Abugida

An abugida (/ˌɑːbuːˈɡiːdə, ˌæb-/ ⓘ;[1] from Geʽez: 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 is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary, similar to a diacritical mark.

[2] The terms also contrast them with a syllabary, in which a single symbol denotes the combination of one consonant and one vowel.

As is the case for syllabaries, the units of the writing system may consist of the representations both of syllables and of consonants.

[10] As Daniels used 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 the idea that, "they share features of both alphabet and syllabary.

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).

In the Indic scripts, the earliest method was simply to arrange them vertically, writing the second consonant of the cluster below the first one.

For example, Brahmic scripts commonly handle a phonetic sequence CVC-CV as CV-CCV or CV-C-CV.

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.

Indic scripts originated in India and spread to Southeast Asia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet, Mongolia, and Russia.

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.

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 a syllable with the default vowel, in this case ka ([kə]).

For example, the game cricket in Hindi is क्रिकेट krikeṭ; the diacritic for /i/ appears before the consonant cluster /kr/, not before the /r/.

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 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.

Bare consonants are indicated either by separate diacritics, or by superscript versions of the aksharas; there is no vowel-killer mark.

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.

[19] The imperial Mongol script called Phagspa was derived from the Tibetan abugida, but all vowels are written in-line rather than as diacritics.

The Gabelsberger shorthand system and its derivatives modify the following consonant to represent vowels.

[citation needed] 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 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.

The Kharosthi family does not survive today, but Brahmi's descendants include most of the modern scripts of South and Southeast Asia.