Abugida

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This article contains Indic text. Without rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes or other symbols instead of Indic characters; or irregular vowel positioning and a lack of conjuncts.

An inscription of Swampy Cree using Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, an abugida developed by Christian missionaries for Aboriginal Canadian languages

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An abugida (pronounced /ˌɑːbuːˈɡiːdə/, from Ge‘ez አቡጊዳ ’äbugida or Amharic አቡጊዳ ’abugida) is a segmental writing system in which each letter (basic character) represents a consonant accompanied by an inherent vowel; other vowels are indicated by modification of the consonant sign, either by means of diacritics or through changes in the form of the consonant itself. In some abugidas, the absence of a vowel is indicated overtly, either through a diacritic or by fusing adjacent consonants into ligatures; in others no distinction is made between a plain consonant and a consonant followed by the inherent vowel. About half the writing systems in the world, including the extensive Brahmic system used in South and Southeast Asia, are abugidas.

The term abugida was adopted into English as a linguistic term by Peter T. Daniels. It is the colloquial name of the Ge‘ez script, derived from the first four letters aləf, bet, gäməl, dənt (in the biblical A B G D order of Hebrew) graded by the first four vowel forms, much as the term abecedary is derived from the Latin a be ce de. As Daniels used the word, an abugida contrasts with a syllabary, where letters with shared consonants or vowels show no particular resemblance to each another, and with an alphabet proper, where independent letters are used to denote both consonants and vowels. Traditionally, abugidas have been considered to be syllabaries or intermediate between syllabaries and alphabets ("semi-syllabaries", "alpha-syllabaries", etc.). Less formally, however, abugidas are simply called "alphabets".

[edit] Description

A 19th century manuscript in the Devanagari script

There are three principal families of abugidas, which function somewhat differently. The best known is the Brahmic family of India and Southeast Asia, in which vowels are marked with diacritics and syllable-final consonants, when they occur, are indicated with ligatures, diacritics, or with a special vowel-canceling mark. In the Ethiopic family, vowels are marked by modifying the shapes of the consonants, and one of these pulls double duty for final consonants. In the Cree family, vowels are marked by rotating or flipping the consonants, and final consonants are indicated with either special diacritics or superscript forms of the main initial consonants.

Indic abugidas contrast vowels through marks (diacritics) around the consonants. Most overtly mark a consonant for the lack of a vowel as well; without a diacritic, a default vowel (usually [a]) is understood. Vowel diacritics may appear above, below, to the left, or to the right of the consonant, or may even surround it.

In many of the Brahmic scripts, a syllable beginning with a cluster is treated as a single character for purposes of vowel marking, so a vowel marker like ि -i, falling before the character it modifies, may appear several positions before the place where it is pronounced. For example, the game cricket in Hindi is क्रिकेट krikeţ; the diacritic for /i/ appears before the consonant cluster /kr/, not before the /r/. A more unusual example is seen in the Batak alphabet: Here the syllable bim is written ba-ma-i-(virama). That is, the vowel diacritic and virama are both written after the consonants for the whole syllable.

In many abugidas, there is also a diacritic to suppress the inherent vowel, yielding the bare consonant. In Devanagari, क् is k, and ल् is l. This is called the virama in Sanskrit, or halant in Hindi. It may be used to form consonant clusters, or to indicate that a consonant occurs at the end of a word. For text information processing on computer, other means of expressing these functions include special conjunct forms in which two or more consonant characters are merged to express a cluster, such as Devanagari: क्ल kla. (Note that on some fonts display this as क् followed by ल, rather than forming a conjunct. This expedient is used by ISCII and South Asian scripts of Unicode.) Thus a closed syllable such as kal requires two akshara to write.

In Ethiopic, which gave us the word abugida, the diacritics have 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.

In the family of abugidas known as Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, vowels are indicated by changing the orientation of the akshara. F