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102-566: Kurukh Banna is an abugida made specifically for the Kurux language in 1991 by Basudev Ram Khalkho from Odisha , India. In Sundargarh district of Odisha the Kurukh Banna alphabet is taught and promoted by Kurukh Parha. Fonts have been developed and people are using it widely in books, magazines and other material. The alphabet is also used by Oraon people in the states of Chhattisgarh , West Bengal , Jharkhand and Assam . As of December 2023,

204-719: A is not written, as in the Indic abugidas, The source of the term "abugida", namely the Ge'ez abugida now used for Amharic and Tigrinya , has assimilated into their consonant modifications. It is no longer systematic and must be learned as a syllabary rather than as a segmental script. Even more extreme, the Pahlavi abjad eventually became logographic . Thus the primary categorisation of alphabets reflects how they treat vowels. For tonal languages , further classification can be based on their treatment of tone. Though names do not yet exist to distinguish

306-413: A change to writing the two consonants side by side. In the latter case, this combination may be indicated by a diacritic on one of the consonants or a change in the form of one of the consonants, e.g. the half forms of Devanagari. Generally, the reading order of stacked consonants is top to bottom, or the general reading order of the script, but sometimes the reading order can be reversed. The division of

408-453: A conjunct. This expedient is used by ISCII and South Asian scripts of Unicode .) Thus a closed syllable such as phaṣ requires two aksharas to write: फष् phaṣ . The Róng script used for the Lepcha language goes further than other Indic abugidas, in that a single akshara can represent a closed syllable: Not only the vowel, but any final consonant is indicated by a diacritic. For example,

510-416: A consistent one-to-one correspondence between the letters and the phonemes so that a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a speaker would always know the pronunciation of a word given its spelling, and vice versa. However, this ideal is usually never achieved in practice. Languages can come close to it, such as Spanish and Finnish . Others, such as English, deviate from it to

612-404: A consonant letter, while the syllable is still pronounced in the order of a consonant-vowel combination (CV). The fundamental principles of an abugida apply to words made up of consonant-vowel (CV) syllables. The syllables are written as letters in a straight line, where each syllable is either a letter that represents the sound of a consonant and its inherent vowel or a letter modified to indicate

714-469: A consonant, with diacritics for disambiguation. In the Pollard script , an abugida, vowels are indicated by diacritics. The placing of the diacritic relative to the consonant is modified to indicate the tone. More rarely, a script may have separate letters for tones, as is the case for Hmong and Zhuang . For many, regardless of whether letters or diacritics get used, the most common tone is not marked, just as

816-473: A default vowel consonant such as फ does not take on a final consonant sound. Instead, it keeps its vowel. For writing two consonants without a vowel in between, instead of using diacritics on the first consonant to remove its vowel, another popular method of special conjunct forms is used in which two or more consonant characters are merged to express a cluster, such as Devanagari, as in अप्फ appha. (Some fonts display this as प् followed by फ, rather than forming

918-515: A diacritic, but writes all other vowels as full letters (similarly to Kurdish and Uyghur). This means that when no vowel diacritics are present (most of the time), it technically has an inherent vowel. However, like the Phagspa and Meroitic scripts whose status as abugidas is controversial (see below), all other vowels are written in-line. Additionally, the practice of explicitly writing all-but-one vowel does not apply to loanwords from Arabic and Persian, so

1020-411: A large number of loanwords at different times, retaining their original spelling at varying levels. However, even English has general, albeit complex, rules that predict pronunciation from spelling. Rules like this are usually successful. However, rules to predict spelling from pronunciation have a higher failure rate. Sometimes, countries have the written language undergo a spelling reform to realign

1122-476: A letter for /ti/ . Devanagari is typically an abugida augmented with dedicated letters for initial vowels, though some traditions use अ as a zero consonant as the graphic base for such vowels. The boundaries between the three types of segmental scripts are not always clear-cut. For example, Sorani Kurdish is written in the Arabic script , which, when used for other languages, is an abjad. In Kurdish , writing

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1224-465: A letter representing just a consonant (C). This final consonant may be represented with: In a true abugida, the lack of distinctive vowel marking of the letter may result from the diachronic loss of the inherent vowel, e.g. by syncope and apocope in Hindi . When not separating syllables containing consonant clusters (CCV) into C + CV, these syllables are often written by combining the two consonants. In

1326-451: A much larger degree. The pronunciation of a language often evolves independently of its writing system. Writing systems have been borrowed for languages the orthography was not initially made to use. The degree to which letters of an alphabet correspond to phonemes of a language varies. Languages may fail to achieve a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds in any of several ways: National languages sometimes elect to address

