An abugida (; from Geʽez: , )—sometimes also called an alphasyllabary, neosyllabary, or pseudo-alphabet—is a segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as units; each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary, like 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 script may be termed "alphabets". The terms also contrast them with a syllabary, in which a single symbol denotes the combination of a consonant and a vowel.
Related concepts were introduced independently in 1948 by James Germain Février (using the term ) and David Diringer (using the term semisyllabary), and in 1959 by Fred Householder (introducing the term pseudo-alphabet).Householder, F. (1959). Review of The Decipherment of Linear B by John Chadwick, The Classical Journal, 54(8), 379–83. Retrieved 30 September 2020. The Ethiopic term "abugida" was chosen as a designation for the concept in 1990 by Peter T. Daniels.Daniels, P. (1990). Fundamentals of Grammatology. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 110(4), 727–31. 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 order 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." Faber suggested "segmentally coded syllabically linear phonographic script"; William O. Bright used the term alphasyllabary;Amalia E. Gnanadesikan (2017) Towards a typology of phonemic scripts, Writing Systems Research, 9:1, 14–35, DOI: 10.1080/17586801.2017.1308239 "The second is that of Bright (1996, 1999) which follows Daniels in abjads and alphabets (Bright, 1999), but identifies instead of abugidas a category of alphasyllabaries. As Bright (1999) points out, the definition of abugida and the definition of alpha-syllabary differ. This fact alone suggests that at least one of the two classifications is either incomplete or inaccurate—or, at the very least, that they have two different purposes. This paper is intended as a (long-delayed) response to Bright (1999) and argues that both of these systems are in fact incomplete."Peter T. Daniels, Littera ex occidente: Toward a Functional History of Writing, in Studies in Semitic and Afroasiatic Linguistics presented to Gene B. Gragg edited by Cynthia L. Miller pages 53–69: "Alongside the terms I rejected (neosyllabary [Février 1948], pseudo-alphabet [Householder 1959], semisyllabary [Diringer 1948], and alphasyllabary [Bright 1992]) because they imply exactly the notion I am trying to refute – that the abugida is a kind of alphabet or a kind of syllabary – I have just come across semialphabet in the Encyclopœdia Britannica Micropœdia (though what is intended by the distinction "the syllabic KharoœøÏ [sic] and semialphabetic BrΩhmÏ" [s.v. "Indic Writing Systems"] is unfathomable). W. Bright denies having devised the term alphasyllabary, but it has not yet been found to occur earlier than his 1992 encyclopedia (in 1990:136 he approved semisyllabary). Compare Daniels 1996b:4 n. * and Bright 2000 for the different conceptualizations of abugida and alphasyllabary: functional vs. formal, as it happens. The words abjad and abugida are simply words in Arabic and Ethiopic, respectively, for the ancient Northwest Semitic order of letters, which is used in those languages in certain functions alongside the customary orders in Arabic reflecting rearrangement according to shape, and in Ethiopic reflecting an entirely different letter-order tradition" and Gnanadesikan and Rimzhim, Katz, & Fowler suggested aksara or āksharik.Amalia E. Gnanadesikan (2017) Towards a typology of phonemic scripts, Writing Systems Research, 9:1, 14–35, DOI: 10.1080/17586801.2017.1308239 "This type of script has been given many names, among them semi-alphabet (Diringer, 1948, referring to Brāhmī), semi-syllabary (Diringer, 1948, referring to Devanāgarī) or semi-syllabic script (Baker, 1997), syllabic alphabet (Coulmas, 1999), alphasyllabary (Bright, 1996, 1999; Trigger, 2004), neosyllabary (Daniels, 1990), abugida (Daniels, 1996a) and segmentally coded syllabically linear phonographic script (Faber, 1992) as well as the Sanskrit-inspired terms aksara system (Gnanadesikan, 2009) or āksharik script (Rimzhim, Katz, & Fowler, 2014). As is discussed further below, however, there is a considerable degree of typological diversity in this family of scripts."
Abugidas include the extensive Brahmic family of scripts of Tibet and South and Southeast Asia; Semitic Ethiopic scripts; and Canadian Aboriginal syllabics. As in syllabaries, the writing system's units may consist of representations of both syllables and consonants. For scripts of the Brahmic family, the term akshara is used for the units.
Etymology In several languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea, abugida traditionally meant letters of the Ethiopic or Geʽez script in which many of these languages are written. The Geʽez script is one of several segmental writing systems; others include Indic/Brahmic scripts and Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics. The word abugida derives from the letters ä, bu, gi, and da, in much the same way that abecedary derives from the Latin letters a be ce de, abjad derives from the Arabic a b j d, and alphabet derives from 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.
Terminology As Daniels used the word, an abugida contrasts with a syllabary, where letters with shared consonant or vowel sounds have no particular resemblance. Furthermore, an abugida contrasts with an alphabet proper, where independent letters denote consonants and vowels. The term alphasyllabary was suggested for the Indic scripts in 1997 by William O. Bright, following South Asian linguistic usage, to convey that "they share features of both alphabet and syllabary."He describes this term as "formal," i.e., more concerned with the graphic arrangement of symbols, whereas abugida was "functional," putting the focus on sound–symbol correspondence. However, this is not a distinction made in the literature.
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" is called 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 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 a consonant letter, while the syllable is still pronounced in the order of a consonant-vowel combination (CV).
General description 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 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, the abugida is not an alphasyllabary. But most languages have words that are more complicated than a sequence of CV syllables, even ignoring tone.
The first complication is syllables that consist of just a vowel (V). In some languages, a zero consonant letter is used as though every syllable began with a consonant. In others, each vowel has a separate letter that is used for each syllable consisting of just the vowel. These are known as independent vowels and are found in most Indic scripts. They may be quite different from the corresponding diacritics, known as dependent vowels. As 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 a letter representing just a consonant (C). This final consonant may be represented by: a modification of the final letter that explicitly indicates the lack of a vowel (virama), a lack of vowel marking on the letter (often with ambiguity between no vowel and a default inherent vowel), vowel marking on the letter for a short or neutral vowel such as schwa (with ambiguity between no vowel and that short or neutral vowel), or a visually unrelated letter.
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 Indic scripts, the earliest method was simply to arrange them vertically, writing the second consonant of the cluster below the first. 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.