Anabjad (/ˈæbdʒæd/;[1]Arabic:أبجد;Hebrew:אבגד; also spelledabgad[2][3]) is awriting system in which onlyconsonants are represented, leaving thevowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts withalphabets, which 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.
The nameabjad is based on theArabic alphabet's first (in itsoriginal order) fourletters — corresponding toa,b,j, andd — to replace the more common terms "consonantary" and "consonantal alphabet" in describing the family of scripts classified as "West Semitic". It is similar to other Semitic languages such asPhoenician,Hebrew andSemitic proto-alphabets: specifically,aleph,bet,gimel,dalet.
According to the formulations ofPeter T. Daniels,[6] 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 asnikkud 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.[7]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".[8]However, Daniels's terminology has found acceptance in the linguistic community.[9][10][11]
The first abjad to gain widespread usage was thePhoenician abjad. Unlike other contemporary scripts, such ascuneiform andEgyptian hieroglyphs, the Phoenician script consisted of only a few dozen symbols. This made the script easy to learn, and seafaring Phoenician merchants took the script throughout the then-known world.
The Phoenician abjad was a radical simplification of phonetic writing, since hieroglyphics required the writer to pick a hieroglyph starting with the same sound that the writer wanted to write in order to write phonetically, much asman'yōgana (kanji used solely for phonetic use) was used to representJapanese phonetically before the invention ofkana.
Phoenician gave rise to a number of new writing systems, including the widely usedAramaic abjad and theGreek alphabet. The Greek alphabet evolved into the modern western alphabets, such asLatin andCyrillic, while Aramaic became the ancestor of many modern abjads and abugidas of Asia.
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.[12] However, most modern 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.[13] This practice was at first rare and limited in scope but became increasingly common and more developed in later times.
In the 9th 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 theGe'ez abugida 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. 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.
^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,"[Footnote: I.e., the alif-ba-jim order familiar from earlier Semitic alphabets, from which the modern order alif-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).] from the Arabic word for the traditional order6 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 unmarked a) 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). "
^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.
Daniels, Peter T. (2013). "The Arabic Writing system". In Owens, Jonathan (ed.).The Oxford Handbook of Arabic Linguistics. Oxford University Press. p. 415.
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.
Lipiński, Edward (1994).Studies in Aramaic Inscriptions and Onomastics II. Leuven, Belgium: Peeters Publishers. pp. 29–30.ISBN9068316109.
