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.)

Etymology

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.

Origins

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).

Connections with numbers

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

"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 הורישׁ 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, ה, 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).

Related concepts

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.

References

, v. 1, p. 28.

External links

Abjad - The Arabic Alphabet learning system

Writing systems

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