Definition of "abugida"

abugida

/ɑːbuˈɡiːdə/

noun
plural abugidas
1. (linguistics) 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.
  Quotations
  An abugida is a script that uses characters for CV syllables wherein the several characters for some consonant plus the language's array of vowels are modifications of the character for that consonant followed by the unmarked vowel (phonemically /a/).
  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
  In an abugida, each consonant carries an inherent vowel, usually /a/.
  2007, Unicode Consortium, The Unicode Standard 5.0, Addison-Wesley, page 200
2. (linguistics) 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.
  Quotations
  For the scripts of the Semitic languages, five categories are needed: logography, syllabary, abjad, alphabet, and abugida. A sixth, featural script, appears when Arabic script is adapted to non-Semitic languages. […] (The English word "abugida" is borrowed from the Amharic term for the letters of the script when taken in the order known from the Ge'ez transliterations of the Hebrew letter names found in the superscriptions of the sections of Psalm 119, as used in the liturgy; it takes the first four consonants and the first four vowels in their traditional order of presentation.)
  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
  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 languages), differential learning of L2 sounds that can and cannot be readily identified with an L1 phoneme (Best, McRoberts, and Sithole, Werker and Tees, 1984b; Best and Tyler, 2007) - all assure us that phonemic perception and representation are not merely a result of alphabetic writing.
  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