Abjad

For the traditional ordering of the letters of the Arabic alphabet, see Abjad numerals.

The first five letters of the Phoenician abjad, from right to left

Template:WStypes An abjad, sometimes also called a consonantary, is a type of writing system in which there is one symbol per consonantal phoneme. In a "true" abjad, there are no symbols representing vowels. For example, if one were to write the phrase "this sentence has no vowels" as an abjad, it would appear something like "ths sntnc hs n vwls." However, most modern abjads, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Avestan, are "impure" abjads, that is, they also contain symbols for some vowels. An example of a pure abjad is ancient Phoenician.

Abjads differ from alphabets in that only consonants, not vowels, are represented in the basic graphemes. Abjads differ from abugidas 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 harakat for Arabic, their use is optional and not the dominant (or literate) form. In an abugida, the vowels (other than the "inherent" vowel) are always marked, either with a diacritic, a minor attachment to the letter or a standalone glyph. 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 terms abjad and abugida appear to be the inventions of Peter T. Daniels

Etymology

The system takes its name from the nonsense "word" made up of the first four letters of the Arabic alphabet in the older abjadi order. It has been suggested that the word Abjad may have earlier roots in Phoenician or Ugaritic.

Origins

A specimen of Proto-Sinaitic script containing a phrase which means 'to Baalat'. The line running from the upper left to lower right reads mt l b^clt. (Photo here)

See also: Genealogy of scripts derived from Proto-Sinaitic

See also: History of the alphabet § Descendants of the Semitic abjad

All known abjads belong to the Semitic family of scripts, which are thought to derive from the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet, which is dated to about 1500 BC and thought to derive from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The abjad was significantly simpler than the earlier hieroglyphs. The number of distinct glyphs was reduced tremendously, at the cost of increased ambiguity.

The first abjad to gain widespread usage was the Phoenician abjad. Unlike other widespread scripts at the time, such as Cuneiform and Hieroglyphs, the Phoenician script consisted of only about two dozen symbols. This made the script easy for commoners to learn, and the script was subsequently spread by the seafaring merchants of Phoenicia. Phoenician gave way to a number of new writing systems, including the Greek alphabet, the first widespread alphabet, and Aramaic, a widely used abjad. Greek evolved into the modern western alphabets, such as Latin and Cyrillic, while Aramaic became the ancestor of many modern abjads and abugidas of Asia.

Aramaic spread across Asia, reaching as far as India and becoming Brahmi, the ancestral abugida to most modern Indian and Southeast Asian scripts. Within the Middle East, Aramaic gave way to the Hebrew and Nabatean abjads, which retained many similar forms from Aramaic. The Syriac script was a cursive variation of Aramaic. The Arabic abjad is known as an indirect ancestor of Aramaic, although there is a dispute concerning how much of it was influenced by Nabatean or Syriac, its two hypothesized parent writing systems.

Connections with numbers

Modern abjads have also been used for isopsephy, a system of assigning numeric values to individual letters. Before the development of the decimal number system, this was one of the regular systems for writing numbers. In some languages, the relationship between words and numbers created by this system has led to poetic and mystical usages.

Impure abjads

An example of the Arabic script, an impure abjad

"Impure" abjads may have characters for some vowels, optional vowel diacritics, or both. The term "pure" abjad refers only to scripts entirely lacking in vowel indicators, thus excluding Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac.

Addition of vowels

In the 9th century BC, the Greeks adapted the Phoenician abjad for use in their own language. The phonetic structure of the Greek language created too many ambiguities when the vowels went unrepresented, so the abjad 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 used. The Greek alphabet became the world's first "true" alphabet.

Abugidas developed along a slightly different route. The basic consonantal form was considered to have an inherent vowel sound, such as "a". Hooks or short lines attached to various parts of the basic letter modified the vowel. In this way, the South Arabian alphabet evolved into the Ge'ez alphabet between the 5th century BC and the 5th century AD. Similarly, around the 3rd century BC, the Brāhmī script developed from the Aramaic abjad.

Related concepts

Many non-Semitic languages such as English can be written without vowels and read with little difficulty. For example, the previous sentence could be written Mn nn-Smtc lnggs sch s nglsh cn b wrttn wtht vwls nd rd wth lttl dffclty. This fact can be used to semi-bowdlerise offensive language, a practice known as disemvoweling.

Some usages of 1337 speak drop vowels, especially for small words.

References

• Wright, W. (1971). A Grammar of the Arabic Language (3^rd ed. ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. v. 1, p. 28. ISBN 0-521-09455-0. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help)

See also

• Abjad numerals
• Shorthand (constructed writing systems that are structurally abjads)
• Gematria, the Hebrew system of mystical numerology