Abjad
For the traditional ordering of the letters of the Arabic alphabet, see Abjad numerals.An
abjad, sometimes also called a
consonantary, is a type of
writing system in which there is one symbol per
consonantal
phoneme. Some abjads in use are
Arabic,
Hebrew,
Aramaic,
Persian, and
Avestan.
As with all
syllabary-like forms, abjads differ from
alphabets in that only the 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 the inclusion of
vowel marks is optional and not the dominant (or literate) form.(In an abugida, the vowel sounds are defined with the grapheme, and any modifications from the standard vowel sound, including no vowel sound, are represented by vowel marks.)
The terms
abjad and
abugida appear to be the inventions of
Peter T. Daniels, as explained in his book (with William Bright)
The World's Writing Systems (Oxford, 1996). They have not won wide acceptance.
The system takes its name from the first nonsense "word" of the mnemonic sequence for the 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.
All known abjads belong to the
Semitic family of scripts, and derive from the
Proto-Sinaitic alphabet, the earliest known abjad, derived from
Egyptian hieroglyphs, dated to ca.
1500 BC. The development of an abjad was a significant simplification compared to the earlier
syllabaries, with the number of glyphs to be learned reduced by about 80%, at the cost of increased ambiguity because of the missing vowels (the step of adding back independent vowel signs was to be reserved for the
Greeks about seven centuries later).
Abjads also often include the principle of each individual letter also representing a numeric value, so that any word may also be interpreted as a number. This is present in
Hebrew,
Arabic, and
Persian, among others.
Baha ("glory"), for example, is 2+1+5+1, or 9, so nine is also known as the "number of
baha," and the two may sometimes be treated as mutual equivalents. Similarly, the Persian word for the city of Adrianople/
Edirne has the same numerical value as the Persian word meaning "mystery," and therefore Adrianople was sometimes referred to as the "City of Mystery." (This has become almost a sort of cultural game in places with such languages.)
Greek and
Latin are other languages that support letter/number equivalents (in Latin, for certain letters only, in Greek for all of them).
"Impure" abjads (such as Arabic) may have characters for some vowels as well (called
matres lectionis, 'mothers of reading', singular
mater lectionis), or optional vowel diacritics, or both; however, the term's originator,
Peter T. Daniels, insists that it should be applied only to scripts entirely lacking in vowel indicators, thus excluding
Arabic,
Hebrew, and
Syriac.
Impure abjads develop when, due to
phonetic change, a previous
consonant or
diphthong becomes a vowel. Later generations, who receive their
orthography without knowing that letter originally signified a consonant there, understand it to mean a
vowel as it is in their spoken language. They then use that letter as a vowel in other places where it was never a consonant. For example, the Hebrew word "ורישׁ probably underwent the following pronunciation change: ' ' . The ו, which was originally the consonant w, became the vowel o. Later, probably in the
Second Temple period, the vowel use of ו was expanded to places where no consonant ever existed.
Addition of vowels
Many scripts derived from abjads have been extended with vowel symbols to become full
alphabets. This has mostly happened when the script was adapted to a non-Semitic language, the most famous case being the derivation of the
Greek alphabet from the Phoenician abjad. The Greeks did not need the letters for the
guttural (א, ", ח, ע) and
co-articulated (צ, ק) consonants. They dropped some of them and turned others into vowels.
In other cases, the vowel signs come in the form of little points or hooks attached to the consonant letters, producing an
abugida such as the system of writing
Amharic (written using the Ge'ez alphabet, which was formerly an abjad before a vocalization occurred sometime after the 5th century BCE but before the 4th century CE).
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
Mny 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.
*
Abjad numerals* , v. 1, p. 28.
*
Abjad - The Arabic Alphabet learning system
