abugida

English

The syllables nga, ngi, ngu in Hanunuo script, an abugida

Etymology

Coined 1990 by Peter T. Daniels by adapting Ge'ez አቡጊዳ (ʾäbugida, “Ge'ez script”) (based on the Hebrew alphabet order: א (alef), ב (bet), ג (gimel), ד (dalet) and traditional vowel order - see 1997 quotation below).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ɑːbuˈɡiːdə/

Noun

abugida (plural abugidas)

1. (linguistics) A kind of syllabary (syllabic alphabet) in which a symbol or glyph representing a syllable contains parts representing a vowel and a consonant, typically such that symbols for different syllables are generated by adding, altering or removing the vowel portion, often by applying a diacritic to a stable consonant symbol.
   • 1997 [Routledge], Peter T. Daniels, 2: Scripts of Semitic Languages, Robert Hetzron (editor), The Semitic Languages, Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2005, Transferred to Digital Printing, unnumbered page,

     For the scripts of the Semitic languages, five categories are needed: logography, syllabary, abjad, alphabet, and abugida. A sixth, featural script, appears when Arabic script is adapted to non-Semitic languages. […] (The English word "abugida" is borrowed from the Amharic term for the letters of the script when taken in the order known from the Ge'ez transliterations of the Hebrew letter names found in the superscriptions of the sections of Psalm 119, as used in the liturgy; it takes the first four consonants and the first four vowels in their traditional order of presentation.)

   • 2007, Unicode Consortium, The Unicode Standard 5.0, Addison-Wesley, page 200,

     In an abugida, each consonant carries an inherent vowel, usually /a/.

   • 2015, Patricia Donegan, 1: The Emergence of Phonological Representation, Brian MacWhinney, William O'Grady (editors, The Handbook of Language Emergence, John Wiley & Sons (Wiley Blackwell), page 39,

     The widespread use and easy learnability of alphabetic writing systems, the typical arrangement of syllabic or abugida phoneme classes (as with Japanese kana, or devanagari), rhyme and alliteration, folk naming of correlative phoneme sets (like the “hard” and “soft” consonant groups of Slavic languages), differential learning of L2 sounds that can and cannot be readily identified with an L1 phoneme (Best, McRoberts, and Sithole, Werker and Tees, 1984b; Best and Tyler, 2007) - all assure us that phonemic perception and representation are not merely a result of alphabetic writing.

Usage notes

Languages that use abugidas include Amharic, Hindi and Burmese, as well as Cree and Ojibwe (for which Canadian Aboriginal syllabics were introduced during the 19th century). For a list of abugidas see List of writing systems on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

Synonyms

• alphasyllabary

Derived terms

• abugidic

Translations

writing system — see also alphasyllabary

• Abkhaz: азбугида (azbugida)
• Dutch: abugida c
• Esperanto: abugido
• Finnish: abugida
• French: abugida (fr) m, alphasyllabaire (fr) m
• Ge'ez: አቡጊዳ (ʾäbugida)
• German: Abugida f
• Hebrew: אבוגידה
• Hindi: आबूगीदा (ābūgīdā)
• Indonesian: abugida, alfasilabis
• Italian: alfasillabario m, abugida m
• Japanese: アブギダ (abugida)
• (deprecated template usage) {{trans-mid}}
• Khmer: អាប៊ុហ៊្គីដា (aabujiidaa)
• Korean: 아부기다 (abugida)
• Persian: ابوگیدا
• Portuguese: abugida m
• Punjabi: ਅਬੁਜੀਡਾ (abujīḍā)
• Russian: абуги́да (ru) f (abugída)
• Tamil: அபுகிடா (apukiṭā)
• Thai: อักษรสระประกอบ (àksŏn sà-bpràgòp)
• Urdu: ابوگیدا

See also

• abjad
• alphabet
• semi-syllabary
• syllabary

Further reading

• Geʽez script on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• Writing system on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• Syllabic alphabets on Omniglot

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French

Noun

abugida m (plural abugidas)

1. abugida

Synonyms

• alphasyllabaire

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Italian

Noun

abugida m (plural abugidi)

1. abugida

Synonyms

• alfasillabario

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Portuguese

Noun

abugida m (plural abugidas)

1. (linguistics) abugida (writing system in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as a unit)