Talk:Abugida

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Version 1.0 Editorial Team     (Rated B-Class)
	This article has been reviewed by the Version 1.0 Editorial Team.
	This article has been selected for Version 0.7 and subsequent release versions of Wikipedia.
Additional information: B This article has been rated as B-Class on the assessment scale. Feel free to make short comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article. ??? This article has not yet received an importance rating on the assessment scale.

Writing systemsWikipedia:WikiProject Writing systemsTemplate:WP Writing systemsWriting system articles	WikiProject Writing systems	(Rated B-Class, Top-importance)
	Writing portal v • d • e This article falls within the scope of WikiProject Writing systems, a WikiProject interested in improving the encyclopaedic coverage and content of articles relating to writing systems on Wikipedia. If you would like to help out, you are welcome to drop by the project page and/or leave a query at the project’s talk page.  B  This article has been rated as B-Class on the project's quality scale.  Top  This article has been rated as Top-importance on the project's importance scale.

Contents 1 Tengwar 2 Link suggestions 3 The usage of consonant characters without an inherent vowel in Brahmi scripts 4 Abugida in Ge'ez 5 Syllabaries 6 Tamil script *not* a true abugida 7 Hebrew 8 "akshara" 9 Evolution 10 Other use of virama 11 Pronunciation 12 Asian languages? 13 Semi-syllabaries? 14 Pronunciation 15 Ge`ez or Amharic 16 Definition 17 Description

[edit] Tengwar

Are the tengwar abugidas? -- Error

They can be, depending on the mode. If you write vowels with dots, they're an abugida. If you write them with separate letters (e.g. mode of Beleriand), they're more alphabet-like (especially if you use separate characters for each vowel rather than a generic vowel character which bears marks). A bit like the difference between Hebrew and Yiddish: both use the same script, but Hebrew uses it as an abjad (if you ignore matres lectionis) while Yiddish uses it as an alphabet. -- pne 15:10, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Link suggestions

An automated Wikipedia link suggester has some possible wiki link suggestions for the Abugida article, and they have been placed on this page for your convenience.
Tip: Some people find it helpful if these suggestions are shown on this talk page, rather than on another page. To do this, just add {{User:LinkBot/suggestions/Abugida}} to this page. — LinkBot 10:33, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] The usage of consonant characters without an inherent vowel in Brahmi scripts

As me and Gwalla have both reverted from our respective edits now, I thought it best to bring the matter do discussion.

In my opinion, the formulation that the vowelless characters are used in consonant clusters and syllable-finally is redundant and, more importantly, perhaps unclear to larger audience. I am not familiar with how South Asian scholars describe them, but in an encyclopedic article that isn't important. My point is that saying that they are used in consonant clusters and word-finally, it should be clear and unambiguous to most what is meant, and there is no need to resort to the notion of syllable, which has no clear and universally agreed status even among linguists.

Of course, I am open to correction and clarification of the opposing view, but until then, I hope that passage wouldn't be further edited. ---Oghmoir 11:01, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

A consonant cluster is a group of adjacent consonants in the same syllable, like the /st/ in "start" or the /dz/ in "kids". A syllable-final consonant is like the /m/ in "hamburger". Linguists differentiate between them because some languages allow the latter but not the former. — Gwalla | Talk 01:14, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

In every discussion on phonology that I have encountered during my linguistics studies, consonant clusters have been defined as any kind of a group of adjacent consonants, regardless of syllable boundaries. For example, the The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics defines consonant clusters as: "A sequence of consonants before, after, or between vowels. E.g. [str] is a medial consonant cluster in words like astray." Anyway, many linguists would say that the /s/ in "start" and /z/ in "kids" are syllables of their own, because they are higher on the sonority hierarchy, but many wouldn't. ---Oghmoir 09:32, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Abugida in Ge'ez

Does anyone know the Ge'ez characters for A-bu-gi-da? Thank you. --Immanuel Giel 14:29, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Not sure if you're still looking for answers, but A-bu-di-da is spelled out in Ge'ez and Amharic in the intro of the page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Peelinglayers (talk • contribs) 02:17, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Syllabaries

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.

