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An alphasyllabary or abugida (a term coined by Peter T. Daniels) is a writing system whose basic signs denote consonants with an inherent vowel and where consistent modifications of the basic sign indicate other following vowels than the inherent one (or, in some cases, the lack of a vowel, for example as the final consonant in a CVC syllable or in consonant clusters). As the term alphasyllabary suggests, they are considered an intermediate step between alphabets and syllabaries. Some abugidas, notably the Brahmic scripts, are thought to have evolved from alphabetic scripts.Thus, in an abugida there is no sign for "k", but instead one for "ka" (if "a" is the inherent vowel), and "ke" is written by modifying the "ka" sign in a way that is consistent with how one would modify "la" to get "le". In many abugidas the modification is the addition of a vowel sign, but other possibilities are imaginable (and used), such as rotation of the basic sign, addition of diacritical marks, and so on.
Some abugidas, especially those in the Brahmic family of scripts, feature a mark called a halant or (in Sanskrit) virama, which suppresses a character's inherent vowel, reducing it to a lone consonant. This is used in consonant clusters and for syllable-final consonants.
The obvious contrast is with syllabaries, which have one distinct symbol per possible syllable, and the signs for each syllable have no systematic graphic similarity.
The name is derived from the first four characters of an order of the Ethiopic script used in some religious contexts (this order seems to correspond to the ancestral semitic character order (aleph, beth, gimel, daleth / ABCD / ...).
The Ethiopic script is an abugida, although the vowel modifications in Ethiopic are not entirely systematic.
Many North American Indian scripts, such as Cree syllabics, can be considered abugidas as well, although they are more often referred to as syllabaries.
The largest single group of abugidas is the Brahmic family of scripts, however, which includes nearly all the scripts used in India and Southeast Asia.
1 List of abugidas
- Baybayin, pre-colonial script of Tagalog
- Burmese
- DevanagariDevangari is a script used to write Nepali and several Indian languages, including Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Kashmiri, Sindhi. Devanagari is a form of alphabet called an abugida, as each consonant has an inherent vowel (a), that can be changed with the di (used to write Sanskrit, PaliPli is a middle Indo-Aryan dialect or prakrit. It is most famous as the language in which the scriptures of Theravada Buddhism (also known as the Pli Canon or in Pli the Tipitaka) were written down in Sri Lanka in the 1st century BCE. Pli has been written, modern Hindi, etc.)
- Ge'ezThe Ge'ez language (or Gi'iz language is an ancient language that developed in the Ethiopian Highlands of the Horn of Africa as the language of the peasantry. It later became the language of the Ethiopian imperial court and of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewah and Amharic
- GujaratiThe Gujarati script which like all Nagari writing systems is strictly speaking an abugida rather than an alphabet, is used to write the Gujarati language and resembles Devanagari script without the line. A few letters are different, such as e (when not pr
- Inuktitut
- Kannada
- Khmer
- Lao
- Malayalam
- Meroitic (used to write the Meroitic language, not related to the Indian scripts)
- Tamil
- Telugu
- Thai
- Tibetan
- Canadian aboriginal syllabic writing
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