Abugida

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
Image:Example.of.complex.text.rendering.svg This article contains Indic text.
Without rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes or other symbols instead of Indic characters; or irregular vowel positioning and a lack of conjuncts.
An inscription of Swampy Cree using Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, an abugida developed by Christian missionaries for Aboriginal Canadian languages
An inscription of Swampy Cree using Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, an abugida developed by Christian missionaries for Aboriginal Canadian languages

Writing systems
History
Grapheme
List of writing systems
Types
Alphabet
Abjad
Abugida
Syllabary
Logogram-based
Related
Pictogram
Ideogram

An abugida (pronounced /ˌɑːbuːˈɡiːdə/, from Ge‘ez አቡጊዳ ’äbugida or Amharic አቡጊዳ ’abugida) is a segmental writing system in which each letter (basic character) represents a consonant accompanied by an inherent vowel; other vowels are indicated by modification of the consonant sign, either by means of diacritics or through changes in the form of the consonant itself. In some abugidas, the absence of a vowel is indicated overtly, either through a diacritic or by fusing adjacent consonants into ligatures; in others no distinction is made between a plain consonant and a consonant followed by the inherent vowel. About half the writing systems in the world, including the extensive Brahmic system used in South and Southeast Asia, are abugidas.

The term abugida was adopted into English as a linguistic term by Peter T. Daniels. It is the colloquial name of the Ge‘ez script, derived from the first four letters aləf, bet, gäməl, dənt (in the biblical A B G D order of Hebrew) graded by the first four vowel forms, much as the term abecedary is derived from the Latin a be ce de. As Daniels used the word, an abugida contrasts with a syllabary, where letters with shared consonants or vowels show no particular resemblance to each another, and with an alphabet proper, where independent letters are used to denote both consonants and vowels. Traditionally, abugidas have been considered to be syllabaries or intermediate between syllabaries and alphabets ("semi-syllabaries", "alpha-syllabaries", etc.). Less formally, however, abugidas are simply called "alphabets".

Contents

[edit] Description

A 19th century manuscript in the Devanagari script
A 19th century manuscript in the Devanagari script

There are three principal families of abugidas, which function somewhat differently. The best known is the Brahmic family of India and Southeast Asia, in which vowels are marked with diacritics and syllable-final consonants, when they occur, are indicated with ligatures, diacritics, or with a special vowel-canceling mark. In the Ethiopic family, vowels are marked by modifying the shapes of the consonants, and one of these pulls double duty for final consonants. In the Cree family, vowels are marked by rotating or flipping the consonants, and final consonants are indicated with either special diacritics or superscript forms of the main initial consonants.

Indic abugidas contrast vowels through marks (diacritics) around the consonants. Most overtly mark a consonant for the lack of a vowel as well; without a diacritic, a default vowel (usually [a]) is understood. Vowel diacritics may appear above, below, to the left, or to the right of the consonant, or may even surround it.

Diacritic placement in Brahmic abugidas
position syllable pronunciation base from script
above के /keː/ क /k(a)/ Devanagari
below कु /ku/
left कि /ki/
right को /kοː/
around கௌ /kau/ க /ka/ Tamil
within ಕಿ /ki/ ಕ /ka/ Kannada

In many of the Brahmic scripts, a syllable beginning with a cluster is treated as a single character for purposes of vowel marking, so a vowel marker like ि -i, falling before the character it modifies, may appear several positions before the place where it is pronounced. For example, the game cricket in Hindi is क्रिकेट krikeţ; the diacritic for /i/ appears before the consonant cluster /kr/, not before the /r/. A more unusual example is seen in the Batak alphabet: Here the syllable bim is written ba-ma-i-(virama). That is, the vowel diacritic and virama are both written after the consonants for the whole syllable.

In many abugidas, there is also a diacritic to suppress the inherent vowel, yielding the bare consonant. In Devanagari, क् is k, and ल् is l. This is called the virama in Sanskrit, or halant in Hindi. It may be used to form consonant clusters, or to indicate that a consonant occurs at the end of a word. For text information processing on computer, other means of expressing these functions include special conjunct forms in which two or more consonant characters are merged to express a cluster, such as Devanagari: क्ल kla. (Note that on some fonts display this as क् followed by ल, rather than forming a conjunct. This expedient is used by ISCII and South Asian scripts of Unicode.) Thus a closed syllable such as kal requires two akshara to write.

In Ethiopic, which gave us the word abugida, the diacritics have fused to the consonants to the point that they must be considered modifications of the form of the letters. Children learn each modification separately, as in a syllabary; nonetheless, the graphic similarities between syllables with the same consonant is readily apparent, unlike the case in a true syllabary.

In the family of abugidas known as Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, vowels are indicated by changing the orientation of the akshara. For example, Inuktitut ᐱ pi, ᐳ pu, ᐸ pa; ᑎ ti, ᑐ tu, ᑕ ta. In Canadian syllabics it is not possible to distinguish a basic or default vowel, unlike Indic abugidas. Bare consonants are indicated either by separate raised letters, or by superscript versions of the aksharas; there is no vowel-killer mark.