But Korean hangul is a syllabary, is it not? And the syllables for (say) ka, ki, ku, ke, ko are all similar. Rcaetano 18:12, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

No, it's an alphabet. --Immanuel Giel 28 June 2005 12:40 (UTC)

Just that the individual letters are combined in squares, read as syllables.

[edit] Tamil script *not* a true abugida

Mainly because it *does* possess pure consonants, marked by a dot on top of the consonant. If there is no contention, I will remove it from the list of "true" abugidas. Kingsleyj 00:21, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

This is the case for most Indic and Ethiopic scripts. Tamil does not have letters for plain consonants; for that it needs a diacritic. That's a defining feature of abugidas. kwami 05:52, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Actually, the Ethiopian script doesn't have a letter for pure consonants anymore. Formerly, the first form was a pure consonant (when it was an abjad), but the sadis (sixth) form which can be used for consonants is technically "Cə" rather than an inherent consonant. It can be a consonant in some cases (usually word-final, except sometimes when connected in a phrase), but the basic letter form is for a vowel. — ዮም (Yom) | contribs • Talk 21:15, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Hebrew

Why classical hebrew is not a abugidas? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 86.205.105.82 (talk • contribs) 09:15, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Wasn't classical Hebrew still an abjad? I thought that it was all consonants with perhaps diacritics to mark vowels (like Arabic), but not actual modification of the letter forms (or reorientation, etc.). Actually, I guess if the diacritics were necessary in all writing, then it would be an abugida, but since it's extraneous to the writing of Hebrew, then it wouldn't be an Abugida. — ዮም (Yom) | contribs • Talk 21:15, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Hebrew is written with an abjad system. Vowels and consonants are written seperately whereas in an abugida system, basic characters combine both consonant and vowel. In an abugida, it requires a special symbol to remove the vowel inherent in the character. Interlingua 21:51, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "akshara"

"In the family of abugidas known as Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, vowels are indicated by rotation and / or inversion of the akshara. For example, Inuktitut ᐱ pi, ᐳ pu, ᐸ pa; ᑎ ti, ᑐ tu, ᑕ ta."

The word akshara is used without being defined or linked. Wikipedia's own page is not very helpful:

• in Sanskrit grammar, "syllable", see Shiksha
• a grapheme of script of the Brahmic family.
• in philosophical terms is the opposite of the word kṣara "perishable", a name of Brahma.

As used in this article, it evidently refers to the abstraction consisting of the shape of a glyph without reference to its orientation: a definition close to but not identical with the second one above. If this definition is standard in some community, it should be

1. added to the akshara article and
2. referenced from this page.

If not, it should be either defined here or, better, replaced by an explanation that doesn't require a hapax legomenon.

Thnidu 20:27, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Plain "consonant" would be better in this case. --JWB (talk) 21:01, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Evolution

From the article:

"Evolution

As the term alphasyllabary suggests, abugidas have been considered an intermediate step between alphabets and syllabaries."

The idea that various writing systems fit on a single evolutionary scale (coincidentally with alphabet being on top, nonetheless) seems rather inaccurate. Different writing systems have different strengths and weaknesses, as opposed to one writing system being more "advanced" than the other. Whether a particular writing system is better suitable depends on several factors including phonology. I think syllabics fit Japanese just fine, for example. It's more of an apples vs oranges or spoon vs fork comparison. One didn't necessarily evolve from another, nor is there a particular predetermined evolutionary sequence. For example, Pitman shorthand is listed as abugida-like despite being derived from the English alphabet. —Tokek 23:38, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree. In any case, there seems to be more of a connection between abjads and abugidas, and between syllabaries and logographic writing systems. I can't think of an abugida that evolved from an alphabet. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 04:13, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Other use of virama

Description

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, (...) This expedient is used by ISCII and South Asian scripts of Unicode.

