "neosyllabary" (1948, 330), and again by Fred Householder thirty years ago, who called it "pseudo-alphabet" (1959, 382). These are the scripts of Ethiopia and "greater India" that use a basic form for the specific syllable consonant + a particular vowel (in practice always the unmarkeda) and modify it to denote the syllables with other vowels or with no vowel. Were it not for this existing term, I would propose maintaining the pattern by calling this type an "abugida", from the Ethiopian word for the auxiliary order of consonants in the signary."
^Amalia E. Gnanadesikan (2017), "Towards a typology of phonemic scripts",Writing Systems Research, 9:1, 14-35,doi:10.1080/17586801.2017.1308239. "Daniels (1990, 1996a) proposes the name abjad for these scripts, and this term has gained considerable popularity. Other terms include partial phonemic script (Hill, 1967), segmentally linear defective phonographic script (Faber, 1992), consonantary (Trigger, 2004), consonant writing (Coulmas, 1989) and consonantal alphabet (Gnanadesikan, 2009; Healey, 1990). "
^"Overview of the Abjad numerological system",Jonah Winters and Frank Lewis, Overview of the Abjad numerological system, Baháʾí Library Online, 1999, quote: "The word abjad is an acronym derived from the first four consonantal shapes in the Arabic alphabet -- Alif, Bá, Jim, Dál. As such abjad designates the letters of the Arabic alphabet (also known as alifbá') in the phrase hurúf al-abjad. An adjective formed from this, abjadí, means a novice at something. Nowadays the Arabic alphabet does not follow the sequence a-b-j-d, but rather the order: A-B-T-Th-J-H.-Kh-D (the basic shapes of the letters A-B-J-D without their diacritical dots do, however, occur in that order, insofar as T and Th are distinguished from B only by dots, and the H. and Kh from the J only by dots). However, the order A-B-J-D is quite ancient, insofar as the word abjad is not of Arabic origin, but comes from earlier written alphabets, perhaps from Phoenician though the sequence may be as old as Ugaritic. In any case, it certainly predates the writing down of Arabic, as can be seen by comparison of Hebrew (Aleph, Beth, Gimel, Daleth) and Greek (Alpha Beta Gamma Delta)." Accessed 2 November 2025.
^Coulmas, Florian (2004).Writing Systems. Cambridge University Press. p. 113.ISBN978-0-521-78737-6.
^"Abjads / Consonant alphabets", Omniglot.com, 2009, quote: "Abjads, or consonant alphabets, represent consonants only, or consonants plus some vowels. Full vowel indication (vocalisation) can be added, usually by means of diacritics, but this is not usually done." Accessed 22 May 2009.
^Rogers, Henry (2005):Writing systems: a linguistic approach. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-23464-0, ISBN 978-0-631-23464-7. See esp.Chap. 7, pp. 115ff.
^Schone, Patrick (2006): "Low-resource autodiacritization of abjads for speech keyword search", In INTERSPEECH-2006, paper 1412-Mon3FoP.13.
^Lam, Joseph (2015). "Ch. 12. The Invention and Development of the Alphabet". In Woods, Christopher; Teeter, Emily; Emberling, Geoff (eds.).Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond. Oriental Institute Museum Publications No. 32 (2nd, revised with minor corrections ed.).The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. pp. 189–190.ISBN9781885923769.The hybrid nature of these earliest signs gives us clues regarding the sociohistorical context for the origins of the alphabet. On the one hand, most if not all of these earliest pictographs have plausible connections to Egyptian hieroglyphic (and perhaps hieratic) symbols, implying that the inventors were influenced at some level by Egyptian writing. On the other hand, the phonemes represented by these symbols are derived from the West Semitic (and not Egyptian) words behind the pictographs. For instance, the sign for a hand is used to denote the /k/ sound through the West Semitic word kaph for "palm" or "hand", a word that also comes to be the name of the letter. (For comparison, the Modern Hebrew name for the corresponding letter is precisely kaph; note also the Greek letter name kappa.) This association of the letter name (kaph) with its initial phoneme (/k/) is called the acrophonic principle (acro- "topmost" + phone "voice, sound"), and the fact that it is via the Semitic vocabulary that such a principle operates suggests that the linear alphabet arose for the purpose of writing a Semitic language. In fact, it is based on this assumption that the Sinai inscriptions have been partially deciphered, 6 revealing intelligible phrases such as lbat ("for the Lady") and rb nqbnm ("chief of the miners").
^Ibn Durayd,Ta'līq min amāli ibn durayd, ed. al-Sanūsī, Muṣṭafā, Kuwait 1984, p. 227 (Arabic). The author purports that a poet from the Kinda tribe in Yemen who settled in Dūmat al-Ǧandal during the advent of Islam told of how another member of the Yemenite Kinda tribe who lived in that town taught the Arabic script to the Banū Qurayš in Mecca and that their use of the Arabic script for writing eventually took the place ofmusnad, or what was then the Sabaean script of the kingdom of Ḥimyar: "You have exchanged themusnad of the sons of Ḥimyar / which the kings of Ḥimyar were wont to write down in books."
^Frajzyngier, Zygmunt; Shay, Erin, eds. (2012). "Introduction".The Afroasiatic languages. Cambridge language surveys. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press. p. 2.ISBN9780521865333.Speakers of Semitic languages, which belong to the Afroasiatic phylum, developed the alphabetic writing system which, with numerous modifications, is now used in thousands of languages throughout the world. The development of the alphabetical writing system may have been facilitated by the underlying structure of verbal roots and derived nominal forms in Semitic languages, where the consonantal structure alone conveyed a great deal of semantic information.
^Rubin, Aaron D.; Kahn, Lily (2021). "Introduction".Jewish Languages from A to Z. New York: Routledge. p. x.ISBN9781138487284.Given their intimate familiarity with the Hebrew alphabet...it is not surprising that Jews very often used the Hebrew alphabet to write down whatever language they were speaking. Thus, we find Hebrew-letter texts in which the language is actually Arabic, Greek, French, Persian, or something else. All told, there are at least three dozen languages that have been written down at least once using Hebrew letters. The fact that a language was written in the Hebrew alphabet does not always mean that, when read aloud or spoken, it sounded any different from the non-Jewish variety of that language, but it does mean that on the page the language looked completely different and was recognizably Jewish. For some languages, such as Malay, Urdu, and Zulu (Fanagalo), we have only just one or some very small number of texts written in Hebrew letters. For others, such as Yiddish, Ladino, or Judeo-Arabic, we have many thousands of texts, written over a period of hundreds of years. Nevertheless, all are examples of Jews using Hebrew letters to record their language.
Gnanadesikan, Amalia E. (2017). "Towards a Typology of Phonemic Scripts".Writing Systems Research.9 (1). Taylor & Francis:14–35.doi:10.1080/17586801.2017.1308239.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt; Shay, Erin, eds. (2012). "Introduction".The Afroasiatic languages. Cambridge Language Surveys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 2.ISBN9780521865333.
Lam, Joseph (2015). "Ch. 12. The Invention and Development of the Alphabet". In Woods, Christopher; Teeter, Emily; Emberling, Geoff (eds.).Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond. Oriental Institute Museum Publications No. 32 (2nd, revised with minor corrections ed.). The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. pp. 189–190.ISBN9781885923769.
Lehmann, Reinhard G. (2011). "Ch 2 27-30-22-26. How Many Letters Needs an Alphabet? The Case of Semitic". In de Voogt, Alex & Quack, Joachim Friedrich (eds.).The idea of writing: Writing across borders. Leiden: Brill. pp. 11–52.ISBN978-9004215450.
