Abjad Did You Mean Abjad?

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This article discusses the recent neologistic use of the word "abjad" to refer to a certain class of writing systems in linguistic scholarship. For information on the original and more established use of the term to denote a certain ordering of the letters of the Arabic alphabet, see Abjadi order.

An abjad is a type of writing system where there is one symbol per consonantal phoneme, sometimes also called a consonantary. Abjads differ from alphabets, in that alphabets have separate symbols for vowels. They also differ from abugidas in that the vowels in abugidas are marked with optional diacritics.

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.

All known abjads belong to the Semitic family of scripts, and derive from the original Northern Linear Abjad. The reason for this is that Semitic languages have a morphemic structure which makes the denotation of vowels redundant or unnecessary in most cases.

"Impure" abjads (such as Arabic) may have characters for some vowels as well (called 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 pronounciation change: *hiwriʃ >> *howriʃ >> horiʃ . 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.

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 guttaral (א, ה, ח, ע) and co-articulated (ט, 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.

Surprisingly, 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 Srprsngly, mny nn-Smtc lnggs sch `s `nglsh cn b wrttn wtht vwls `nd rd wth lttl dffclty.)

References

Wright, W. (1971). A Grammar of the Arabic Language (3rd ed.), Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-09455-0, v. 1, p. 28.

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