This says about rendering of glyphs on the information processing, but doesn't say about written scripts: the virama character for this use won't be visible/writable character. It might be described in ISCII or Unicode#Ligatures. --Hatukanezumi 03:54, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Pronunciation

How is Abugida pronounced? It is not to be found at webster.com on in my American Heritage dictionary application.

[edit] Asian languages?

What about written Japanese such as Hiragana/Katakana? They employ consonants followed by vowels with the exception of the stand-alone "n" sound... are these considered abugidas as well or have I misunderstood the category?

Hiragana and Katakana are pure syllabaries. They have separate, unrelated characters for each CV (consonant-vowel) combination, whereas abugidas use the same character for each syllable where the consonant is the same, marking the vowel with a diacritic or other means (this makes abugidas sound like alphabets but I'm just trying to make clear how they differ from syllabaries). So when you look at a Hiragana chart, you'll notice that the characters for ki and ke, for example, look completely different. But if you look how those same syllables are written in Devanagari, for instance, you'll see that they use the same base character (for the consonant) but a different diacritic (for the vowel). (ka in Devanagari would be written without any diacritics, which makes it an abugida, not an ordinary alphabet.) Hope this helps :) Oghmoir 22:58, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Semi-syllabaries?

From the intro:

Others, however, prefer to consider such systems of writing syllabaries, "semi-syllabaries", or "alpha-syllabaries".

It is not clear what "such" refers to here. What systems are called semi-syllabaries? AxelBoldt 02:38, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Abugidas. kwami (talk) 07:00, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Pronunciation

Could someone add an IPA pronunciation for this word? I have never heard it spoken and it is so obscure that not a single online dictionary has it. −Woodstone (talk) 09:43, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

I haven't been able to find anything. Put the question up on the Ge'ez article. kwami (talk) 16:13, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

In Amharic it's [əbuɡida]. Evidently stress is not phonemic. I've always stressed the gi, but that's just me. kwami (talk) 09:58, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Nope, the first vowel is most definitely not ə, in Amharic. It is a, the long a, as in Father. One experience that is worth hearing is an Ethiopian singing the ABC song (the one to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star) with the Abugida. "Ah, bu, gi, da, hey, wuh, zo... beh, gu, di, ha, wey, zih, zho..." etc. Til Eulenspiegel (talk) 11:28, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

By the way, in Ge'ez, as noted in the article, the first vowel is ä (not ə, and not a as it is in Amharic either!) Til Eulenspiegel (talk) 11:38, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Amharic "ä" is [ə] (we don't really know about Ge'ez, of course). Amharic "ə" is [ɨ], not [ə]. kwami (talk) 17:39, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Ge`ez or Amharic

Following the editing disagreement between Kwamikagami and Til Eulenspiegel over the source of the word "abugida", I referred the question to Peter T. Daniels, who replied, "I adopted it (at Wolf Leslau's suggestion) from Ethiopic. It occurs in both Ge`ez and Amharic. Solomonic, no?" He also asked, "Please get them to spell Ge`ez correctly" and mentioned that "shwa is misleading in Ethiopic transcriptions, because it's not a reduced vowel, it's a high central vowel". —12.109.41.2 (talk) 18:50, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for that!

We should also ask which syllable is stressed.

