Abjad

An abjad is a writing system whose basic letters represent consonants, while vowels are omitted or indicated with secondary marks. Readers often infer unwritten vowels from language and context.

Consonant: A speech sound made with a constriction or closure in the vocal tract. Abjad letters primarily represent these sounds.
Matres lectionis: Consonant letters used in some Semitic scripts to indicate certain vowels. They provide a way to spell vowels without a separate full vowel alphabet.
Peter T. Daniels: An American linguist who developed a influential typology of writing systems. Daniels introduced the modern technical use of the term “abjad.”
Arabic: A Semitic language spoken across the Middle East and North Africa and used widely in religious and literary traditions. Arabic spelling usually leaves short vowels unmarked in ordinary texts.
Alphabetic writing system: A writing system whose symbols represent phonemes, including consonants and, in many systems, vowels. Abjads belong to alphabetic writing broadly, though they treat vowels differently.
Vowel: A speech sound produced with an open vocal tract, typically serving as a syllable nucleus. Abjads commonly omit these sounds from ordinary spelling.
Tashkil: Arabic diacritical marks that indicate short vowels and other pronunciation details. These marks make normally omitted vowel information explicit in Arabic text.
Phoenician alphabet: An ancient consonant-writing script used by Phoenician communities around the Mediterranean. It is a prominent historical example of an early abjad.
Hebrew: A Northwest Semitic language used in Israel and in Jewish religious and literary traditions. Modern Hebrew commonly omits vowel points in everyday writing.
Syllabary: A writing system whose basic signs represent syllables, often consonant-vowel combinations. A syllabary encodes whole syllables rather than primarily representing consonants.

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