Abugida

Not to be confused with Abjad or Semi-syllabary.

Comparison of various abugidas descended from Brahmi script. Sanskrit for, May Śiva protect those who take delight in the language of the gods. (Kalidasa)
This article contains Ethiopic text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Ethiopic characters.
This article contains Indic text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks or boxes, misplaced vowels or missing conjuncts instead of Indic text.
This article contains Canadian Aboriginal syllabic characters. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of syllabics.
This article contains letters from the Javanese script. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Javanese characters.

An abugida (/ˌɑːbuːˈɡiːdə, ˌæb-/ ⓘ;[1] from Ge'ez: አቡጊዳ, 'äbugīda) – sometimes also called alphasyllabary, neosyllabary, or pseudo-alphabet – is a segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as units; each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary, similar to a diacritical mark. This contrasts with a full alphabet, in which vowels have status equal to consonants, and with an abjad, in which vowel marking is absent, partial, or optional – in less formal contexts, all three types of the script may be termed "alphabets".[2] The terms also contrast them with a syllabary, in which a single symbol denotes the combination of one consonant and one vowel.

Related concepts were introduced independently in 1948 by James Germain Février (using the term néosyllabisme)[3] and David Diringer (using the term semisyllabary),[4] then in 1959 by Fred Householder (introducing the term pseudo-alphabet).[5] The Ethiopic term "abugida" was chosen as a designation for the concept in 1990 by Peter T. Daniels.[6][2] In 1992, Faber suggested "segmentally coded syllabically linear phonographic script", and in 1992 Bright used the term alphasyllabary,[7][8] and Gnanadesikan and Rimzhim, Katz, & Fowler have suggested aksara or āksharik.[9]

Abugidas include the extensive Brahmic family of scripts of Tibet, South and Southeast Asia, Semitic Ethiopic scripts, and Canadian Aboriginal syllabics. As is the case for syllabaries, the units of the writing system may consist of the representations both of syllables and of consonants. For scripts of the Brahmic family, the term akshara is used for the units.

  1. ^ "abugida". Dictionary.com Unabridged (Online). n.d.
  2. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference Bright was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Février, James Germain (1948). "Le Néosyllabisme". Histoire de l'écriture. Payot. pp. 333–83.
  4. ^ Diringer, David (1948). The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind. Philosophical Library. p. 601 (index).
  5. ^ Householder, F. (1959). Review of The Decipherment of Linear B by John Chadwick, The Classical Journal, 54(8), 379–83. Retrieved 30 September 2020.
  6. ^ Daniels, P. (1990). Fundamentals of Grammatology. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 110(4), 727–31. 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 order 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."
  7. ^ Amalia E. Gnanadesikan (2017) Towards a typology of phonemic scripts, Writing Systems Research, 9:1, 14–35, DOI: 10.1080/17586801.2017.1308239 "The second is that of Bright (1996, 1999) which follows Daniels in abjads and alphabets (Bright, 1999), but identifies instead of abugidas a category of alphasyllabaries. As Bright (1999) points out, the definition of abugida and the definition of alpha-syllabary differ. This fact alone suggests that at least one of the two classifications is either incomplete or inaccurate—or, at the very least, that they have two different purposes. This paper is intended as a (long-delayed) response to Bright (1999) and argues that both of these systems are in fact incomplete."
  8. ^ Peter T. Daniels, Littera ex occidente: Toward a Functional History of Writing, in Studies in Semitic and Afroasiatic Linguistics presented to Gene B. Gragg edited by Cynthia L. Miller pages 53–69: "Alongside the terms I rejected (neosyllabary [Février 1948], pseudo-alphabet [Householder 1959], semisyllabary [Diringer 1948], and alphasyllabary [Bright 1992]) because they imply exactly the notion I am trying to refute – that the abugida is a kind of alphabet or a kind of syllabary – I have just come across semialphabet in the Encyclopœdia Britannica Micropœdia (though what is intended by the distinction "the syllabic KharoœøÏ [sic] and semialphabetic BrΩhmÏ" [s.v. "Indic Writing Systems"] is unfathomable). W. Bright denies having devised the term alphasyllabary, but it has not yet been found to occur earlier than his 1992 encyclopedia (in 1990:136 he approved semisyllabary). Compare Daniels 1996b:4 n. * and Bright 2000 for the different conceptualizations of abugida and alphasyllabary: functional vs. formal, as it happens. The words abjad and abugida are simply words in Arabic and Ethiopic, respectively, for the ancient Northwest Semitic order of letters, which is used in those languages in certain functions alongside the customary orders in Arabic reflecting rearrangement according to shape, and in Ethiopic reflecting an entirely different letter-order tradition"
  9. ^ Amalia E. Gnanadesikan (2017) Towards a typology of phonemic scripts, Writing Systems Research, 9:1, 14–35, DOI: 10.1080/17586801.2017.1308239 "This type of script has been given many names, among them semi-alphabet (Diringer, 1948, referring to Brāhmī), semi-syllabary (Diringer, 1948, referring to Devanāgarī) or semi-syllabic script (Baker, 1997), syllabic alphabet (Coulmas, 1999), alphasyllabary (Bright, 1996, 1999; Trigger, 2004), neosyllabary (Daniels, 1990), abugida (Daniels, 1996a) and segmentally coded syllabically linear phonographic script (Faber, 1992) as well as the Sanskrit-inspired terms aksara system (Gnanadesikan, 2009) or āksharik script (Rimzhim, Katz, & Fowler, 2014). As is discussed further below, however, there is a considerable degree of typological diversity in this family of scripts."