I don't understand what he means by "spell Ge`ez correctly". True, "Gə‘əz" is confusing for someone trained in the IPA, but it is the standard transliteration. "Ge‘ez" is wrong both in the IPA and the standard transliteration, so I don't see how it's any more "correct". kwami (talk) 19:01, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that's actually the alternative spelling he noted, with the schwa symbols, before his comment about how it can be misleading. I think he was talking somewhat tongue-in-cheek. There isn't any reason why the English name for a language has to be a transliteration of that language's name for itself at all. 12.109.41.2 (talk) 19:10, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Re stress: "Secondary stress on a-, primary stress on -gi-." Good to know, I'd assumed primary stress was on the -bu-. Probably because it sounded like "boogity". 12.109.41.2 (talk) 21:14, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

It's really too bad you cannot accept the word of fluent Amharic speakers that there is no such concept as stressed syllables in Amharic, and must turn to those who know zero Amharic, to get a second opinion about the language that is in fact quite incorrect. I can dig up actual quotes from one of the world's foremost Amharic experts, Dr. Amsalu Aklilu, stating there is no such thing as syllabic stress, since you won't believe me. Til Eulenspiegel (talk) 21:32, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

You're off on a tangent. We aren't talking about Amharic. We're talking about the English word "abugida", written in English letters and spoken with English phonetics by people who are using the word while writing or speaking in English. Amharic speakers are not the authority on how words are pronounced in English. When I use the word "abugida", not to mention the words "Ge'ez" or "Amharic" or "Ethiopia", while speaking English, I will no more avoid stress (or otherwise feign a knowledge of Amharic phonetics) than I will pronounce the word "schwa" as [ʃvɑ] on account of it being borrowed from German or the word "alphabet" as a Greek would say it or the word "abjad" with an Arabic accent. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.34.101.226 (talk) 00:23, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Til Eulenspiegel, it's not possible to avoid stress in English. If a word comes from a language without stress, such as Japanese or French, we invent the stress placement. The question is where would be best. Daniels' answer happens to match my intuition, but it could easily have been something else. kwami (talk) 17:58, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Definition

Use of presence of a default inherent vowel as the sole or primary criterion should be deemphasized. Placing vowels relative to a consonant rather than simply as part of a liner sequence is a more basic feature. --JWB (talk) 21:07, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. Abugidas are segmental scripts where vowels are obligatory but take second billing. Rather like tone most Roman alphabet adaptations (in Hanyu Pinyin all full tones are written, but 'neutral' tone is not; in Tongyong Pinyin it is the high tone that is not written). kwami (talk) 00:02, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

How's that? kwami (talk) 00:17, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Description

I'm not sure what to say to edit the "Description" section, other than that I highly disagree with the table with the Features listed for the "Canadian":

• Initial vowel letter(s): Zero consonant >> depending on the consonant, it is either a Zero consonant or Glottal stop
• Absence of vowel sign: Vowel indication obligatory >> ... but not for the Medials ᐧ ᐦ ᓬ ᕒ
• Consonant ligatures: None >> wrong!, ᕓᕕᕗᕙ and ᕞᕠᕤᕦ are ligatures, as with these: ᕿ ᖁ ᖃ ᖏ ᖑ ᖓ ᔉ ᔊ. Also, in NW Ontario, there are the L and R series written with ᓀᓂᓄᓇ with ᓫ or ᕑ above them, which are also ligatures. When we head west to the Athapaskan forms, they are completely full of ligatures!
• Distinct final forms: Western only >> no. ᐤ is a distinct final form found in Cree and Ojibwe in both eastern and western orthographies.
• Final consonant position: Inline, small, raised >> Only true in the Cree-Ojibwe-Inuktitut and Blackfoot forms. In the Athapaskan forms, they're Inline, small, but can be raised, mid-line or lowered, depending on the final.

I tried to edit the table and it just became a mess, so I'm going to let someone who can say this a bit more eloquently do the edits. CJLippert (talk) 02:30, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll take a look at it. Not sure exactly what your first point means, though. --JWB (talk) 03:06, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

These points are misleading or wrong.

