Abjad
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An abjad (
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
.Terminology
According to the formulations of
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
The first abjad to gain widespread usage was the
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
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.
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
The other major family of abugidas,
Abjads and the structure of Semitic languages
The abjad form of writing is well-adapted to the
By contrast, the Arabic and Hebrew scripts sometimes perform the role of
Comparative chart of Abjads, extinct and extant
Name | In use | Cursive | Direction | # of letters | Matres lectionis
|
Area of origin | Used by | Languages | Time period (age) | Influenced by | Writing systems influenced |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Syriac |
yes | yes | right-left | 22 consonants | 3 | Middle East | Syriac Christianity, Assyrians | Aramaic: Syriac, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Turoyo, Mlahso | c. 100 BCE[14] | Aramaic | Nabatean, Palmyran, Mandaic, Parthian, Pahlavi, Sogdian, Avestan and Manichean[14] |
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 | |
Arabic |
yes | yes | right-left | 28 | 3 | Middle East and North Africa | Over 400 million people | Urdu, many others[14] |
512 CE[15][14] | Nabataean Aramaic | |
Aramaic (Imperial) | no | no | right-left | 22 | 3 | Middle East | Achaemenid, Persian, Babylonian, and Assyrian empires | Imperial Aramaic, Hebrew | c. 500 BCE[14] | Phoenician | Late Hebrew, Nabataean, Syriac |
Aramaic (Early) | no | no | right-left | 22 | none | Middle East | Various Semitic Peoples | c. 1000 – c. 900 BCE [citation needed] |
Phoenician | Hebrew, Imperial Aramaic.[14] | |
Nabataean |
no | no | right-left | 22 | none | Middle East | Nabataean Kingdom[16] | Nabataean | 200 BCE[16] | Aramaic | Arabic |
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[14] |
Psalter Pahlavi | no | yes | right-left | 21 | yes | Northwestern China [14] | Persian Script for Paper Writing[14] | 400 CE[17] | c.Syriac [citation needed] |
||
Phoenician | no | no | right-left, boustrophedon | 22 | none | Byblos[14] | Canaanites | Phoenician, Punic, Hebrew | c. 1500 – c. 1000 BCE[14] | Proto-Canaanite Alphabet[14] | Punic (variant), Greek, Etruscan, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew |
Parthian | no | no | right-left | 22 | yes | Parthia (modern-day equivalent of Northeastern Iran, Southern Turkmenistan and Northwest Afghanistan)[14] | Parthian & Sassanian periods of Persian Empire[14] | Parthian | c. 200 BCE[14] | Aramaic | |
Sabaean | no | no | right-left, boustrophedon | 29 | none | Southern Arabia (Sheba) | Southern Arabians | Sabaean | c. 500 BCE[14] | Byblos[14] | Ethiopic (Eritrea & Ethiopia)[14] |
Punic | no | no | right-left | 22 | none | Carthage (Tunisia), North Africa, Mediterranean[14] | Punic Culture | Punic, Neo-Punic | Phoenician [citation needed] |
||
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 [citation needed] |
Phoenician, Hebrew |
Ugaritic | no | yes | left-right | 30 | none, 3 characters for gs+vowel | Ugarit (modern-day Northern Syria) | Ugarites | Ugaritic, Hurrian | c. 1400 BCE[14] | Proto-Sinaitic | |
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 [citation needed] |
900 BCE [citation needed] |
Proto-Sinaitic | Ge'ez (Ethiopia and Eritrea) |
Sogdian | no | no (yes in later versions) | right-left, left-right (vertical) | 20 | 3 | parts of China (Xinjiang), Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan | Buddhists, Manichaens | Sogdian | 400 CE | c.Syriac | Old Uyghur alphabet[14] |
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 |
See also
- Abjad numerals (Arabic alphanumeric code)
- Abugida
- Gematria (Hebrew & English system of alphanumeric code)
- Numerology
- Shorthand (constructed writing systems that are structurally abjads)
References
- ^ "abjad". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
- ISBN 978-1-78925-092-3.
- ISBN 9789004215450.
- ^ 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."
- ^ 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). "
- ^ Daniels & Bright 1996.
- ^ Lehmann 2011.
- ISBN 978-0-521-78737-6.
- ^ "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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Schone, Patrick (2006): "Low-resource autodiacritization of abjads for speech keyword search", In INTERSPEECH-2006, paper 1412-Mon3FoP.13.
- ^ Daniels 2013.
- ^ Lipiński 1994.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u Ager 2015.
- ^ Ekhtiar 2011, p. 21.
- ^ a b Lo 2012.
- ^ "PAHLAVI PSALTER – Encyclopaedia Iranica". iranicaonline.org.
- ISBN 9781782975885.
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.
- 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.