1428-456: A phenomenon where letters have been given names distinct from their pronunciations. Systems with acrophony include Greek, Arabic , Hebrew , and Syriac ; systems without include the Latin alphabet . More recently however, four cylinder seals dating to 2400 BC and found at the site of Umm el-Marra , in present-day Syria , are incised with what is potentially the earliest known alphabetic writings in

1530-416: A result of the spread of writing systems, independent vowels may be used to represent syllables beginning with a glottal stop , even for non-initial syllables. The next two complications are consonant clusters before a vowel (CCV) and syllables ending in a consonant (CVC). The simplest solution, which is not always available, is to break with the principle of writing words as a sequence of syllables and use

1632-409: A set of some 24 hieroglyphs that are called uniliterals, which are glyphs that provide one sound. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms , to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names. The script was used a fair amount in the 4th century CE. However, after pagan temples were closed down, it was forgotten in the 5th century until

1734-593: A single symbol denotes the combination of one consonant and one vowel. Related concepts were introduced independently in 1948 by James Germain Février (using the term néosyllabisme ) and David Diringer (using the term semisyllabary ), then in 1959 by Fred Householder (introducing the term pseudo-alphabet ). The Ethiopic term "abugida" was chosen as a designation for the concept in 1990 by Peter T. Daniels . In 1992, Faber suggested "segmentally coded syllabically linear phonographic script", and in 1992 Bright used

1836-453: A syllabary, as their name would imply, because each glyph stands for a consonant and is modified by rotation to represent the following vowel. In a true syllabary, each consonant-vowel combination gets represented by a separate glyph. All three types may be augmented with syllabic glyphs. Ugaritic , for example, is essentially an abjad but has syllabic letters for /ʔa, ʔi, ʔu/ These are the only times that vowels are indicated. Coptic has

1938-497: A syllable with the default vowel, in this case ka ( [kə] ). In some languages, including Hindi, it becomes a final closing consonant at the end of a word, in this case k . The inherent vowel may be changed by adding vowel mark ( diacritics ), producing syllables such as कि ki, कु ku, के ke, को ko. In many of the Brahmic scripts, a syllable beginning with a cluster is treated as a single character for purposes of vowel marking, so

2040-778: A systematic graphic modification of the consonants. The earliest known alphabet using this sense is the Wadi el-Hol script , believed to be an abjad. Its successor, Phoenician , is the ancestor of modern alphabets, including Arabic , Greek , Latin (via the Old Italic alphabet ), Cyrillic (via the Greek alphabet), and Hebrew (via Aramaic ). Examples of present-day abjads are the Arabic and Hebrew scripts ; true alphabets include Latin , Cyrillic, and Korean hangul; and abugidas, used to write Tigrinya , Amharic , Hindi , and Thai . The Canadian Aboriginal syllabics are also an abugida, rather than

2142-600: A unique order based on phonology : The letters are arranged according to how and where the sounds get produced in the mouth. This organization is present in Southeast Asia, Tibet, Korean hangul , and even Japanese kana , which is not an alphabet. In Phoenician, each letter got associated with a word that begins with that sound. This is called acrophony and is continuously used to varying degrees in Samaritan , Aramaic , Syriac , Hebrew , Greek , and Arabic . Acrophony

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2244-466: A vowel marker like ि -i, falling before the character it modifies, may appear several positions before the place where it is pronounced. For example, the game cricket in Hindi is क्रिकेट krikeṭ ; the diacritic for /i/ appears before the consonant cluster /kr/ , not before the /r/ . A more unusual example is seen in the Batak alphabet : Here the syllable bim is written ba-ma-i-(virama) . That is,

2346-403: A word into syllables for the purposes of writing does not always accord with the natural phonetics of the language. For example, Brahmic scripts commonly handle a phonetic sequence CVC-CV as CV-CCV or CV-C-CV. However, sometimes phonetic CVC syllables are handled as single units, and the final consonant may be represented: More complicated unit structures (e.g. CC or CCVC) are handled by combining

2448-465: Is Elder Futhark , believed to have evolved out of one of the Old Italic alphabets . Elder Futhark gave rise to other alphabets known collectively as the Runic alphabets . The Runic alphabets were used for Germanic languages from 100 CE to the late Middle Ages, being engraved on stone and jewelry, although inscriptions found on bone and wood occasionally appear. These alphabets have since been replaced with

2550-463: Is a non-segmental script that indicates syllable onsets and rimes , such as consonant clusters and vowels with final consonants. Thus it is not segmental and cannot be considered an abugida. However, it superficially resembles an abugida with the roles of consonant and vowel reversed. Most syllables are written with two letters in the order rime–onset (typically vowel-consonant), even though they are pronounced as onset-rime (consonant-vowel), rather like

2652-407: Is an example of an abugida because it has an inherent vowel , but it is not an alphasyllabary because its vowels are written in linear order. Modern Lao is an example of an alphasyllabary that is not an abugida, for there is no inherent vowel and its vowels are always written explicitly and not in accordance to their temporal order in speech, meaning that a vowel can be written before, below or above

