Abjad

Terminology

According to the formulations of Peter T. Daniels, 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 niqqud 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 grapheme, 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. 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". However, Daniels's terminology has found acceptance in the linguistic community.

Origins and history

The Proto-Sinaitic script represents the earliest-known example of alphabetic writing. This script is generally considered to have been developed around the Sinai Peninsula during the Middle Bronze Age by speakers of an ancient West Semitic language who repurposed pictographic elements of local Egyptian hieroglyphs in order to construct a new script that represented the consonants of their own language using acrophony. The Proto-Sinaitic script is thought to represent, or at least indicate the existence of, an early ancestor of the many later Semitic consonantal scripts which continued to develop over time into more abstract, less visually representational forms, including the Phoenician abjad.

The Phoenician abjad was a radical simplification of phonetic writing. Unlike other scripts, such as Mesopotamian cuneiform (logographic and syllabic) and Egyptian hieroglyphs (logographic and consonantal), the Phoenician abjad consisted of only a few dozen symbols. Presumably, the relative simplicity of the Phoenician abjad made this script easy to learn, allowed it to gain widespread usage, and influenced how readily it was adopted or adapted into the development of other scripts by non-Phoenicians who encountered seafaring Phoenician merchants and their script which they brought with them as they traded throughout the ancient Mediterranean world during the first millennium BCE.

During these exchanges, the Phoenician script gave rise to a number of new writing systems, including the widely used Aramaic abjad and the Greek alphabet. The Greek alphabet was later developed into several alphabets, including Etruscan, Coptic, Cyrillic, and Latin (via Etruscan), while Aramaic became the ancestor of many abjads and abugidas of Asia, particularly in and around India, Southeast Asia, and Oceania.

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

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 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. This practice was at first rare and limited in scope but became increasingly common and more developed in later times.

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 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).

Abjads and the structure of Semitic languages

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.

Adaptation for use as true alphabets

The Arabic abjad has 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.

Comparative chart of abjads, extinct and extant