An abjad is a type of writing system in which each symbol always or usually stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel. It is a term suggested by Peter T. Daniels to replace the common terms consonantary or consonantal alphabet or syllabary to refer to the family of scripts called West Semitic. In popular usage, abjads often contain the word "alphabet" in their names, such as "Arabic alphabet" and "Phoenician alphabet". The name abjad itself derives from the Arabic word for alphabet. The word "Alphabet" in English has a source in Phoenician language the first two letters of which were A (Aleph) and B (Beth), hence Alephbeth. In Arabic, A (Alif), B (Ba), J (Jeem), D (Daal) make the word "Abjad" which means "Alphabet". It is also used to enumerate a list like a,b,c,d etc. are used in English language.
All known abjads belong to the Semitic family of scripts. These scripts are thought to derive from the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet (dated to about 1500 BC) which is thought to derive from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The abjad was significantly simpler than the earlier hieroglyphs. The number of distinct glyphs was reduced tremendously, at the cost of increased ambiguity.
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 about two dozen symbols. This made the script easy to learn, and Phoenician seafaring merchants took the script wherever they went. Phoenician gave way to a number of new writing systems, including the Greek alphabet, and Aramaic, a widely used abjad. Greek evolved into the modern western alphabets, such as Latin and Cyrillic, while Aramaic became the ancestor of many modern abjads and abugidas of Asia.
Aramaic spread across Asia, reaching as far as India and becoming Brahmi, the ancestral abugida to most modern Indian and Southeast Asian scripts. In the Middle East, Aramaic gave rise to the Hebrew and Nabataean abjads, which retained many of the Aramaic letter forms. The Syriac script was a cursive variation of Aramaic. It is unclear whether the Arabic abjad was derived from Nabatean or Syriac.
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 the 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 used. The Greek alphabet thus became the world's first "true" alphabet.
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 alphabet evolved into the Ge'ez alphabet between the 5th century BC and the 5th century AD. Similarly, around the 3rd century BC, the Brāhmī script developed (from the Aramaic abjad, it has been hypothesised).
In general, non-Semitic texts are often puzzling and ambiguous without their vowels, more so if the context and subject are unknown, because the consonant sequences for many word roots are not unique. For example, in English, "abate", "abet", "about", "abut", "bat", "bait", "bet", "beat", "beet", "bit", "bite", "bot", "boat", "boot", "bout", "but", and "byte" all reduce to "bt". Nevertheless, Indo-European languages can be written adequately using the impure abjads of Arabic and Hebrew, as with Persian orthography.
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