2754-509: Is an inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram c.  1000 BCE . This script is the parent script of all western alphabets. By the 10th century BCE, two other forms distinguish themselves, Canaanite and Aramaic . The Aramaic gave rise to the Hebrew alphabet . The South Arabian alphabet , a sister script to the Phoenician alphabet, is the script from which the Ge'ez abugida

2856-410: Is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary, similar to a diacritical mark . This contrasts with a full alphabet , in which vowels have status equal to consonants, and with an abjad , in which vowel marking is absent, partial , or optional – in less formal contexts, all three types of the script may be termed "alphabets". The terms also contrast them with a syllabary , in which

2958-555: Is believed to have been created by Saints Cyril and Methodius , while the Cyrillic alphabet was created by Clement of Ohrid , their disciple. They feature many letters that appear to have been borrowed from or influenced by Greek and Hebrew. Many phonetic scripts exist in Asia. The Arabic alphabet , Hebrew alphabet , Syriac alphabet , and other abjads of the Middle East are developments of

3060-540: Is considered a separate letter, but accented vowels such as á and é are not. The ll and ch were also formerly considered single letters and sorted separately after l and c , but in 1994, the tenth congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies changed the collating order so that ll came to be sorted between lk and lm in the dictionary and ch came to be sorted between cg and ci ; those digraphs were still formally designated as letters, but in 2010

3162-490: Is difficult to draw a dividing line between abugidas and other segmental scripts. For example, the Meroitic script of ancient Sudan did not indicate an inherent a (one symbol stood for both m and ma, for example), and is thus similar to Brahmic family of abugidas. However, the other vowels were indicated with full letters, not diacritics or modification, so the system was essentially an alphabet that did not bother to write

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3264-458: Is referred to as the inherent or implicit vowel, as opposed to the explicit vowels marked by the 'diacritics'.) An alphasyllabary is defined as "a type of writing system in which the vowels are denoted by subsidiary symbols, not all of which occur in a linear order (with relation to the consonant symbols) that is congruent with their temporal order in speech". Bright did not require that an alphabet explicitly represent all vowels. ʼPhags-pa

3366-476: Is syllables that consist of just a vowel (V). For some languages, a zero consonant letter is used as though every syllable began with a consonant. For other languages, each vowel has a separate letter that is used for each syllable consisting of just the vowel. These letters are known as independent vowels , and are found in most Indic scripts. These letters may be quite different from the corresponding diacritics, which by contrast are known as dependent vowels . As

3468-423: Is unknown to many Italians because spelling is usually trivial, as Italian spelling is highly phonemic. In standard Spanish, one can tell the pronunciation of a word from its spelling, but not vice versa, as phonemes sometimes can be represented in more than one way, but a given letter is consistently pronounced. French using silent letters , nasal vowels , and elision , may seem to lack much correspondence between

3570-657: Is with North Indic scripts, used in Northern India, Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, Mongolia, and Russia; and Southern Indic scripts, used in South India , Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia . South Indic letter forms are more rounded than North Indic forms, though Odia , Golmol and Litumol of Nepal script are rounded. Most North Indic scripts' full letters incorporate a horizontal line at the top, with Gujarati and Odia as exceptions; South Indic scripts do not. Indic scripts indicate vowels through dependent vowel signs (diacritics) around

3672-659: The Real Academia Española changed it, so they are no longer considered letters at all. In German, words starting with sch- (which spells the German phoneme / ʃ / ) are inserted between words with initial sca- and sci- (all incidentally loanwords) instead of appearing after the initial sz , as though it were a single letter, which contrasts several languages such as Albanian , in which dh- , ë- , gj- , ll- , rr- , th- , xh-, and zh-, which all represent phonemes and considered separate single letters, would follow

3774-523: The Aramaic alphabet . Most alphabetic scripts of India and Eastern Asia descend from the Brahmi script , believed to be a descendant of Aramaic. European alphabets, especially Latin and Cyrillic, have been adapted for many languages of Asia. Arabic is also widely used, sometimes as an abjad, as with Urdu and Persian , and sometimes as a complete alphabet, as with Kurdish and Uyghur . In Korea , Sejong

3876-593: The Brahmi alphabet . Today they are used in most languages of South Asia (although replaced by Perso-Arabic in Urdu , Kashmiri and some other languages of Pakistan and India ), mainland Southeast Asia ( Myanmar , Thailand , Laos , Cambodia , and Vietnam ), Tibet ( Tibetan ), Indonesian archipelago ( Javanese , Balinese , Sundanese , Batak , Lontara , Rejang , Rencong , Makasar , etc.), Philippines ( Baybayin , Buhid , Hanunuo , Kulitan , and Aborlan Tagbanwa ), Malaysia ( Rencong ). The primary division

