Talk:Abugida

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)

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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)

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)

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.

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)

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)

"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)

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)

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)

Pronunciation

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

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)

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)

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)

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 "Chinese" with syllabic tones or the word "French" with a uvular "r" or the word "abjad" with an Arabic accent.