Abugidas

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A writing system where each symbol represents a consonant with an inherent vowel sound that can be changed by diacritics; used primarily for scripts in South and Southeast Asia; a type of alphasyllabary
2. A script type characterized by characters that stand for consonants paired with a default vowel, modified by marks to indicate other vowels; commonly found in Indian subcontinent scripts; a hybrid between alphabet and syllabary
3. A form of phonetic writing in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as unitary symbols, with the vowel element often indicated by secondary signs; employed in several Asian languages; a system blending alphabetic and syllabic principles

Etymology: "Abugidas" is the plural of "abugida," a term for writing systems in which each consonant carries an inherent vowel that is changed by a diacritic or modification rather than by a separate letter. The word comes from Ge'ez, the liturgical language of Ethiopia, where "ʾäbugida" was the name of the script's own letter order, built from the first letters of its sequence: the first four letters of the Ethiopic alphabet, ʾä, bu, gi, da. The name thus records the sequence of the letters themselves, much as "alphabet" takes its name from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. Scholars adopted the term for the wider family of scripts in the twentieth century, and it first appears in English around 1961. Ethiopic writing, along with Devanagari and other South Asian scripts, is the classic example, so a term drawn from one script's own name was applied to many unrelated writing systems that share the same principle.

Synonyms: alphasyllabaries, syllabic scripts