3978-674: The Etruscan alphabet . One of these became the Latin alphabet, which spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their republic. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire , the alphabet survived in intellectual and religious works. It came to be used for the Romance languages that descended from Latin and most of the other languages of western and central Europe. Today, it is the most widely used script in

4080-443: The Ge'ez abugida (or fidel ), the base form of the letter (also known as fidel ) may be altered. For example, ሀ hä [hə] (base form), ሁ hu (with a right-side diacritic that does not alter the letter), ሂ hi (with a subdiacritic that compresses the consonant, so it is the same height), ህ hə [hɨ] or [h] (where the letter is modified with a kink in the left arm). In the family known as Canadian Aboriginal syllabics , which

4182-553: The Greek alphabet was the first true alphabet; it was originally derived from the Phoenician alphabet , which was an abjad. Alphabets usually have a standard ordering for their letters. This makes alphabets a useful tool in collation , as words can be listed in a well-defined order—commonly known as alphabetical order . This also means that letters may be used as a method of "numbering" ordered items. Some systems demonstrate acrophony ,

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4284-504: The Hanuno'o script , are learned one letter at a time, in no particular order, and are not used for collation where a definite order is required. However, a dozen Ugaritic tablets from the fourteenth century BCE preserve the alphabet in two sequences. One, the ABCDE order later used in Phoenician, has continued with minor changes in Hebrew , Greek , Armenian , Gothic , Cyrillic , and Latin ;

4386-525: The Kharoṣṭhī and Brāhmī scripts ; the abjad in question is usually considered to be the Aramaic one, but while the link between Aramaic and Kharosthi is more or less undisputed, this is not the case with Brahmi. The Kharosthi family does not survive today, but Brahmi's descendants include most of the modern scripts of South and Southeast Asia . Ge'ez derived from a different abjad, the Sabean script of Yemen ;

4488-465: The Late Latin word alphabetum , which in turn originated in the Greek ἀλφάβητος alphábētos ; it was made from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha (α) and beta (β). The names for the Greek letters, in turn, came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet: aleph , the word for ox , and bet , the word for house . The Ancient Egyptian writing system had

4590-551: The Phoenician alphabet . The Phoenician system is considered the first true alphabet and is the ultimate ancestor of many modern scripts, including Arabic , Cyrillic , Greek , Hebrew , Latin , and possibly Brahmic . Peter T. Daniels distinguishes true alphabets—which use letters to represent both consonants and vowels—from both abugidas and abjads , which only need letters for consonants. Abjads generally lack vowel indicators altogether, while abugidas represent them with diacritics added to letters. In this narrower sense,

4692-527: The aksharas ; there is no vowel-killer mark. Abjads are typically written without indication of many vowels. However, in some contexts like teaching materials or scriptures , Arabic and Hebrew are written with full indication of vowels via diacritic marks ( harakat , niqqud ) making them effectively alphasyllabaries. The Arabic scripts used for Kurdish in Iraq and for Uyghur in Xinjiang , China, as well as

4794-448: The phoneme level—that is, it has separate glyphs for individual sounds and not for larger units such as syllables or words. In the narrower sense, some scholars distinguish "true" alphabets from two other types of segmental script, abjads , and abugidas . These three differ in how they treat vowels. Abjads have letters for consonants and leave most vowels unexpressed. Abugidas are also consonant-based but indicate vowels with diacritics ,

4896-510: The thorn ⟨þ⟩ in Old English and Icelandic , which came from the Futhark runes; and modified existing letters, such as the eth ⟨ð⟩ of Old English and Icelandic, which is a modified d . Other alphabets only use a subset of the Latin alphabet, such as Hawaiian and Italian, which uses the letters j, k, x, y, and w only in foreign words. Another notable script

4998-405: The 15th century BCE. This was an alphabetic cuneiform script with 30 signs, including three that indicate the following vowel. This script was not used after the destruction of Ugarit in 1178 BCE. The Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, conventionally called Proto-Canaanite , before c.  1050 BCE . The oldest text in Phoenician script

5100-550: The 16th century BCE, had 87 symbols, including five vowels. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, causing many different alphabets to evolve from it. The Greek alphabet, in Euboean form , was carried over by Greek colonists to the Italian peninsula c.  800–600 BCE giving rise to many different alphabets used to write the Italic languages , like

5202-453: The Brahmic family, the term akshara is used for the units. In several languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea, abugida traditionally meant letters of the Ethiopic or Ge‘ez script in which many of these languages are written. Ge'ez is one of several segmental writing systems in the world, others include Indic/Brahmic scripts and Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics . The word abugida is derived from