• The 'medials' are marginal, at least in Eastern Cree. L & R only occur in English & French loans, and init H only occurs in one native word. In dialects which have L or R, there are separate C series. Normal words rotate the C. But it doesn't matter, because vowel marking is obligatory regardless. You can't leave the V off an init H; if you did, it would be read as a final H.
• There are no consonant ligatures. ᕿ is not a ligature for /rki/, but a digraph for /qi/. ᕓ is not even a digraph.
• As there is no initial /w/, it's hard to argue that the final form is distinct from the initial. The ᐤ could just as easily be said to be a diacritic to mark a /u/ diphthong. But that's a minor point and it was okay the way JWB had it.
• The only Athabaskan final which is not raised, at least in the Unicode fonts, is the mid dot for glottal stop. None are lowered. A comment like we had for final /w/ would be okay here, but either CJ's claim is wrong, or else Unicode got it wrong.

I also don't understand what is meant by the consonant being zero or a glottal stop depending on the consonant.

I took out hangul again. We may not state that it's an abugida, but putting it in a table comparing abugidas certainly implies that it is one. The characterization was also wrong: Hangul does not use diacritics to mark vowels, for example, and doesn't have special final C forms. kwami (talk) 07:19, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

Adding Latin alphabet to the comparison makes it very clear that not all are necessarily abugidas. Hangul does put vowels in various vowel-specific positions relative to the initial consonant (like the abugidas) and final consonants below everything else (somewhat like the Canadian Syllabic finals that are small, raised versions of the initial consonant signs). Hangul is unique only in not having fixed sizes for each letter but compressing all letters of a syllable to fit in a square block, and some recent Hangul fonts even drop this in favor of fixed-size letters and irregular, variable syllabic blocks, though the blocks themselves are kerned as fixed width not variable width, at least as far as I've seen. --JWB (talk) 11:57, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

Depending on the dialect, ᐁᐃᐅᐊ is either treated either as the zero-consonant or as a glottal stop as a consonant. If in the initial position, then it is always assumed zero-consonant. For example, in Ojibwe, ᒪᓯᓇᐃᑲᓐ is mazina'igan and not mazinaigan, but ᐅᐅᐤ is o'ow and ᐦᐋᐤ is haaw and not 'aaw. And yes, UniCode is most definitely wrong in treatment of Canadian syllabics because it unifies all of it into a single block. Yes, Cree-Ojibwe-Inuktitut group can be merged into a unified set, but you can't do that with the Blackfoot group, and the demands of the Athapaskan groups are very different from that of the other two groups. UniCode completely omits the ᓀᓂᓄᓇ with the overscript ᓬ and ᕒ for the Ojibwe (see my Freelang Ojibwe readme). Unicode ignores the Athapaskan finals that are mid-line and low-line positions. However, this is not really UniCode's problem because they just adopted pDam's recommendations, and pDam was focused on Cree with everything else being ancillary. Even the ᕃᕆᕈᕋ, if pDam would have taken the historical context into consideration, would instead have ᕃᕂᕄᕆ; or if the form was of concern ᕂᕆᕈᕋ would have been the preferred order. CJLippert (talk) 15:28, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

The ᕓᕕᕗᕙ and ᕞᕠᕤᕦ developed from the rotation of ᕙ and ᕦ, which most definitely are ligatures of the digraphs ᐸᐦ and ᑕᐦ. In the Island Lake dialect of Oji-Cree, they still use ᑌᐦᑎᐦᑐᐦᑕᐦ instead of ᕞᕠᕤᕦ.

The Athapaskan groups most definitely do have high-line, mid-line and low-line. For examples online, see Languagegeek's Syllabic Variation page. CJLippert (talk) 15:46, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

That's not what we mean by 'ligature' here. We're talking about ligatures being used to indicate the lack of a vowel. ᐸᐦ and ᑕᐦ are simply digraphs calqued from English, and ᕙ and ᕦ are new letters created to replace them. Whether or not the loops in ᕙ and ᕦ derive from the letter ᐦ is perhaps debatable, but in any case is irrelevant, as even if they do, that is a historical detail that has no effect on the functioning of the script. kwami (talk) 18:14, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

Correct, the article should use the more specific term conjunct consonants meaning ligature specifically to indicate lack of a vowel, rather than "ligature" in general.

