abugida

Noun

abugida (plural abugidas)

1. A kind of syllabary (syllabic alphabet) in which a symbol or glyph representing a syllable contains parts representing a vowel and a consonant, such that symbols for syllables not including the default vowel are generated by adding a common notation to indicate the vowel that it does include.
   • Words are entered under the Abugida system.1961, Haile Sellassie I University (contributor), University College Review - Volume 1, Issue 1, page 137
   • 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,
     An abugida is a script that uses characters for CV syllables wherein the several characters for...
2. 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...
   • 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...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