Abjad

 ( Arabic Orthography ) 

An abjad ( or abgad

Reinhard G. Lehmann (2025). 9789004215450, Brill. . ISBN 9789004215450

) is a writing system in which only are represented, leaving the vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with alphabets, which provide for both consonants and vowels. The term was introduced in 1990 by Peter T. Daniels.Daniels, P. (1990). " Fundamentals of Grammatology". Journal of the American Oriental Society, 110(4), 727-731. . "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: 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." Other terms for the same concept include partial phonemic script, segmentally linear defective phonographic script, consonantary, consonant writing, and consonantal alphabet.Amalia E. Gnanadesikan (2017), "Towards a typology of phonemic scripts", Writing Systems Research, 9:1, 14-35, . "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). "

Impure abjads represent vowels with either optional , a limited number of distinct vowel glyphs, or both.

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Etymology The name abjad is based on the Arabic alphabet's first (in its original order) four corresponding to a, b, j, and 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 as Phoenician, Hebrew alphabet and Semitic alphabet proto-alphabets: specifically, aleph, bet, gimel, dalet.

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Terminology According to the formulations of Peter T. Daniels, abjads differ from in that only consonants, not vowels, are represented among the basic . Abjads differ from , another category defined by Daniels, in that in abjads, the vowel sound is implied by phonology, and where Diacritic exist for the system, such as niqqud for Hebrew language and harakat 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. 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".

However, Daniels's terminology has found acceptance in the linguistic community.

 [http://omniglot.com/writing/alphabetic.htm "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.

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Origins The first abjad to gain widespread usage was the Phoenician abjad. Unlike other contemporary scripts, such as Cuneiform script 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 alphabet abjad and the Greek alphabet. The Greek alphabet evolved into the modern western alphabets, such as Latin alphabet 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.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." and Ancient South Arabian, which evolved later into the Geʽez script, still being used in Eritrea and Ethiopia.

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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. However, most modern abjads, such as Arabic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Aramaic alphabet, and Pahlavi alphabet, are "impure" abjadsthat 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 mater lectionis. This practice was at first rare and limited in scope but became increasingly common and more developed in later times.

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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 Yodh were also adapted into vowel signs; along with he, these were already used as Mater 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).

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 alphabet, it has been hypothesized).

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Abjads 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 triliteral, the vowels being used to indicate inflectional or derived forms. For instance, according to Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic, from the Arabic root ك‌ت‌ب K-T-B (to write) can be derived the forms كَتَبَ (he wrote), كَتَبْتَ (you (masculine singular) wrote), يَكْتُبُ⁩ (he writes), and مَكْتَبَة⁩ (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 recognition while reading for practiced readers.

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Adaptation for use as true alphabets The Arabic abjad have been adapted to perform as alphabet when used to write several languages, including Kurdish language, Swahili Ajami, Jawi script, and Uyghur alphabets and historically Arebica, Andalusi Romance, Aragonese, Portuguese, Spanish language and Arabic 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.

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Comparative chart of abjads, extinct and extant

Thaana
Nabatean, Palmyran, Mandaic, Parthian, Pahlavi, Sogdian, Avestan and Manichean
Late Hebrew, Nabataean, Syriac
Hebrew, Imperial Aramaic.
Arabic
Punic (variant), Greek, Etruscan, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew
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
Geʽez (Ethiopia and Eritrea)
Ethiopic (Eritrea & Ethiopia)
Phoenician, Hebrew
Neo-Tifinagh
Psalter, Avestan
Old Uyghur alphabet

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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)

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Sources

• Maryam Ekhtiar (2025). 9781588394347, Metropolitan Museum of Art. . ISBN 9781588394347

• (1994). 9789068316100, Peeters Publishers. ISBN 9789068316100

• (1967). 9780521094559, CUP. ISBN 9780521094559

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External links

• The Science of Arabic Letters, Abjad and Geometry, by Jorge Lupin is dead

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