Abjad
Template:Short description Template:For Template:More citations needed
An abjad (Template:IPAc-en[1] or abgad[2][3]) is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving the vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels. The term was introduced in 1990 by Peter T. Daniels.[4] Other terms for the same concept include partial phonemic script, segmentally linear defective phonographic script, consonantary, consonant writing, and consonantal alphabet.[5]
Impure abjads represent vowels with either optional diacritics, a limited number of distinct vowel glyphs, or both.
Etymology
The name abjad is based on the Arabic alphabet's first (in its original order) four Template:Nowrapcorresponding to a, b, j, and Template:Nowrapto 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 as Phoenician, Hebrew and Semitic proto-alphabets: specifically, aleph, bet, gimel, dalet.
Terminology
According to the formulations of Peter T. Daniels,Template:Sfn abjads differ from alphabets in that only consonants, not vowels, are represented among the basic graphemes. Abjads differ from abugidas, another category defined by Daniels, in that in abjads, the vowel sound is implied by phonology, and where vowel marks exist for the system, such as nikkud for Hebrew and ḥarakāt for Arabic, their use is optional and not the dominant (or literate) form. Abugidas mark all vowels (other than the "inherent" vowel) with a diacritic, a minor attachment to the letter, a standalone glyph, or (in Canadian Aboriginal syllabics) by rotation of the letter. Some abugidas use a special symbol to suppress the inherent vowel so that the consonant alone can be properly represented. In a syllabary, 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 because abjad 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. the Greek alphabet, were not yet true alphabets.Template:Sfn 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".[6] However, Daniels's terminology has found acceptance in the linguistic community.[7][8][9]
Origins
The first abjad to gain widespread usage was the Phoenician abjad. Unlike other contemporary scripts, such as cuneiform and Egyptian 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 as man'yōgana (kanji used solely for phonetic use) was used to represent Japanese phonetically before the invention of kana.
Phoenician gave rise to a number of new writing systems, including the widely used Aramaic abjad and the Greek alphabet. The Greek alphabet evolved into the modern western alphabets, such as Latin and Cyrillic, while Aramaic became the ancestor of many modern abjads and abugidas of Asia.
Other sister scripts to Phoenician, that branched from Proto-Sinaitic script are the South Semitic scripts with its two main branches; the Ancient North Arabian scripts that were used in north and central Arabia, until it was displaced by the Arabic alphabet.[10] and Ancient South Arabian, which evolved later into the Geʽez script, still being used in Eritrea and Ethiopia.
Impure abjads
Impure abjads have characters for some vowels, optional vowel diacritics, or both. The term pure abjad refers to scripts entirely lacking in vowel indicators.Template:Sfn However, most modern abjads, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Pahlavi, are "impure" abjadsTemplate:Sndthat 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, particularly approximants that sound similar to long vowels. A "pure" abjad is exemplified (perhaps) by very early forms of ancient Phoenician, 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, called matres lectionis.Template:Sfn This practice was at first rare and limited in scope but became increasingly common and more developed in later times.
Addition of vowels
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 the guttural sounds represented by aleph, he, heth or ayin, so these symbols were assigned vocalic values. The letters waw and yod were also adapted into vowel signs; along with he, these were already used as matres 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 as Linear 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, the South Arabian abjad evolved into the Geʽez 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 the Aramaic abjad, it has been hypothesized).
Template:AnchorAbjads and the structure of Semitic languages
The abjad form of writing is well-adapted to the morphological structure of the Semitic languages it was developed to write. This is because words in Semitic languages are formed from a root consisting of (usually) three consonants, the vowels being used to indicate inflectional or derived forms. For instance, according to Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic, from the Arabic root Template:Lang K-T-B (to write) can be derived the forms Template:Lang Template:Transliteration (he wrote), Template:Lang Template:Transliteration (you (masculine singular) wrote), Template:Lang Template:Transliteration (he writes), and Template:Lang Template:Transliteration (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 with context clues) and improving word recognitionTemplate:Citation neededTemplate:Dubious while reading for practiced readers.
Adaptation for use as true alphabets
The Arabic abjad have been adapted to perform as true alphabets when used to write several languages, including Kurdish, Swahili, Malay, and Uyghur and historically Bosnian, Mozarabic, Aragonese, Portuguese, Spanish and Afrikaans, with some letters or letter combinations being repurposed to represent vowels. The Hebrew abjad has also been adapted to write Jewish languages like Ladino and Yiddish.