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5304-607: The English names got derived) preserve the qualities of the English vowels before the Great Vowel Shift. By contrast, the names of F, L, M, N, and S ( /ɛf, ɛl, ɛm, ɛn, ɛs/ ) remain the same in both languages because "short" vowels were largely unaffected by the Shift. In Cyrillic, originally, acrophony was present using Slavic words. The first three words going, azŭ, buky, vědě, with the Cyrillic collation order being, А, Б, В. However, this

5406-522: The Great created the Hangul alphabet in 1443 CE. Hangul is a unique alphabet: it is a featural alphabet , where the design of many of the letters comes from a sound's place of articulation, like P looking like the widened mouth and L looking like the tongue pulled in. The creation of Hangul was planned by the government of the day, and it places individual letters in syllable clusters with equal dimensions, in

5508-508: The Hebrew script of Yiddish , are fully vowelled, but because the vowels are written with full letters rather than diacritics (with the exception of distinguishing between /a/ and /o/ in the latter) and there are no inherent vowels, these are considered alphabets, not abugidas. The Arabic script used for South Azerbaijani generally writes the vowel /æ/ (written as ə in North Azerbaijani) as

5610-624: The Indic scripts, the earliest method was simply to arrange them vertically, writing the second consonant of the cluster below the first one. The two consonants may also merge as conjunct consonant letters, where two or more letters are graphically joined in a ligature , or otherwise change their shapes. Rarely, one of the consonants may be replaced by a gemination mark, e.g. the Gurmukhi addak . When they are arranged vertically, as in Burmese or Khmer , they are said to be 'stacked'. Often there has been

5712-454: The Latin alphabet. The exception was for decorative use, where the runes remained in use until the 20th century. The Old Hungarian script was the writing system of the Hungarians. It was in use during the entire history of Hungary, albeit not as an official writing system. From the 19th century, it once again became more and more popular. The Glagolitic alphabet was the initial script of

5814-714: The Northwest Semitic "Abgad" order, is already well established. Although, languages using this alphabet have different conventions for their treatment of modified letters (such as the French é , à , and ô ) and certain combinations of letters ( multigraphs ). In French, these are not considered to be additional letters for collation. However, in Icelandic , the accented letters such as á , í , and ö are considered distinct letters representing different vowel sounds from sounds represented by their unaccented counterparts. In Spanish, ñ

5916-457: The Ugaritic script were the first scripts with a limited number of signs instead of using many different signs for words, in contrast to cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Linear B . The Phoenician script was probably the first phonemic script, and it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for traders to learn. Another advantage of the Phoenician alphabet

6018-699: The advent of vowels coincided with the introduction or adoption of Christianity about AD 350. The Ethiopic script is the elaboration of an abjad. The Cree syllabary was invented with full knowledge of the Devanagari system. The Meroitic script was developed from Egyptian hieroglyphs , within which various schemes of 'group writing' had been used for showing vowels. Alphabet The first letters were invented in Ancient Egypt to serve as an aid in writing Egyptian hieroglyphs ; these are referred to as Egyptian uniliteral signs by lexicographers . This system

6120-463: The consonants to the point that they must be considered modifications of the form of the letters. Children learn each modification separately, as in a syllabary; nonetheless, the graphic similarities between syllables with the same consonant are readily apparent, unlike the case in a true syllabary . Though now an abugida, the Ge'ez script , until the advent of Christianity ( ca. AD 350 ), had originally been what would now be termed an abjad . In

6222-476: The consonants, often including a sign that explicitly indicates the lack of a vowel. If a consonant has no vowel sign, this indicates a default vowel. Vowel diacritics may appear above, below, to the left, to the right, or around the consonant. The most widely used Indic script is Devanagari , shared by Hindi , Bihari , Marathi , Konkani , Nepali , and often Sanskrit . A basic letter such as क in Hindi represents

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6324-767: The discovery of the Rosetta Stone . There was also cuneiform , primarily used to write several ancient languages, including Sumerian . The last known use of cuneiform was in 75 CE, after which the script fell out of use. In the Middle Bronze Age , an apparently alphabetic system known as the Proto-Sinaitic script appeared in Egyptian turquoise mines in the Sinai Peninsula c.  1840 BCE , apparently left by Canaanite workers. Orly Goldwasser has connected

6426-582: The earlier forms. The script in its classical form was used until the 1st century CE. The Etruscan language itself was not used during the Roman Empire , but the script was used for religious texts. Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet have ligatures , a combination of two letters make one, such as æ in Danish and Icelandic and ⟨ Ȣ ⟩ in Algonquian ; borrowings from other alphabets, such as

6528-402: The entire final -an . While bopomofo is not a mainstream writing system, it is still often used in ways similar to a romanization system, for aiding pronunciation and as an input method for Chinese characters on computers and cellphones. The term "alphabet" is used by linguists and paleographers in both a wide and a narrow sense. In a broader sense, an alphabet is a segmental script at

