ABJAD

'Abjad' is a term suggested by Peter T. Daniels ^[1] to replace the common terms 'consonantary' or 'consonantal alphabet' to refer to the family of scripts called West Semitic, a type of writing system in which each symbol stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel. Some linguists consider West Semitic writing a type of alphabet, while others classify it as a separate writing system, while others view it as an unusual sort of syllabary. In popular usage, abjads often contain the word "alphabet" in their names, such as "Phoenician alphabet" and "Arabic alphabet."
According to the formulations of Daniels, Abjads differ from alphabets in that only consonants, not vowels, are represented among the basic graphemes. Abjads differ from another category invented by Daniels, 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 harakāt 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.
Daniels terms look at the external features of these writings, but ignore their historical membership in the large family of West Semitic writings. Most prefer to regard the West Semitic writings as an odd syllabary in which the consonant is specified, but the vowel remains implied. The Egyptian writing, on which West Semitic is based, worked in just this way. The following account represents Daniels' reconstruction, but many reject it in its general description and its details.

Contents

Etymology

Origins

Connections with numbers

Impure abjads

Addition of vowels

Related concepts

Notes

References

See also

External links

Etymology

The system takes its name from the Arabic word for alphabet, which is made up of the first four letters of the Arabic alphabet in the older abjadi order, just as the English word "alphabet" is made up of the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. It has been suggested that the word ''Abjad'' may have earlier roots in Phoenician or Ugaritic.

Origins

All known abjads belong to the Semitic family of scripts. These scripts are thought to derive from the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet (dated to about 1500 BC) which is 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 contemporary scripts, such as Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Phoenician script consisted of only about two dozen symbols. This made the script easy to learn, and Phoenician seafaring merchants took the script wherever they went. Phoenician gave way to a number of new writing systems, including the Greek alphabet, the first "true" 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. In the Middle East, Aramaic gave rise to the Hebrew and Nabatean abjads, which retained many of the Aramaic letter forms. The Syriac script was a cursive variation of Aramaic. It is unclear whether the Arabic abjad was derived from Nabatean or Syriac.

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

"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, Hebrew, Aramaic and Avestan, are '"impure" abjads', that is, they also contain symbols for some of the vowel phonemes. An example of a pure abjad is ancient Phoenician.

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 the 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 used. The Greek alphabet became the world's first "true" alphabet.
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 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, if the Latin alphabet were a pure abjad, the previous sentence could be written ''Mn nn-Smtc lnggs sch s nglsh cn b wrttn wtht vwls nd rd wth lttl dffclt'' (an impure abjad would include more vowels). This fact can be used to semi-bowdlerise offensive language, a practice known as disemvoweling.

Notes

1. Daniels, Peter T., et al. eds. ''The World's Writing Systems'' Oxford. (1996), p.4.

References

★ A Grammar of the Arabic Language, Wright, W., , , Cambridge University Press, 1971,

See also

★ Abjad numerals

★ Shorthand (constructed writing systems that are structurally abjads)

★ Gematria, the Hebrew system of mystical numerology

External links

★ Actual photo of the specimen of Proto-sinaitic script