I've added information at Hangul#Block shape on recent Hangul typography emphasizing consistent letter size rather than consistent block size.

I think it is better to focus on living writing systems, and it sounds like Athapaskan syllabics went out of use some time ago. --JWB (talk) 00:12, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

Yes, but if they are functionally different than living scripts, we should at least make a note of that. kwami (talk) 00:40, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

The new Korean fonts are weird. I can see why they're not used for full texts. kwami (talk) 00:57, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

They looked weird at first to me, but I think the increased visual variation in block shape corresponds with characteristics of Latin-alphabet mixed-case typography (descenders, ascenders, whitespace) that are said to promote legibility and faster reading. --JWB (talk) 06:21, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

That makes sense, actually. The only reservation I've ever had about hangul (besides the impracticality of applying it to other languages) is wondering how visually distinct the blocks would be to a fluent reader. kwami (talk) 06:40, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Hello, I am literate in Korean and wanted to comment. I think the way hangul assembles jamo into syllabic blocks work well for the Korean language, because 1) Korean has several vowels, and 2) Korean is agglutinative. As an agglutinative language, a Korean word can be potentially very long, but unlike fusional languages, a word can be segmented into morphemes pretty easily. Due to the large vowel inventory, a syllabic structure naturally arises, and (given that one wants a morphophonemic orthography) it is possible and relatively easy to map morphemes onto one or more syllables.

What this entails is that a syllable boundary, orthgraphically, can also be a morpheme boundary, and thus segmentation is done at the text level rather than in the reader's mind. Further, since a syllable boundary is implicit (i.e. does not require additional symbol or whitespace), the compactness of the orthography is not lessened. Due to these, I hypothesise that the syllabic assembly makes reading Korean texts easier.

So, about your comment about the impracticality of applying hangul to other languages.... It is obviously impractical for languages in which denoting vowels can be superfluous, like Arabic, or for languages that are syllable-less.

It is also not very practical for analytic or fusional languages--words in analytic languages are short enough that the complexity of syllable assembly outweighs the benefit of morpheme segmentation (although it might work well with analytic languages with high number of monosyllabic words, such as Vietnamese, as it would compact the writing by rendering whitespaces unnecessary); and morphemes in fusional languages are difficult to segment, and even if they can be segmented, I doubt whether there will be a close correspondence between speech and orthography.

However, for agglutinative languages with large vowel inventory, I think a system similar to hangul's will work better than a linear alphabetic system.

As for visual distinction of blocks.... Despite the fact that the syllables are forced into uniform squares, the individual jamos in the block change in position and size as the font designer balances them that, I think, there is enough variation within the block to make most blocks distinct from each other. Frankly, I don't think this is much of an issue, since one can disambiguate by looking at surrounding syllables. And like in most other written languages, a fluent reader in Korean would not read every letter on a page.

Talnemo fonts are cool, but the extreme ones are, for me, to fixed-block fonts as Courier New is to Arial, so I don't think many people would choose to use it exclusively. As I previously mentioned, it seems to me that the variation within the block is a main factor in making a syllable distinct, so syllables with similar graphic structure, such as 를, 롤, and 룰, out of context, are inherently difficult to distinguish, whether you use a Talnemo font or not. The modern, less extreme Talnemo fonts tend to be designed based on ergonomics (i.e. "how long can you read before tiring out?", "how quickly can you recognise the symbol?" etc.) or to achieve inter-jamo balance (i.e. regularity of space between jamo) as much as inter-syllable balance (i.e. regularity of the block size). If you can read hangul, here's one such rationale.[1] -- AZ, 09 Sept 2008 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.84.167.225 (talk) 10:13, 9 September 2008 (UTC)