6630-457: The examples above to sets of syllables in the Japanese hiragana syllabary: か ka , き ki , く ku , け ke , こ ko have nothing in common to indicate k; while ら ra , り ri , る ru , れ re , ろ ro have neither anything in common for r , nor anything to indicate that they have the same vowels as the k set. Most Indian and Indochinese abugidas appear to have first been developed from abjads with

6732-477: The first alphabet had developed about that time. The script was based on letter appearances and names, believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. This script had no characters representing vowels. Originally, it probably was a syllabary—a script where syllables are represented with characters—with symbols that were not needed being removed. The best-attested Bronze Age alphabet is Ugaritic , invented in Ugarit before

6834-428: The four letters, ' ä, bu, gi, and da , in much the same way that abecedary is derived from Latin letters a be ce de , abjad is derived from the Arabic a b j d , and alphabet is derived from the names of the two first letters in the Greek alphabet , alpha and beta . Abugida as a term in linguistics was proposed by Peter T. Daniels in his 1990 typology of writing systems . As Daniels used

6936-466: The idea that, "they share features of both alphabet and syllabary." The formal definitions given by Daniels and Bright for abugida and alphasyllabary differ; some writing systems are abugidas but not alphasyllabaries, and some are alphasyllabaries but not abugidas. An abugida is defined as "a type of writing system whose basic characters denote consonants followed by a particular vowel, and in which diacritics denote other vowels". (This 'particular vowel'

7038-432: The illiterate turquoise miner graffiti theory to the origin of the alphabet. In 1999, American Egyptologists John and Deborah Darnell discovered an earlier version of this first alphabet at the Wadi el-Hol valley. The script dated to c.  1800 BCE and shows evidence of having been adapted from specific forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs that could be dated to c.  2000 BCE , strongly suggesting that

7140-447: The letters ⟨d, e, g, l, n, r, t, x, z⟩ respectively, as well as Hungarian and Welsh. Further, German words with an umlaut get collated ignoring the umlaut as—contrary to Turkish , which adopted the graphemes ö and ü , and where a word like tüfek would come after tuz , in the dictionary. An exception is the German telephone directory, where umlauts are sorted like ä = ae since names such as Jäger also appear with

7242-540: The liturgical language Old Church Slavonic and became, together with the Greek uncial script, the basis of the Cyrillic script . Cyrillic is one of the most widely used modern alphabetic scripts and is notable for its use in Slavic languages and also for other languages within the former Soviet Union . Cyrillic alphabets include Serbian , Macedonian , Bulgarian , Russian , Belarusian , and Ukrainian . The Glagolitic alphabet

7344-535: The most common vowel is not marked in Indic abugidas. In Zhuyin , not only is one of the tones unmarked; but there is a diacritic to indicate a lack of tone, like the virama of Indic. Alphabets often come to be associated with a standard ordering of their letters; this is for collation —namely, for listing words and other items in alphabetical order . The ordering of the Latin alphabet ( A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ), which derives from

7446-405: The most common vowel. Several systems of shorthand use diacritics for vowels, but they do not have an inherent vowel, and are thus more similar to Thaana and Kurdish script than to the Brahmic scripts. The Gabelsberger shorthand system and its derivatives modify the following consonant to represent vowels. The Pollard script , which was based on shorthand, also uses diacritics for vowels;

7548-501: The other, HMĦLQ, was used in southern Arabia and is preserved today in Geʻez . Both orders have therefore been stable for at least 3000 years. Runic used an unrelated Futhark sequence, which got simplified later on. Arabic usually uses its sequence, although Arabic retains the traditional abjadi order , which is used for numbers. The Brahmic family of alphabets used in India uses

7650-423: The placements of the vowel relative to the consonant indicates tone . Pitman shorthand uses straight strokes and quarter-circle marks in different orientations as the principal "alphabet" of consonants; vowels are shown as light and heavy dots, dashes and other marks in one of 3 possible positions to indicate the various vowel-sounds. However, to increase writing speed, Pitman has rules for "vowel indication" using

7752-401: The position of the /i/ vowel in Devanagari, which is written before the consonant. Pahawh is also unusual in that, while an inherent rime /āu/ (with mid tone) is unwritten, it also has an inherent onset /k/ . For the syllable /kau/ , which requires one or the other of the inherent sounds to be overt, it is /au/ that is written. Thus it is the rime (vowel) that is basic to the system. It

7854-553: The positioning or choice of consonant signs so that writing vowel-marks can be dispensed with. As the term alphasyllabary suggests, abugidas have been considered an intermediate step between alphabets and syllabaries . Historically, abugidas appear to have evolved from abjads (vowelless alphabets). They contrast with syllabaries, where there is a distinct symbol for each syllable or consonant-vowel combination, and where these have no systematic similarity to each other, and typically develop directly from logographic scripts . Compare

