# Abjad

An abjad (/ˈæbdʒæd/; Arabic: أبجد; Hebrew: אבגד; also spelled abgad) is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving the vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels. The term was introduced in 1990 by Peter T. Daniels. Other terms for the same concept include partial phonemic script, segmentally linear defective phonographic script, consonantary, consonant writing, and consonantal alphabet.
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 Arabic alphabet's first (in its original order) four letters — corresponding to a, b, j, and d — to replace the more common terms "consonantary" and "consonantal alphabet" in describing the family of scripts classified as "West Semitic". It is similar to other Semitic languages such as Phoenician, Hebrew and Semitic proto-alphabets: specifically, aleph, bet, gimel, dalet.

## Terminology

According to the formulations of Peter T. Daniels, abjads differ from alphabets in that only consonants, not vowels, are represented among the basic graphemes. Abjads differ from abugidas, another category defined by Daniels, in that in abjads, the vowel sound is implied by phonology, and where vowel marks exist for the system, such as nikkud for Hebrew and ḥarakāt for Arabic, their use is optional and not the dominant (or literate) form. Abugidas mark all vowels (other than the "inherent" vowel) with a diacritic, a minor attachment to the letter, a standalone glyph, or (in Canadian Aboriginal syllabics) by rotation of the letter. Some abugidas use a special symbol to suppress the inherent vowel so that the consonant alone can be properly represented. In a syllabary, a grapheme denotes a complete syllable, that is, either a lone vowel sound or a combination of a vowel sound with one or more consonant sounds.
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. 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". However, Daniels's terminology has found acceptance in the linguistic community.

## Origins

The first abjad to gain widespread usage was the Phoenician abjad. Unlike other contemporary scripts, such as cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Phoenician script consisted of only a few dozen symbols. This made the script easy to learn, and seafaring Phoenician merchants took the script throughout the then-known world.
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 Aramaic abjad and the Greek alphabet. The Greek alphabet evolved into the modern western alphabets, such as Latin and Cyrillic, while Aramaic became the ancestor of many modern abjads and abugidas of Asia.

## 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. However, most modern abjads, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Pahlavi, are "impure" abjads – that is, they also contain symbols for some of the vowel phonemes, although the said non-diacritic vowel letters are also used to write certain consonants, particularly approximants that sound similar to long vowels. A "pure" abjad is exemplified (perhaps) by very early forms of ancient Phoenician, though at some point (at least by the 9th century BC) it and most of the contemporary Semitic abjads had begun to overload a few of the consonant symbols with a secondary function as vowel markers, called matres lectionis. This practice was at first rare and limited in scope but became increasingly common and more developed in later times.

### 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 guttural sounds represented by aleph, he, heth or ayin, so these symbols were assigned vocalic values. The letters waw and yod were also adapted into vowel signs; along with he, these were already used as matres lectionis in Phoenician. The major innovation of Greek was to dedicate these symbols exclusively and unambiguously to vowel sounds that could be combined arbitrarily with consonants (as opposed to syllabaries such as Linear B which usually have vowel symbols but cannot combine them with consonants to form arbitrary syllables).
Abugidas developed along a slightly different route. The basic consonantal symbol was considered to have an inherent "a" vowel sound. Hooks or short lines attached to various parts of the basic letter modify the vowel. In this way, the South Arabian abjad evolved into the Ge'ez abugida of Ethiopia between the 5th century BC and the 5th century AD. Similarly, the Brāhmī abugida of the Indian subcontinent developed around the 3rd century BC (from the Aramaic abjad, it has been hypothesized).

## Abjads and the structure of Semitic languages

The abjad form of writing is well-adapted to the morphological structure of the Semitic languages it was developed to write. This is because words in Semitic languages are formed from a root consisting of (usually) three consonants, the vowels being used to indicate inflectional or derived forms. For instance, according to Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic, from the Arabic root ك‌ت‌ب K-T-B (to write) can be derived the forms كَتَبَ kataba (he wrote), كَتَبْتَ katabta (you (masculine singular) wrote), يَكْتُبُ⁩ yaktubu (he writes), and مَكْتَبَة⁩ maktabah (library). In most cases, the absence of full glyphs for vowels makes the common root clearer, allowing readers to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words from familiar roots (especially in conjunction with context clues) and improving word recognition while reading for practiced readers.
By contrast, the Arabic and Hebrew scripts sometimes perform the role of true alphabets rather than abjads when used to write certain Indo-European languages, including Kurdish, Bosnian, Yiddish, and some Romance languages such as Mozarabic, Aragonese, Portuguese, Spanish and Ladino.

## 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 | Aramaic | Nabatean, Palmyran, Mandaic, Parthian, Pahlavi, Sogdian, Avestan and Manichean |
| 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 | Over 400 million people | Arabic, Kashmiri, Persian, Pashto, Uyghur, Kurdish, Urdu, many others | 512 CE | Nabataean Aramaic | Thaana |
| Aramaic (Imperial) | no | no | right-left | 22 | 3 | Middle East | Achaemenid, Persian, Babylonian, and Assyrian empires | Imperial Aramaic, Hebrew | c. 500 BCE | Phoenician | Late Hebrew, Nabataean, Syriac |
| Aramaic (Early) | no | no | right-left | 22 | none | Middle East | Various Semitic Peoples | | c. 1000 – c. 900 BCE | Phoenician | Hebrew, Imperial Aramaic. |
| Nabataean | no | no | right-left | 22 | none | Middle East | Nabataean Kingdom | Nabataean | 200 BCE | 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 |
| Psalter Pahlavi | no | yes | right-left | 21 | yes | Northwestern China | Persian Script for Paper Writing | | 0400 c. 400 CE | Syriac | |
| Phoenician | no | no | right-left, boustrophedon | 22 | none | Byblos | Canaanites | Phoenician, Punic, Hebrew | c. 1500 – c. 1000 BCE | Proto-Canaanite Alphabet | 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) | Parthian & Sassanian periods of Persian Empire | Parthian | c. 200 BCE | Aramaic | |
| Sabaean | no | no | right-left, boustrophedon | 29 | none | Southern Arabia (Sheba) | Southern Arabians | Sabaean | c. 500 BCE | Byblos | Ethiopic (Eritrea & Ethiopia) |
| Punic | no | no | right-left | 22 | none | Carthage (Tunisia), North Africa, Mediterranean | Punic Culture | Punic, Neo-Punic | | Phoenician | |
| 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 | 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 | 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 | 900 BCE | 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 | 0400 c. 400 CE | Syriac | Old Uyghur alphabet |
| 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 | Phoenician, Arabic | Neo-Tifinagh |