page_title: Abugida
section_title: Ethiopic
hierarchical_section_title: Abugida / Family-specific features / Ethiopic
caption_attribution_description: English: A portion of the Octateuch in Ethiopian, British Library Oriental MS. 480, containing Genesis 29:11-16. This MS. was written in the 15th century, &amp; is part of a library collected by Emperor Theodore at Magdala for an intended church of the Redeemer of the World. It was brought to the U.K. as part of the spoils of the Anglo-Abyssinian War of 1867.
context_page_description: An abugida, or alphasyllabary, is a segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as a unit; each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary. 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. The terms also contrast them with a syllabary, in which the symbols cannot be split into separate consonants and vowels.
  Abugidas include the extensive Brahmic family of scripts of Tibet, South and Southeast Asia, Semitic Ethiopic scripts, and Canadian Aboriginal syllabics.
  As is the case for syllabaries, the units of the writing system may consist of the representations both of syllables and of consonants. For scripts of the Brahmic family, the term akshara is used for the units.
  ’Äbugida is an Ethiopian name for the Ge‘ez script, taken from four letters of that script, 'ä bu gi da, in much the same way that abecedary is derived from Latin a be ce de, abjad is derived from the Arabic a b j d, and alphabet is derived from the names of the two first letters in the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta.
context_section_description: In Ethiopic (where the term abugida originates) the diacritics have been fused to the consonants to the point that they must be considered modifications of the form of the letters. Children learn each modification separately, as in a syllabary; nonetheless, the graphic similarities between syllables with the same consonant is readily apparent, unlike the case in a true syllabary.
  Though now an abugida, the Ge'ez script, until the advent of Christianity (ca. AD 350), had originally been what would now be termed an abjad. In the Ge'ez abugida (or fidel), the base form of the letter (also known as fidel) may be altered. For example, ሀ hä [hə] (base form), ሁ hu (with a right-side diacritic that doesn't 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).
caption: The Ge'ez script, an abugida of Eritrea and Ethiopia
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