7956-402: The problem of dialects by associating the alphabet with the national standard. Some national languages like Finnish , Armenian , Turkish , Russian, Serbo-Croatian ( Serbian , Croatian , and Bosnian ), and Bulgarian have a very regular spelling system with nearly one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes. Similarly, the Italian verb corresponding to 'spell (out),' compitare ,

8058-560: The same way as Chinese characters . This change allows for mixed-script writing, where one syllable always takes up one type space no matter how many letters get stacked into building that one sound-block. Bopomofo , also referred to as zhuyin , is a semi-syllabary used primarily in Taiwan to transcribe the sounds of Standard Chinese . Following the proclamation of the People's Republic of China in 1949 and its adoption of Hanyu Pinyin in 1956,

8160-467: The script does not have an inherent vowel for Arabic and Persian words. The inconsistency of its vowel notation makes it difficult to categorize. The imperial Mongol script called Phagspa was derived from the Tibetan abugida, but all vowels are written in-line rather than as diacritics. However, it retains the features of having an inherent vowel /a/ and having distinct initial vowel letters. Pahawh Hmong

8262-525: The script has been proposed for inclusion in Unicode, most recently in May 2023. Abugida An abugida ( / ˌ ɑː b uː ˈ ɡ iː d ə , ˌ æ b -/ ; from Ge'ez : አቡጊዳ , 'äbugīda ) – sometimes also called alphasyllabary , neosyllabary , or pseudo-alphabet  – is a segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as units; each unit

8364-495: The spelling Jaeger and are not distinguished in the spoken language. The Danish and Norwegian alphabets end with ⟨æ, ø, å⟩ , whereas the Swedish conventionally put ⟨å, ä, ö⟩ at the end. However, æ phonetically corresponds with ⟨ä⟩ , as does ⟨ø⟩ and ⟨ö⟩ . It is unknown whether the earliest alphabets had a defined sequence. Some alphabets today, such as

8466-499: The spelling and pronunciation. However, its rules on pronunciation, though complex, are consistent and predictable with a fair degree of accuracy. At the other extreme are languages such as English, where pronunciations mostly have to be memorized as they do not correspond to the spelling consistently. For English, this is because the Great Vowel Shift occurred after the orthography got established and because English has acquired

8568-435: The syllable [sok] would be written as something like s̥̽, here with an underring representing /o/ and an overcross representing the diacritic for final /k/ . Most other Indic abugidas can only indicate a very limited set of final consonants with diacritics, such as /ŋ/ or /r/ , if they can indicate any at all. In Ethiopic or Ge'ez script , fidels (individual "letters" of the script) have "diacritics" that are fused with

8670-430: The term alphasyllabary , and Gnanadesikan and Rimzhim, Katz, & Fowler have suggested aksara or āksharik . Abugidas include the extensive Brahmic family of scripts of Tibet, South and Southeast Asia, Semitic Ethiopic scripts, and Canadian Aboriginal syllabics . As is the case for syllabaries, the units of the writing system may consist of the representations both of syllables and of consonants. For scripts of

8772-527: The term zed for Z in all forms of English, other than American English. Over time names sometimes shifted or were added, as in double U for W , or "double V" in French, the English name for Y, and the American zee for Z. Comparing them in English and French gives a clear reflection of the Great Vowel Shift : A, B, C, and D are pronounced /eɪ, biː, siː, diː/ in today's English, but in contemporary French they are /a, be, se, de/ . The French names (from which

8874-520: The use of bopomofo on the mainland is limited. Bopomofo developed from a form of Chinese shorthand based on Chinese characters in the early 1900s and has elements of both an alphabet and a syllabary. Like an alphabet, the phonemes of syllable initials are represented by individual symbols, but like a syllabary, the phonemes of the syllable finals are not; each possible final (excluding the medial glide ) has its own character, an example being luan written as ㄌㄨㄢ ( l-u-an ). The last symbol ㄢ takes place as

8976-620: The various techniques above. Examples using the Devanagari script There are three principal families of abugidas, depending on whether vowels are indicated by modifying consonants by diacritics, distortion, or orientation. Lao and Tāna have dependent vowels and a zero vowel sign, but no inherent vowel. Indic scripts originated in India and spread to Southeast Asia , Bangladesh , Sri Lanka , Nepal , Bhutan , Tibet , Mongolia , and Russia . All surviving Indic scripts are descendants of

9078-504: The various types. Some alphabets disregard tone entirely, especially when it does not carry a heavy functional load, as in Somali and many other languages of Africa and the Americas. Most commonly, tones are indicated by diacritics, which is how vowels are treated in abugidas, which is the case for Vietnamese (a true alphabet) and Thai (an abugida). In Thai, the tone is determined primarily by