The Róng script used for the Lepcha language goes further than other Indic abugidas, in that a single akshara can represent a closed syllable: Not only the vowel, but any final consonant is indicated by a diacritic. For example, the syllable [sok] would be written as something like s̥̽, here with an underring representing /o/ and an overcross representing the diacritic for final /k/. Most other Indic abugidas can only indicate a very limited set of final consonants with diacritics, such as /ŋ/ or /r/, if they can indicate any at all.

[edit] Examples

The Ge'ez script, an abugida of Ethiopia
The Ge'ez script, an abugida of Ethiopia

Examples of abugidas include the various scripts of the Brahmic family, Ethiopic Ge'ez, and Canadian Aboriginal syllabics.

A typical abugida is Devanagari, in which Hindi is written. There is no basic sign representing the consonant k; rather the unmodified letter क represents the syllable ka; the a is not marked on the symbol, and thus is the so-called inherent vowel. The vowel may be changed by adding vowel marks (diacritics) to the basic character, producing other syllables beginning with k-, such as कि ki, कु ku, के ke, को ko. These diacritics are applied to other consonant characters for other syllables. For example, from ल la is formed लि li, लु lu, ले le, लो lo. Such a consonant with either an inherent or marked vowel is called an akshara.

Though now an abugida, the Ge'ez alphabet was actually an abjad until the 4th century AD. In the Ge'ez abugida, the form of the letter itself may be altered. For example, ሀ hä (basic form), ሁ hu (with a right-side diacritic that does not alter the letter), ሂ hi (with a subdiacritic that compresses the letter, so that the whole fidel occupies the same amount of space), ህ hə (where the letter is modified with a kink in the left arm).

[edit] Special features

The Pahawh Hmong script represents both consonants and vowels with full letters. However, the graphic order is vowel-consonant even though they are pronounced as consonant-vowel. This is rather like the /o/ vowel in the Indic abugidas. Pahawh Hmong is unusual in that, while the inherent vowel /au/ is unwritten, so is the inherent consonant /k/. For the syllable /kau/, which requires one or the other of the inherent sounds to be overt, it is /au/ that is written. That is, a Pahawh akshara appears to be a vowel with an inherent consonant rather than the other way around.

It is difficult to draw a dividing line between abugidas and other segmental scripts. For example, the Meroitic script of ancient Sudan did not indicate an inherent a (one symbol stood for both m and ma, for example), and is thus similar to Brahmic family abugidas. However, the other vowels were indicated with full letters, not diacritics or modification, so the system was essentially an alphabet that did not bother to write the most common vowel.

Thaana is also like an abugida in that vowels are marked with diacritics. However, all vowels are marked, as is the absence of a vowel; there is no inherent vowel. Normally no letter may occur without a diacritic. That is, it is equivalent to an abjad with obligatory vowel marking, like the Arabic alphabet as used for Kurdish in Iraq, as is thus essentially alphabetic. Note that it developed among a population that was already literate with an abugida for their language.

Several systems of shorthand use diacritics for vowels, but they do not have an inherent vowel, and are thus more similar to Thaana and Kurdish than to the Brahmic scripts. The Gabelsberger shorthand system and its derivatives modify the following consonant to represent vowels. The Pollard script, which was based on shorthand, also uses diacritics for vowels; the placements of the vowel relative to the consonant indicates tone.

[edit] Evolution

An example of Brāhmī script - Ashoka's Major Rock Edict at Girnar.
An example of Brāhmī script - Ashoka's Major Rock Edict at Girnar.

As the term alphasyllabary suggests, abugidas have been considered an intermediate step between alphabets and syllabaries. Historically, abugidas appear to have evolved from abjads (vowelless alphabets). They contrast with syllabaries, where there is a distinct symbol for each syllable or consonant-vowel combination, and where these have no systematic similarity to each other, and typically develop directly from logographic scripts. Compare the Devanagari examples above to sets of syllables in the Japanese hiragana syllabary: か ka, き ki, く ku, け ke, こ ko have nothing in common to indicate k; while ら ra, り ri, る ru, れ re, ろ ro have neither anything in common for r, nor anything to indicate that they have the same vowels as the k set.

Most Indian and Indochinese abugidas appear to have first evolved from abjads with the Kharoṣṭhī and Brāhmī scripts; the abjad in question is usually considered to be the Aramaic one, but while the link between Aramaic and Kharosthi is more or less undisputed, this is not the case with Brahmi. The Kharosthi family does not survive today, but Brahmi's descendants include most of the modern scripts of South and Southeast Asia. Although Ge'ez derived from a different abjad, one theory is that its evolution into an abugida may have been influenced by Christian missionaries from India.

[edit] Other types of writing systems

[edit] Partial list of abugidas

For a more complete list, see List of writing systems.

[edit] True abugidas

[edit] Abugida-like scripts

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida"
Personal tools