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It is NOT an alphabet, no Indian script is an alphabet! An ""alphabet"" is a writing system which conveys a (near) one-to-one correspondence between sounds and graphemes. This includes the representation of EVERY VOWEL AND EVERY COONSONANT. In the Indian scripts, consonants are the basic symbols and vowels are written as diacritics, and they can be before, after, above, or below the consonant depending on what the vowel is. Also, there is one vowel (a) which is inherent and is not written unless it begins a word. Also all consonant clusters are written as ligatures, which an alphabet does not do. This script, and every other script from India, is what's called an ABUGIDA. An abugida is NOT AN ALPHABET. You don't have unwritten vowel sounds in an alphabetic system! Hebrew and Arabic are not alphabets either, they are ABJADS, since they normally do not write vowels at all, no matter which vowel it is. But systems that do write vowels as DIACRITICS (NOT independent letters) are abugidas. ""Alphabet"" has a very sctrict definition that pretty much only fits systems such as Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Korean, etc."