Comparative chart of abjads, extinct and extant
| Name | In use | Cursive | Direction | # of letters | Matres lectionis | Area of origin | Used by | Languages | Time period (age) | Influenced by | Writing systems influenced |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arabic | yes | yes | right-left | 28 | 3 | Middle East | Over 400 million people | Arabic, Kashmiri, Persian, Pashto, Uyghur, Kurdish, Urdu, many othersTemplate:Sfn | 512 CETemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn | Nabataean Aramaic | Thaana |
| Syriac | yes | yes | right-left | 22 consonants | 3 | Middle East | Syriac Christianity, Assyrians | Aramaic: Syriac, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Turoyo, Mlahso | Template:Circa BCETemplate:Sfn | Aramaic | Nabatean, Palmyran, Mandaic, Parthian, Pahlavi, Sogdian, Avestan and ManicheanTemplate:Sfn |
| Hebrew | yes | yes | right-left | 22 consonants + 5 final letters | 4 | Middle East | Israelis, Jewish diaspora communities, Second Temple Judea | Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Aramaic, Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Italian, Yiddish, Ladino, many others | 2nd century BCE | Paleo-Hebrew, Early Aramaic | |
| Aramaic (Imperial) | no | no | right-left | 22 | 3 | Middle East | Achaemenid, Persian, Babylonian, and Assyrian empires | Imperial Aramaic, Hebrew | Template:Circa BCETemplate:Sfn | Phoenician | Late Hebrew, Nabataean, Syriac |
| Aramaic (Early) | no | no | right-left | 22 | none | Middle East | Various Semitic Peoples | Template:Circa BCE Template:Citation needed |
Phoenician | Hebrew, Imperial Aramaic.Template:Sfn | |
| Nabataean | no | no | right-left | 22 | none | Middle East | Nabataean KingdomTemplate:Sfn | Nabataean | 200 BCETemplate:Sfn | Aramaic | Arabic |
| Phoenician | no | no | right-left, boustrophedon | 22 | none | ByblosTemplate:Sfn | Canaanites | Phoenician, Punic, Hebrew | Template:Circa BCETemplate:Sfn | Proto-Canaanite AlphabetTemplate:Sfn | Punic (variant), Greek, Etruscan, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew |
| Punic | no | no | right-left | 22 | none | Carthage (Tunisia), North Africa, MediterraneanTemplate:Sfn | Punic Culture | Punic, Neo-Punic | Phoenician Template:Citation needed |
||
| Ancient North Arabian | no | no | right-left | 29 | yes | Arabian Peninsula | Northern Arabians | Old Arabic,Ancient North Arabian languages | 8th century BCE - 4th century CE | Proto-Sinaitic | |
| Ancient South Arabian | no | yes (Zabūr - cursive form of the South Arabian script) | right-left, boustrophedon | 29 | yes | South-Arabia (Yemen) | D'mt Kingdom | Amharic, Tigrinya, Tigre, Semitic, Cushitic, Nilo-Saharan Template:Citation needed |
900 BCE Template:Citation needed |
Proto-Sinaitic | Geʽez (Ethiopia and Eritrea) |
| Sabaean | no | no | right-left, boustrophedon | 29 | none | Southern Arabia (Sheba) | Southern Arabians | Sabaean | Template:Circa BCETemplate:Sfn | ByblosTemplate:Sfn | Ethiopic (Eritrea & Ethiopia)Template:Sfn |
| Parthian | no | no | right-left | 22 | yes | Parthia (modern-day equivalent of Northeastern Iran, Southern Turkmenistan and Northwest Afghanistan)Template:Sfn | Parthian & Sassanian periods of Persian EmpireTemplate:Sfn | Parthian | Template:Circa BCETemplate:Sfn | Aramaic | |
| Ugaritic | no | yes | left-right | 30 | none, 3 characters for gs+vowel | Ugarit (modern-day Northern Syria) | Ugarites | Ugaritic, Hurrian | Template:Circa BCETemplate:Sfn | Proto-Sinaitic | |
| Proto-Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite | no | no | left-right | 24 | none | Egypt, Sinai, Canaan | Canaanites | Canaanite | Template:Circa BCE | In conjunction with Egyptian Hieroglyphs Template:Citation needed |
Phoenician, Hebrew |
| Samaritan | yes (700 people) | no | right-left | 22 | none | Levant | Samaritans (Nablus and Holon) | Samaritan Aramaic, Samaritan Hebrew | Template:Circa | Paleo-Hebrew Alphabet | |
| Tifinagh | yes | no | bottom-top, right-left, left-right, | 31 | yes | North Africa | Berbers | Berber languages | 2nd millennium BCE[11] | Phoenician, Arabic | Neo-Tifinagh |
| Middle Persian, (Pahlavi) | no | no | right-left | 22 | 3 | Middle East | Sassanian Empire | Pahlavi, Middle Persian | Template:Circa | Aramaic | Psalter, AvestanTemplate:Sfn |
| Psalter Pahlavi | no | yes | right-left | 21 | yes | Northwestern ChinaTemplate:Sfn | Persian Script for Paper WritingTemplate:Sfn | Template:Circa CE[12] | Syriac Template:Citation needed |
||
| Sogdian | no | no (yes in later versions) | right-left, left-right (vertical) | 20 | 3 | parts of China (Xinjiang), Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan | Buddhists, Manichaens | Sogdian | Template:Circa CE | Syriac | Old Uyghur alphabetTemplate:Sfn |
See also
- Abjad numerals (Arabic alphanumeric code)
- Abugida
- Disemvoweling
- Gematria (Hebrew & English system of alphanumeric code)
- Numerology
- Shorthand (constructed writing systems that are structurally abjads)
References
Sources
External links
Template:Writing systems Template:List of writing systems
- ↑ Template:OED
- ↑ Template:Cite book
- ↑ Template:Cite book
- ↑ Daniels, P. (1990). "Fundamentals of Grammatology". Journal of the American Oriental Society, 110(4), 727-731. Template:Doi. "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, Template:Doi. "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). "
- ↑ Template:Cite book
- ↑ "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.
- ↑ 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 of musnad, or what was then the Sabaean script of the kingdom of Ḥimyar: "You have exchanged the musnad of the sons of Ḥimyar / which the kings of Ḥimyar were wont to write down in books."
- ↑ Template:Cite book
- ↑ Template:Cite web