Abjad - Wikipedia

An abjad (/ ˈ æ b dʒ æ d / 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 letters —  corresponding to a, b, j, and d  —  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 and Semitic proto-alphabets: specifically, aleph, bet, gimel, dalet.

Terminology

According to the formulations of Peter T. Daniels,⁶ 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.⁷ 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”.⁸ However, Daniels’s terminology has found acceptance in the linguistic community.^{9 10 11}

Origins

A specimen of Proto-Sinaitic script containing a phrase which may mean ‘to Baalat ‘. The line running from the upper left to lower right reads mt l b c lt.

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.¹² and Ancient South Arabian, which evolved later into the Geʽez script, still being used in Eritrea and Ethiopia.

Impure abjads

Al-ʻArabiyya, meaning “Arabic”: an example of the Arabic script, which is an impure abjad

Impure abjads have characters for some vowels, optional vowel diacritics, or both. The term pure abjad refers to scripts entirely lacking in vowel indicators.¹³ However, most modern abjads, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Pahlavi, are “impure” abjads – that 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.¹⁴ This practice was at first rare and limited in scope but became increasingly common and more developed in later times.

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).

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 كتب K-T-B (to write) can be derived the forms كَتَبَ kataba (he wrote), كَتَبْتَ katabta (you (masculine singular) wrote), يَكْتُبُ⁩ yaktubu (he writes), and مَكْتَبَة⁩ maktabah (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.

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.

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 others 15	512 CE 16 15	Nabataean Aramaic	Thaana
Syriac	yes	yes	right-left	22 consonants	3	Middle East	Syriac Christianity, Assyrians	Aramaic: Syriac, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Turoyo, Mlahso	c. 100 BCE 15	Aramaic	Nabatean, Palmyran, Mandaic, Parthian, Pahlavi, Sogdian, Avestan and Manichean 15
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	c. 500 BCE 15	Phoenician	Late Hebrew, Nabataean, Syriac
Aramaic (Early)	no	no	right-left	22	none	Middle East	Various Semitic Peoples		c. 1000 – c. 900 BCE	Phoenician	Hebrew, Imperial Aramaic.15
Nabataean	no	no	right-left	22	none	Middle East	Nabataean Kingdom 17	Nabataean	200 BCE 17	Aramaic	Arabic
Phoenician	no	no	right-left, boustrophedon	22	none	Byblos 15	Canaanites	Phoenician, Punic, Hebrew	c. 1500 – c. 1000 BCE 15	Proto-Canaanite Alphabet 15	Punic (variant), Greek, Etruscan, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew
Punic	no	no	right-left	22	none	Carthage (Tunisia), North Africa, Mediterranean 15	Punic Culture	Punic, Neo-Punic		Phoenician
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	900 BCE	Proto-Sinaitic	Geʽez (Ethiopia and Eritrea)
Sabaean	no	no	right-left, boustrophedon	29	none	Southern Arabia (Sheba)	Southern Arabians	Sabaean	c. 500 BCE 15	Byblos 15	Ethiopic (Eritrea & Ethiopia) 15
Parthian	no	no	right-left	22	yes	Parthia (modern-day equivalent of Northeastern Iran, Southern Turkmenistan and Northwest Afghanistan) 15	Parthian & Sassanian periods of Persian Empire 15	Parthian	c. 200 BCE 15	Aramaic
Ugaritic	no	yes	left-right	30	none, 3 characters for gs +vowel	Ugarit (modern-day Northern Syria)	Ugarites	Ugaritic, Hurrian	c. 1400 BCE 15	Proto-Sinaitic
Proto-Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite	no	no	left-right	24	none	Egypt, Sinai, Canaan	Canaanites	Canaanite	c. 1900 – c. 1700 BCE	In conjunction with Egyptian Hieroglyphs	Phoenician, Hebrew
Samaritan	yes (700 people)	no	right-left	22	none	Levant	Samaritans (Nablus and Holon)	Samaritan Aramaic, Samaritan Hebrew	c. 100 BCE – c. 1 CE	Paleo-Hebrew Alphabet
Tifinagh	yes	no	bottom-top, right-left, left-right,	31	yes	North Africa	Berbers	Berber languages	2nd millennium BCE 18	Phoenician, Arabic	Neo-Tifinagh
Middle Persian, (Pahlavi)	no	no	right-left	22	3	Middle East	Sassanian Empire	Pahlavi, Middle Persian	c. 200 BCE – c.  700 CE	Aramaic	Psalter, Avestan 15
Psalter Pahlavi	no	yes	right-left	21	yes	Northwestern China 15	Persian Script for Paper Writing 15		c. 400 CE 19	Syriac
Sogdian	no	no (yes in later versions)	right-left, left-right (vertical)	20	3	parts of China (Xinjiang), Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan	Buddhists, Manichaens	Sogdian	c. 400 CE	Syriac	Old Uyghur alphabet 15

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

• Ager, Simon (2015). “Abjads / Consonant alphabets”. Omniglot.
• Daniels, Peter T. (2013). “The Arabic Writing system”. In Owens, Jonathan (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Arabic Linguistics. Oxford University Press. p. 415.
• Daniels, Peter T. & Bright, William, eds. (1996). The World’s Writing Systems. OUP. p. 4. ISBN 978-0195079937.
• Ekhtiar, Maryam (2011). Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. p. 21. ISBN 9781588394347.
• Lehmann, Reinhard G. (2011). ” Ch 2 27-30-22-26. How Many Letters Needs an Alphabet? The Case of Semitic”. In de Voogt, Alex & Quack, Joachim Friedrich (eds.). The idea of writing: Writing across borders. Leiden: Brill. pp. 11– 52. ISBN 978-9004215450.
• Lipiński, Edward (1994). Studies in Aramaic Inscriptions and Onomastics II. Leuven, Belgium: Peeters Publishers. pp. 29– 30. ISBN 9068316109.
• Lo, Lawrence (2012). “Berber”. Archived from the original on 26 August 2017.
• Wright, W. (1967). A Grammar of the Arabic Language [transl. from the German of Caspari]. Vol. 1 (3rd ed.). CUP. p. 28. ISBN 978-0521094559.

External links

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

Footnotes

1. “abjad”. Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press.(Subscription or participating institution membership required.) ↩

2. Boyes, Philip J.; Steele, Philippa M. (10 October 2019). Understanding Relations Between Scripts II. Oxbow Books. p. 24. ISBN 978-1-78925-092-3. ↩

3. Lehmann, Reinhard G. (2012). de Voogt, Alex; Quack, Joachim Friedrich (eds.). The Idea of Writing: Writing Across Borders. Leiden, Boston: Brill. p. 35. ISBN 9789004215450. ↩

4. Daniels, P. (1990). ” Fundamentals of Grammatology “. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 110(4), 727-731. 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 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.” ↩

5. Amalia E. Gnanadesikan (2017), “Towards a typology of phonemic scripts”, Writing Systems Research, 9:1, 14-35, doi:10.1080/17586801.2017.1308239. “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). ” ↩

6. Daniels & Bright 1996. ↩

7. Lehmann 2011. ↩

8. Coulmas, Florian (2004). Writing Systems. Cambridge University Press. p. 113. ISBN 978-0-521-78737-6. ↩

9. “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. ↩

10. 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. ↩

11. Schone, Patrick (2006): “Low-resource autodiacritization of abjads for speech keyword search”, In INTERSPEECH-2006, paper 1412-Mon3FoP.13. ↩

12. 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.” ↩

13. Daniels 2013. ↩

14. Lipiński 1994. ↩