9180-475: The vowel diacritic and virama are both written after the consonants for the whole syllable. In many abugidas, there is also a diacritic to suppress the inherent vowel, yielding the bare consonant. In Devanagari , प् is p, and फ् is ph . This is called the virāma or halantam in Sanskrit. It may be used to form consonant clusters , or to indicate that a consonant occurs at the end of a word. Thus in Sanskrit,

9282-406: The vowel. Letters can be modified either by means of diacritics or by changes in the form of the letter itself. If all modifications are by diacritics and all diacritics follow the direction of the writing of the letters, then the abugida is not an alphasyllabary. However, most languages have words that are more complicated than a sequence of CV syllables, even ignoring tone. The first complication

9384-508: The vowels is mandatory, and whole letters are used, so the script is a true alphabet. Other languages may use a Semitic abjad with forced vowel diacritics, effectively making them abugidas. On the other hand, the ʼPhags-pa script of the Mongol Empire was based closely on the Tibetan abugida , but vowel marks are written after the preceding consonant rather than as diacritic marks. Although short

9486-434: The word, an abugida is in contrast with a syllabary , where letters with shared consonant or vowel sounds show no particular resemblance to one another. Furthermore, an abugida is also in contrast with an alphabet proper, where independent letters are used to denote consonants and vowels. The term alphasyllabary was suggested for the Indic scripts in 1997 by William Bright , following South Asian linguistic usage, to convey

9588-411: The world. The Etruscan alphabet remained nearly unchanged for several hundred years. Only evolving once the Etruscan language changed itself. The letters used for non-existent phonemes were dropped. Afterwards, however, the alphabet went through many different changes. The final classical form of Etruscan contained 20 letters. Four of them are vowels— ⟨a, e, i, u⟩ —six fewer letters than

9690-486: The world. The discovery suggests that the alphabet emerged 500 years earlier than previously thought, and undermines leading ideas about how it was invented. According to Christopher Rollston , a scholar of the ancient Near East, the morphology of the letters on the cylinder seals parallels quite nicely that of the existing corpus of early alphabetic writing. This theory however has yet to be universally accepted. The English word alphabet came into Middle English from

9792-670: The writing with the contemporary spoken language. These can range from simple spelling changes and word forms to switching the entire writing system. For example, Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet to a Latin-based Turkish alphabet , and Kazakh changed from an Arabic script to a Cyrillic script due to the Soviet Union's influence. In 2021, it made a transition to the Latin alphabet, similar to Turkish. The Cyrillic script used to be official in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan before they switched to

9894-411: Was abandoned in Latin . It referred to the letters by adding a vowel—usually ⟨e⟩ , sometimes ⟨a⟩ or ⟨u⟩ —before or after the consonant. Two exceptions were Y and Z , which were borrowed from the Greek alphabet rather than Etruscan. They were known as Y Graeca "Greek Y" and zeta (from Greek)—this discrepancy was inherited by many European languages, as in

9996-476: Was descended. Abugidas are writing systems with characters comprising consonant–vowel sequences. Alphabets without obligatory vowels are called abjads , with examples being Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac . The omission of vowels was not always a satisfactory solution due to the need of preserving sacred texts. "Weak" consonants are used to indicate vowels. These letters have a dual function since they can also be used as pure consonants. The Proto-Sinaitic script and

10098-438: Was inspired by the Devanagari script of India, vowels are indicated by changing the orientation of the syllabogram . Each vowel has a consistent orientation; for example, Inuktitut ᐱ pi, ᐳ pu, ᐸ pa; ᑎ ti, ᑐ tu, ᑕ ta . Although there is a vowel inherent in each, all rotations have equal status and none can be identified as basic. Bare consonants are indicated either by separate diacritics, or by superscript versions of

10200-412: Was later abandoned in favor of a system similar to Latin. When an alphabet is adopted or developed to represent a given language, an orthography generally comes into being, providing rules for spelling words, following the principle on which alphabets get based. These rules will map letters of the alphabet to the phonemes of the spoken language. In a perfectly phonemic orthography , there would be

10302-542: Was that it could write different languages since it recorded words phonemically. The Phoenician script was spread across the Mediterranean by the Phoenicians. The Greek alphabet was the first in which vowels had independent letterforms separate from those of consonants. The Greeks chose letters representing sounds that did not exist in Phoenician to represent vowels. The Linear B syllabary, used by Mycenaean Greeks from

10404-404: Was used until the 5th century CE, and fundamentally differed by adding pronunciation hints to existing hieroglyphs that had previously carried no pronunciation information. Later on, these phonemic symbols also became used to transcribe foreign words. The first fully phonemic script was the Proto-Sinaitic script , also descending from Egyptian hieroglyphs, which was later modified to create

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