Alphabet Or Abugida?

[SoftWater]

If you want to be that technical about it...Thai uses an abugida, NOT an alphabet.

This came up in the 'One Guy Wants to Embarrass Us All in 8 Weeks' thread ( just kidding, nice to see its not only macwalen that can enliven the community... ).

I'd be interested to hear what Rikker, Rick Bradford or other linguistics-minded people think. As I understand it (=as I just read on wikipedia...) an abugida uses diacriticals to perform vowel functions. While the tone marks in Thai seem to be diacriticals, it seems to me to be a stretch to think of เ แ โ ใ ำ า as being merely diacriticals (but maybe I don't understand what a diacritical is, something else I had to look up).

The other distinction between alphabet and abugida seems to be that the latter treats consonants as in some (undefined, at least on wkp) way superior to vowels. I think this is at least debatable with regards to Thai. Just because the consonants and vowels are ordered separately (whereas in the Roman alphabet they are part of the same series), I'm not sure that the functional relationship between consonants and vowels in Thai is any different from that in English.

One last point - I notice that the term 'abugida' is something of a neologism (coined around 1990). I also note that in Hedgcock's book (Teaching Readers of English), Thai is classed as a hybrid 'alphabet-syllabic' language (though I might retract that if pushed, as I'm writing from memory and the book is at home).

I appreciate this is a 'niche' topic, but any thoughts from the experts much appreciated.

Edited February 25, 2010 by SoftWater

[kikenyoy]

I know next to nothing about linguistics, but I saw an opportunity to further "enliven" the thread and couldn't help myself.

Also from Wiki:

Although commonly referred to as the "Thai alphabet", the character set is in fact not a true alphabet but an abugida, a writing system in which each consonant may invoke an inherent vowel sound, described as an implied 'a' or 'o'

Wiki is not always the greatest source so I am also interested in hearing what others have to say about it.

[RickBradford]

I'd also like to hear the experts' view on this.

Omniglot, which is very informative on such subjects, says:

Syllabic alphabets, alphasyllabaries or abugidas consist of symbols for consonants and vowels. The consonants each have an inherent vowel which can be changed to another vowel or muted by means of diacritics. Vowels can also be written with separate letters when they occur at the beginning of a word or on their own.

It includes Thai in its list of abugidas, along with Khmer, Burmese and Lao, and most of the Indian scripts.

So you would think that any Thai consonant should carry the same implied vowel; the usual implied vowel is '-a' for a separate consonant and '-o' between two consonants. Yet this is not strictly adhered to:

ก็ and บ่ both carry an implicit '-aw' sound, but ณ is pronounced 'na'. These are special cases, of course....

[SoftWater]

Thanks Rick, that's a useful link. If I've understood it correctly, it also seems to confirm that 'abugida' is a neologoism for alphabet-syllabic hybrids ('syllabic alphabets').

I don't see that the idea of an abugida implies all the consonants should have the same inherent syllable - though I was equally ignorant that ณ carries an implicit 'na' sound.

[Richard W]

I'd be interested to hear what Rikker, Rick Bradford or other linguistics-minded people think. As I understand it (=as I just read on wikipedia...) an abugida uses diacriticals to perform vowel functions. While the tone marks in Thai seem to be diacriticals, it seems to me to be a stretch to think of เ แ โ ใ ำ า as being merely diacriticals (but maybe I don't understand what a diacritical is, something else I had to look up).

Peter Daniels claims to have coined the term 'abugida'. The critical point is that there is an implicit vowel, which is overridden by other signs to indicate other vowels. He did not dispute that getting rid of all implicit vowels, as modern Lao spelling does, converts the writing system to an alphabet. Thus, Thai written in the Thai script is an abugida, Pali written in the Thai script using implicit vowels is an abugida, Pali written in the Thai script without implicit vowels is an alphabet, 21st century Lao is an alphabet, 19th century Lao is an abugida. Thus the distinction between alphabet and abugida can be fairly minor.

To my mind, the important point is that in all the systems I just listed, the vowels do not have a common position with respect to the consonants. This is part of their inheritance from the Brahmi script, and is more important than whether they are alphabets or abugidas. Some of the derivatives of the Brahmi script have vowels that regularly follow consonants, and might as well be alphabets - little is gained by observing that the Phagspa script is an abugida.

Daniels has defined a diacritic as a means of making a new letter from an old one. By this definition, vowel marks are not diacritics.

For what it's worth, Unicode counts the Thai vowels listed above as 'letters' (Type code 'Lo' = Letter, other, i.e. with no casing.) Thai and Lao are almost unique in having such dependent vowels. And, of course, they do get treated as consonants when stretching out Thai words.

The other distinction between alphabet and abugida seems to be that the latter treats consonants as in some (undefined, at least on wkp) way superior to vowels. I think this is at least debatable with regards to Thai. Just because the consonants and vowels are ordered separately (whereas in the Roman alphabet they are part of the same series), I'm not sure that the functional relationship between consonants and vowels in Thai is any different from that in English.

Actually, it's not necessary to think of them as ordered separately. Thai consonants and vowels can be though of as a single sequence, starting with the consonants and ending with the vowels. (The tone marks and a few others are different, and can be thought of as 'diacritics', though not in Daniels' sense. They get sorted like accent marks.) However, culturally, they are treated as separate series, and that is probably the most relevant aspect.

One last point - I notice that the term 'abugida' is something of a neologism (coined around 1990). I also note that in Hedgcock's book (Teaching Readers of English), Thai is classed as a hybrid 'alphabet-syllabic' language (though I might retract that if pushed, as I'm writing from memory and the book is at home).

All abugidas are 'alphasyllabaries'.